The Heretic King of Bohemia

I recently finished Frederick Heymann's George of Bohemia: King of Heretics (1965, Princeton University Press). It's a weighty and laborious read but necessary for anyone seeking to understand the history of Hussitism.

Comenius and the Swedish Occupation of Lissa

As reported in a previous piece the Bohemian Brethren who would later become the Moravians were involved in the 1618 Protestant plot to install Frederick V of the Palatinate on the throne of Bohemia. The Habsburgs responded, defeated the Utraquist-led Protestant forces and launched a vicious Counter-Reformation that would almost eradicate Protestantism in Bohemia. Though minor players and a minority within Bohemian Protestantism, the Brethren would suffer severe persecution. The war soon expanded and would become the Thirty Years War enveloping much of Central Europe. After the Habsburgs had scored tremendous victories and seemed poised to win the war - and roll back Magisterial Protestant gains from the previous century, the Swedes invaded under Gustavus Adolphus in 1630 - landing in Pomerania. The tide would quickly turn.

The Bohemian Brethren and the Crowning of Frederick V

I've been working my way through Edmund Alexander de Schweinitz's The History of the Church Known as the Unitas Fratrum; or, The Unity of the Brethren, Founded by the Followers of John Hus (1885), and I was once again particularly struck by the episode leading up to the Thirty Years War and the Counter or Anti-Reformation that was the result.

After the 1618 Defenestration of Prague, the Protestant uprising against the Habsburg Ferdinand II, the various Protestant leaders of Bohemia (Utraquists and Lutherans) decided to reject Ferdinand's claims and instead appealed to the Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate to come and be their king.

Inbox: The Church as Institution vs. Sect (II)

The non-sacral sect model views culture as something that is at best inevitably corrupt (and thus to some degree a thing indifferent), and at worst a subversive danger to the Kingdom. This must be juxtaposed with the sacral-institutional model that views culture as something to be mastered, shaped, and controlled. When I say 'indifferent', this is not to suggest that it can be used expansively or with abandon. On the contrary our interactions with it must be marked by caution and even cynicism - and yet without fear. Such wisdom and occasionalism prove difficult and thus many have (in the spirit of the Pharisees) erected the Legalist Wall as a means of protection - a move that is ultimately corrosive in that in addition to being unbiblical it has the tendency to shut down the spiritual faculties of discernment instead relying on a kind of checklist spirituality wed to a (fundamentally flawed) cultural narrative.

Lying Missionaries and Brutalised Victims of Their Times: A Revisionist Historian Spins the Gnadenhutten Massacre

When sections of the American public were forced to admit that it was American soldiers that committed the horrific massacre at My Lai in 1968, some attempted to justify their actions on account of their brutalisation. In other words, the sheer brutality and normalised violence that characterized their setting dehumanized the soldiers and thus, their culpability was at least in part lessened. They too became victims as it were and instead of being punished and answering to justice they were to be pitied and forgiven.

The Gnadenhutten Massacre

When one thinks of religious conflict and persecution in the Americas, the slaughter of Huguenots at the hands of the Spanish necessarily comes to mind. Hundreds were killed in northern Florida during the sixteenth century as Spain took exception to the notion of a French Protestant colony proximate to their vast Caribbean empire.

The Unity of the Brethren before The Thirty Years War

Through the efforts of my son I was able to read Peter Brock's The Political and Social Doctrines of the Unity of Czech Brethren in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries (The Hague, Mouton & Co., 1957).

Copies can be found but it's a somewhat rare and expensive book. This is one of Brock's early works and probably not his best known. Recognized as an authority on pacifism, he specialised by focusing on many of the groups in Eastern Europe such as the Unity of the Brethren or Unitas Fratrum.

The Legacy of the Second Constantinian Shift and the Threat of Secularism

Recovering the First Reformation - Toward a Proto-Protestant Narrative of Church History (XIII)

Not all among the Czech Brethren and Waldensians greeted the Magisterial Reformation with joy. Some were alarmed and not a little put off by some of the ideas which they believed were being forced upon them by the Reformers. There was (at least in the case of the Cottian valleys) a degree of resentment with regard to the patronising attitude which they encountered from Guillaume Farel and what would become the Calvinist wing of the Reformation.

The Hussite Spectrum

Recovering the First Reformation - Toward a Proto-Protestant Narrative of Church History (VII)

The Great Schism which erupted in 1378 generated a new wave of dissent which while not unrelated to the earlier movements and impulses, nevertheless generated more radical factions which for a season took up the sword. These movements failed and yet in most cases the core ideas and commitments endured and the survivors would eventually merge back into the non-violent sword and coin rejecting, non-Sacralist and separatist posture of the movement's first wave. They would not be challenged or tempted again with regard to Sacralism until the time of the Magisterial Reformation.

Petr Chelčický: A Medieval Biblicist and Rustic Philosopher (Part 2)

Chelčický finds himself occupying an almost unique place in pre-Reformation Church History, representing views that would all but disappear by the 17^th century swallowed up by the profound political and cultural changes which reshaped the European map. And while we know that many works of reformers and critics of the Catholic social order were doomed to perish and be lost to time, Chelčický's works survived though many were not translated from Czech until modern times.

Petr Chelčický: A Medieval Biblicist and Rustic Philosopher (Part 1)

Petr Chelčický was born sometime around 1380 in Southern Bohemia, today's Czech Republic.* Associated with the village of Chelčice, he was probably from Vodňany or some other nearby village. There are debates as to his identity, some identifying him with one Peter of Zahorči, but this is not conclusive. Regardless of his background (of which there are many theories) it seems a yeoman farmer is the most likely which would have placed him above the serfs and peasants but a member of neither the gentry nor the emergent bourgeoisie. Apparently a self-educated man he wrote in Czech and though he had some Latin, he wasn't fluent.

The Moravian Way: Pilgrim Missiology vs. Magisterial Dominionism

It is one thing to evangelise the lost in other cultures, but this is quickly followed by another question. After becoming Christians, how do the converts live and interact with their society? This is an issue missionaries have long wrestled with. Undoubtedly, every society presents cultural elements and norms that are religious in nature and present a problem for the Christian, especially the new proselyte.

Zeisberger and the Testimony of the Moravians

https://theflamingheretic.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/moravians-and-peace/

This is a sad article regarding the peace witness of the Moravian Church, the Protestant body originally descended from the Hussites.