The Heresy of Jan Hus by Chris White

C.S. Lewis once offered the advice that for every new book you read you should counter it with an old one.  He was trying to counter the intellectual snobbery of his time (and ours as well) that the latest is the greatest, and what is old (or ancient for that matter) is of little or no value.  Jack Lewis would be proud of me this week because I have read two books the newest of which was 103 years old.  Most of my reading has been about the 15th century Czech proto-reformer and martyr Jan Hus.  In protestantism, Hus and the Oxford philosopher and cleric John Wycliffe are known as reformers before the Reformation which is normally attributed to Martin Luther in 1517.  This is generally true, but better history shows that the road to the Reformation started much earlier and has a longer cast of characters than most would suppose.  But that said, Jan Hus (prounounced "yawn-hus") was a popular preacher, educator, and writer who based his theology and practice on the scriptures alone and found himself at great variance with the laws and structures of the Catholic church of his day.  His views that Christ, not the Pope, is the actual head of the Church and that only God, not a priest can forgive the sins of a repentant Christian, or that when communion is served both the wine and the bread should be presented to the parishioners as opposed to bread for the parishioners and wine and bread for the priest are hardly radical.  His sermons were also very popular because he taught them in the plain language of his people not the ecclesiastical Latin which was the language of the highly learned.  For evangelicals (and even a lot of Catholics) this is hardly radical much less heresy.  So why was Hus condemned as an arch-heretic and burned at the stake and his memory damned by the Catholic church never to be reviewed or overturned even posthumously (as was done in the case of Joan of Arc)?  It was largely because Hus misunderstood his situation and ministry context.  What he believed is scriptural and 100% true and Hus believed that if something is true, he is free under God to practice it or amend it.  When he was accused of heresy (teaching false ideas) he stood his ground on the basis that he would retract anything that could be proven wrong.  Standing your ground for conscience sake is always the moral high ground and in my estimation the correct course for any son of God.  But what Hus failed to take into account was that as a servant of the Church he was to obey the doctrines and laws laid down by his superiors in the hierarchy which in Catholic theology has been given this authority by Christ Himself.  His heresy then was not Biblically-based but rather a violation of church polity something he had vowed to support and obey when he was given his license to preach.  He also lived in a context that valued harmony and uniformity in society the cement of which was a single and united Christian faith (hence, Christendom).  Modern society values diversity of opinions and society even though it often does so at the expense of truth.  This put Jan Hus in the position of saying, "if I'm wrong, show me" (which presumed he was right) and the council that was judging his actions was in the position of saying "the very fact we have to prove to you your error, shows you persist in your rebellion towards the constituted authority of the church."  What both parties in the Hus trial were doing was speaking past one another with differing visions of the ultimate right and good.  Hus saw scriptural truth and practice as the highest good (which it is) while the other party saw institutional unity and coherence as such.   The tragedy is that better communication was not likely to change the outcome given the spirit of the times.  While I believe Hus was in the right, I do have some sympathy for the other side.  Few institutions appreciate the condemnation or correction of anyone, especially an insider.  Having your failures pointed out, especially by a subordinate, requires humility few but saints and angels possess.  As with many things in history, what needed to happen, did.  Later church reformers realized separation was the only way they could speak truth into the situation.  And while the institution of the Roman Catholic church did not appreciably reform its doctrines, much of the moral corruption which had been condemned by the reformers was eventually corrected within decades (lightening speed in the Christian world!).