Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

unity‟s sake in subsequent centuries, the spiritual ancestors of the Moravians who come into
church history in the 18 th Century.
The Unity of the Brethren were the spiritual descendents of the Hussites who had carried Jan
Hus‟s and John Wycliffe‟s teaching from Prague across Bohemia at the beginning of the 15 th
Century. Lollard (Wycliffite) views survived in Bohemian libraries despite official opposition
and prohibition of the study of Wycliffe‟s works, yet in 1410 his books were burned publicly.
Jan Hus‟s execution failed to extinguish his teaching that the Bible should be the sole
authority for faith and conduct and that civil or ecclesiastical authority could be challenged if
it did not conform to its teaching. In the Church of St Martin-in-the-Walls, not far from Hus‟s
own Bethlehem Chapel, in 1414, Holy Communion was celebrated for the first time by the
congregation partaking of the cup as well as the bread.
The cup (chalice-calix) became the symbol for a reforming section of the Church who
became known as the „Utraquists„ (from utraque, „and the other‟). The Utraquists were given
a special status in the Catholic Church from 1433 and only lost their position as the
established Church in Bohemia after the Thirty Years‟ War, when full Catholicism was
restored. Compromises are not at all common in the history of the Church and the Utraquite
compromise was short-lived. The Utraquites themselves were opposed to the radical
Hussites, the „Taborites‟, based on the fortified town of Tabor in Southern Bohemia, and
defeated them in battle at Lipany, ending the Taborite rebellion.
With Utraquist priests officiating at first, a group of reformers calling themselves „Brethren„
met in the village of Kunwald in 1457 and at Lhota in 1467, and formed themselves into a
Church, choosing three of their number by lot to be their ministers. Later these men were
ordained by Waldensians, and attempts at union were made with the Waldensians and other
schismatic, though not heretical, groups, but these attempts came to nothing.
The Bible was central to the Brethren‟s life, and a printed Bible in Czech was produced from
Hebrew and Greek, the Kralice Bible (1579-1594). The Brethren, like the Waldensians,
anticipated the Protestant Reformation before Luther and John Calvin (1509-1564). They
had some 200 churches in Bohemia and Moravia by 1507, when Pope Alexander VI issued
edicts against them. In 1520 two of the Brethren contacted Luther, who approved of their
confession of faith.
In Northern Europe, Johann Rucherat (‘John of Wesel’) (c.1400-1481), Johann Wessel of
Groeningen (c.1420-1489) and Johann Pupper of Goch were Reformers before the
Reformation, all living in the Netherlands. John of Wesel, Canon of Worms, was accused of
preaching Hussite doctrines on the Church and the sacraments. He was tried by the
Inquisition in 1479 and publicly recanted, but was imprisoned until his death.
Wycliffe‟s legacy of questioning Church authority was kept alive in these Netherlands
Reformers. Wycliffe taught that the Bible only was authoritative; he rejected the doctrine of
transubstantiation, the practice of granting indulgences, compulsory fasting and extreme
unction. Johann Wessel similarly attacked indulgences (Luther came across his writings with
delight in 1522), and criticised the Papacy even though he taught in Paris for many years.
In 1570 „the Brethren‟ inspired the Protestant United Synod of Sendormir in Poland, where
Protestantism (Calvinist and Lutheran) was facing a revival of the Catholic Church. The
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