Jan Hus

Life and Ministry

Jan Hus was a priest, scholar, and rector of the University of Prague, born around 1369 to a peasant family in southern Bohemia. He read deeply in the works of the English reformer John Wycliffe and began preaching at the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague in the Czech tongue, drawing crowds with sermons that pressed the authority of Scripture, denounced the sale of indulgences, and called for moral reform of the clergy from the bishops down. His arguments anticipated the Reformation by a full century: that Christ alone is head of the church, that no pope or council can stand against the plain word of Scripture, and that a corrupt cleric loses his rightful office.

Circumstances of Death

Hus was summoned to the Council of Constance in 1414 under a written safe-conduct from Emperor Sigismund. On arrival he was arrested, imprisoned, and tried for heresy. He refused to recant unless his accusers could show him from Scripture where he was wrong. The council declared his teachings heretical; the emperor's safe-conduct was set aside on the principle that no faith need be kept with heretics. On July 6, 1415, Hus was led to a meadow outside Constance, stripped of his vestments, his head pressed into a paper crown painted with demons, and tied to a stake atop a pyre of straw and wood. Offered one last chance to recant, he answered that he had preached only what he could prove from Scripture and would die in the truth he had taught. He prayed and sang the Psalms aloud as the flames rose, until the smoke silenced him.

Legacy

A century later, when Martin Luther was challenged at the Leipzig Debate, his opponent accused him of holding "the errors of Hus." Luther went home, read Hus, and wrote, We are all Hussites without knowing it. The Czech and Moravian churches that bore Hus's name became the seed of one of the longest continuous Protestant traditions in Europe; the Moravian Brethren in turn helped kindle the Wesleyan revival in the eighteenth century. Hus's last reported words — that today they roast a goose (hus in Czech), but in a hundred years a swan will sing whom they cannot silence — were widely read by sixteenth-century Protestants as a prophecy of Luther.