Dead Christians Society

Because Comenius spent his whole life as a member, then bishop, and always protective father of a small Moravian Protestant denomination called the Unity of the Brethren, we need to say a few words about this group up front.

The Reformation started by the pre-Protestant reformer John Hus (1369–1415) in Bohemia did not die when he was burned at the stake. A number of small communities spun off from the Hussites, each rebelling against Rome in its own ways. The first “Brethren” moved to a remote village in 1457 to live together as the early church did and follow the law of Christ.

From the start, the Unity of the Brethren, as they became known, believed in the equality of all believers and opposed ecclesiastical hierarchy. They also, like the later Mennonites and Quakers, condemned the use of force in matters of faith and the participation of Christians in political power struggles, especially in war.

These ideas, as you can imagine, did not sit well with the authorities. The Unity was outlawed and persecuted by secular and religious powers alike. But its numbers grew, new communities were formed, and its influence went far beyond its ranks.
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In 1722, still facing persecution, a few Moravian pilgrims went across the border from Bohemia and Moravia to the estate of Count Zinzendorf in Silesia, Germany. There they found refuge and encouragement from that Lutheran nobleman. They called their settlement Herrnhut. These new Brethren adopted much of Zinzendorf’s Lutheran pietism, but the legacy of the old Unity remained alive among them.

On August 13, 1727, there was a revival in Herrnhut, a spiritual explosion of sorts, out of which came a round-the-clock prayer meeting that lasted 100 years, and a missions explosion to go with it. The preparation for that August 13th renewal came from the count’s reading of a copy of Comenius’ Ratio Disciplinae—a Latin history of the Brethren’s church and the essential “discipline” of their faith. This book helped Zinzendorf understand the depth of the Brethren’s faith and the reason why the refugees were saying, “God has brought us here so that He might restore our Church.”

A part of the discipline that Bishop Comenius bequeathed to the Moravian Church was his hope and prayer that all the world should come to know the saving Word of God. Comenius had worked towards this all his life through his commitment to education. The Moravians now took that global vision and transmuted it into the first Protestant missions push. The Herrnhut community—a small, seemingly insignificant minority in a land not their own—now sent missionaries to the Americas and eventually throughout the world.

This, by the way, was a century before William Carey, the supposed “Father of Modern Missions,” began his great work.
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The battle front between Roman Catholicism and the Reformation passed through Central Europe, where Comenius lived. The Protestant churches in Bohemia and Moravia were violently liquidated in 1620. Under the Hapsburg dynasty, Roman Catholicism became the only legal religion in those lands. Protestant nobles were forced into exile and the common people were corralled back into the Roman Church.

A historian of the Moravian church replays the horrific scenes Comenius witnessed, in these words: “He saw the weapons for stabbing, for chopping, for cutting, for pricking, for hacking, for tearing and for burning. He saw the savage hacking of limbs, the spurting of blood, and the flash of fire.”

“Almighty God,” wrote Comenius in one of his books, “what is happening? Must the whole world perish?”

In 1620, the town of Comenius’s ministry, Fulneck, was occupied by Spanish troops supporting the Imperial forces. His house was pillaged and gutted; his books and his manuscripts were burned. He was forced to flee to a town called Brandeis, leaving behind his pregnant wife and young son. He was never to return to Fulneck again.

He was a persecuted Christian on the run. He had lost his post as teacher and minister. Much worse, he had lost his wife and one of his children to plague. And now, for the sake of his suffering Brethren, he wrote his beautiful allegory, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart.
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The Labyrinth is a brilliant, imaginative Christian allegory a few decades earlier than John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and in something of the same vein.

In his Labyrinth, the truth-seeking pilgrim is led around for much of the book with a number of impairments that keep him from seeing clearly. Comenius explains that the pilgrim’s guides are “insatiability of Mind, which pries into everything, and Custom, which lends a color of truth to all the frauds of the world.” He has also been fitted with a bridle and a pair of blurry spectacles fixed to his nose: “The bridle is Vanity, and the glasses are constructed from the rims of Habit and the lens of Assumption.”

. . . the pilgrim quickly finds that the world is full of deception and deceit. Everyone is wearing masks. So the pilgrim, seeking answers, visits a number of professions whose primary concern is the discovery of truth. These include historians, astronomers, astrologers, metaphysicians, rhetoricians, and dialecticians. Though he is initially attracted to these various occupations, he consistently uncovers the fraud and deception of each profession that he is investigating.

 “According to Comenius, God has provided humanity with three tools to learn wisdom: the five senses to discover the secrets of the natural world; reason and intelligence to increase their knowledge; and faith, for it is only with this spiritual gift that God’s children may hear his voice through Scripture, meditation, or prayer. These three bases of Comenius’s later educational reforms are central components of the Labyrinth.

“By his senses and natural reason, the pilgrim begins to detect the fraud and hypocrisy of the world. His guides attempt to allure him with earthly riches and pleasures. Each time he is tempted, however, he is able to discover the moral flaw of the class he is examining. Although his sight is blurred by the spectacles Delusion has given him, the pilgrim can make these observations by surreptitiously peering under them. But human reason and sensory perception have their limits. With them, the pilgrim is only able to discover the deception and chaos of the world. The harmony and unity underlying this confusion can only be discerned through revelation.
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When the pilgrim meets Christ, he is given a new pair of spectacles. The Word of God and the Holy Spirit replace the lens of Assumption and rim of Habit. With these new aids, the pilgrim is able to reenter the world’s labyrinth, confident in his ability to negotiate its tortuous passages successfully.”

In the closing sections of his book, we can see that he then regarded the Brethren as almost ideal Christians. Among them he found no priests in gaudy attire, no flaunting wealth, no grinding poverty; and passing their time in peace and quietness, they cherished Christ in their hearts. “All,” he says, “were in simple attire, and their ways were gentle and kind. I approached one of their preachers, wishing to speak to him. When, as is our custom, I wished to address him according to his rank, he permitted it not, calling such things worldly fooling.” To them ceremonies were matters of little importance. “Thy religion,” said the Master to the Pilgrim–i.e., to the Brethren’s Church–”shall be to serve me in quiet, and not to bind thyself to any ceremonies, for I do not bind thee by them.”
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He had two objects. He wanted to revive the Church of the Brethren, and he wanted to uplift the whole human race; and for each of these purposes he used the same method: education.

If the Brethren, said Comenius, were to flourish again, they must pay more attention to the training of the young than ever they had done in days gone by. He issued detailed instructions to his Brethren. They must begin, he said, by teaching the children the pure word of God in their homes. They must bring their children up in habits of piety. They must maintain the ancient discipline of the Brethren. They must live in peace with other Christians, and avoid theological bickerings. They must publish good books in the Bohemian language. They must build new schools wherever possible, and try to obtain the help of godly nobles.

This is the key to the whole of Comenius’s career. It is the fashion now with many scholars to divide his life into two distinct parts. On the one hand, they say, he was a Bishop of the Brethren’s Church; on the other hand he was an educational reformer. The distinction is false and artificial. He never distinguished between these two works. He drew no line between the secular and the sacred. He loved the Brethren’s Church to the end of his days; he regarded her teaching as ideal; he laboured and longed for her revival; and he believed with all his soul that God would surely enable him to revive that Church by means of education and uplift the world by means of that regenerated Church.
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His greatest educational work was undoubtedly his Great Didactic, or the Art of Teaching All Things to All Men. It was a thorough and comprehensive treatise on the science, method, scope, and purpose of universal education. It is far too rich to do justice to in a summary, though I can give you a taste of it in these few quotations from John Amos Comenius, The Great Didactic, 1649; tr. M.W. Keatinge, 1896:

Education for Everyone

Not the children of the rich or of the powerful only, but of all alike, boys and girls, both noble and ignoble, rich and poor, in all cities and towns, villages and hamlets, should be sent to school. Education is indeed necessary for all, and this is evident if we consider the different degrees of ability. No one doubts that those who are stupid need instruction, that they may shake off their natural dullness. But in reality those who are clever need it far more, since an active mind, if not occupied with useful things, will busy itself with what is useless, curious, and pernicious.

Learning is Natural

Who is there that does not always desire to see, hear, or handle something new? To whom is it not a pleasure to go to some new place daily, to converse with someone, to narrate something, or have some fresh experience? In a word, the eyes, the ears, the sense of touch, the mind itself, are, in their search for food, ever carried beyond themselves. The proper education of the young does not consist in stuffing their heads with a mass of words, sentences, and ideas dragged together out of various authors, but in opening up their understanding to the world, so that a living stream may flow from their own minds, just as leaves, flowers, and fruit spring from the bud on a tree.

Play

Much can be learned in play that will afterwards be of use when the circumstances demand it. A tree must also transpire, and needs to be copiously refreshed by wind, rain, and frost; otherwise it easily falls into bad condition, and becomes barren. In the same way the human body needs movement, excitement, and exercise; in daily life these must be supplied, artificially or naturally.

Lifelong Learning

If, in each hour, a man could learn a single fragment of some branch of knowledge, a single rule of some mechanical art, a single pleasing story or proverb (the acquisition of which would require no effort), what a vast stock of learning he might lay by. Seneca is therefore right when he says: “Life is long, if we know how to use it.” It is consequently of importance that we understand the art of making the very best use of our lives. Aristotle compared the mind of man to a blank tablet on which nothing was written, but on which all things could be engraved. There is, however, this difference, that on the tablet the writing is limited by space, while in the case of the mind, you may continually go on writing and engraving without finding any boundary, because, as has already been shown, the mind is without limit.
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Summing up, while the Thirty Years’ War was raging, and warriors were turning Europe into a desert, this scholar, banished from his native land, was devising sublime and broad-minded schemes for the elevation of the whole human race.

This is one of the things that makes Comenius great. He didn’t play any part in the disgraceful religious quarrels of the age. A Jesuit scholar once pointed out that “Comenius wrote many works, but none that were directed against the Catholic Church.” As he looked around upon the learned world he saw the great monster Confusion still unslain, and intended to found a Grand Universal College, which would consist of all the learned in Europe, would devote its attention to the pursuit of knowledge in every conceivable branch, and would arrange that knowledge in beautiful order.

He was so sure that his system was right that he compared it to a great clock or mill, which had only to be set going to bring about the desired result. If his scheme could only be carried out, he believed it would put an to wars and religious disputes. He believed it would unify all men of all nations at the feet of God!

To review all the innovations by which Comenius almost single-handedly created modern education is nearly impossible. When we read about these reforms, they just seem common-sense to us, since they have shaped education today. But they were revolutionary for his time.

Sensitive to the developmental needs of children of various ages, he divided elementary schools by grades. Believing that children must be wooed rather than coerced into learning, he invented the illustrated textbook and made experience and discovery part of the classroom environment. He taught that corporal punishment, if used at all, should be connected only with moral and not intellectual faults. He insisted girls were fully as capable of learning at the highest levels as boys. And he preached that schools should teach all realms of knowledge, including those of morals and piety.

Comenius’s reforms were both praised and implemented all across Europe, with over half of European schools eventually using his textbooks. These books made him an overnight celebrity, so that Cardinal Richelieu sought his services for France and the Massachusetts Puritans (it seems) offered him the presidency of Harvard.

Amanda Berry Smith (1837 - 1915): Working from below—and conquering fear—to challenge the comfortable. This “washerwoman evangelist” spent her life ministering effectively across the Big Three cultural barriers: race, class, and gender. In the Victorian moment of complacent prosperity, she broke like a sanctified thunderstorm on the vibrant but genteel holiness camp meetings of the white middle class. Her autobiography is one of the most fascinating first-person accounts you’ll ever read from a Victorian-era Christian. It describes a woman who often spoke up in strange settings even when she felt unwelcome and intimidated, and knew she would be reviled and misunderstood.

Here are a few highlights from the Cornerstone course–John Newton session. They are pretty raw, but I thought folks might like to see and interact with them:
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Yes, he was a sea captain—a backslider from his mother’s evangelical faith—who worked in the slave trade and had many adventures and near-death experiences. And yes, it was a storm at sea that first turned him back to God in prayer, (although his ship didn’t capsize).

But Newton didn’t get hauled out of the water, dry himself off, and write the famous hymn. No, “Amazing Grace” belonged to a second, and Newton believed, far more exciting and important, phase of his life. The part where he became the Anglican curate of an impoverished English midlands town, then the rector of one of London’s most prestigious parishes. And became the most influential person to shape evangelicalism in its crucial “teen years” after the heyday of John Wesley.

To Newton, those years as a lonely soul wrestling with God through dangerous situations in exotic locales did not hold a candle, for excitement and eternal significance, to his long career as a pastor.

. . . the hundreds of warm Christian friendships he built over the years, and the work he did to bring Christians together across boundaries of class, denomination, and theology. These were the touchstone of his years as pastor—and what he would really want us to remember him for.

Newton was the ultimate Christian boundary-crosser and bridge-builder. He was a Calvinist who accepted Arminians, a state-church pastor who encouraged independent churches, friend of prominent personalities who was comfortable in the company of the working poor.

In an America more pluralistic than ever on its Christian scene—not to mention the many non-Christian religions—John Newton is a man worth knowing.
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Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.

Though some today wonder if the word “wretch” is hyperbole or a bit of dramatic license, John Newton clearly did not think so. In fact often, throughout his life, he referred to himself as “the old African blasphemer.”
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It was during this period of peak influence in his London parish that Newton founded the Eclectic Society, a group of like-minded “Gospel” clergy, to discuss the issues of the day. It was, he said, “the society that bears no name, and espouses no party.” It included in its membership Anglicans, nonconformists, and even a Moravian or two.

The agenda of each monthly meeting was driven by a single question, submitted by one of the members at the end of the previous meeting. The members would take turns answering, and Newton kept minutes in a small journal.

The questions spanned theological issues, cultural trends, and the practical trials and dilemmas of church and family life—from “How should we reconcile Paul and James on justification?” to “What are the particular dangers of youth in the present day?”

Newton insisted the group maintain a high tone of gracious humility. In responding to theological error and dealing with ecclesiastical foes, kindness always took precedence over sternness and persuasion over polemics.

“If we stretch our authority, we lose it,” Newton observed.

In both its charitable tone and its parachurch format, the Eclectic Society became the model for other parachurch societies (including William Wilberforce’s influential Clapham Sect) and agencies (including the great British missionary societies, two of which were birthed out of the Eclectic Society).

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How Did Newton Build Bridges?

By ministering to the needy, engendering hope in hopeless places.

By building broad personal friendships, fostered by considerable personal correspondence.

By holding fast to his theological convictions, but not allowing them to prevent cooperation.

By working within the government-sanctioned religious system where possible, around it only when necessary.

By giving lay people power and responsibility, encouraging their freedom of thought (unfortunately, at the expense of his pastoral authority).

By gathering people with divergent views and encouraging civil conversation.

An intrepid few (currently 14) have signed on to explore these “patron saints” with me starting on September 27, in a course cross-listed in history and spiritual formation at Bethel Seminary, St. Paul, MN. Welcome!

What’s the difference between the book and the course? As I put it in a recent email:

The book will focus on issues related to ecclesiology (how each figure pioneers a distinctive cultural translation of the gospel, why that translation was necessary at their time and place, and how the church reacted to it).

The course is focused on more personal, biographical questions of vocation, spirituality, and character–because I take seriously the cross-listing of the course in the spiritual formation center.

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In planning the course, I have come up with a vocation-related question for each of the 8 figures we’ll be getting to know. These are certainly not the only questions that could be asked of each figure’s life. Nor have they necessarily  even been central or obvious questions asked by those who have already studied the figure in a scholarly way. But they may serve our purposes; or I may change them as I continue preparing the course . . . (-:

John Amos Comenius (17th c.):  How can our education and our children’s education be a Godly  one, and how can it help heal our human strife and schisms?

Charles Simeon (19th c.):  How can a wounded person be used by God?

Margery Kempe (14th c.):  How can I pray so as to hear God, and how can I be sure I’m hearing what he’s saying correctly?

Charles M. Sheldon (19th c.):  What does Jesus want me to do, and how?

Amanda Berry Smith (19th c.):  When the Spirit commands me to act, will we be bold enough to obey?

Dorothy L. Sayers (20th c.):  Does God value and use human creativity–and is it worth the cost to strive for integrity as we put creative gifts to use?

Gregory the Great (6th c.):  How can I find harmonious balance between my inner spiritual and outer active lives?

John Newton (18th c.):  How can I cross social boundaries to minister the Gospel effectively?