Irenic or Heretical? The Moravian Church’s Controversial Non-Confessionalism (1460–1760)

In the ancient world, the Greek word hairesis (heresy) connoted an option or school of thought, but with the rise of the Christian church it took on the meaning of false teaching, and in the Middle Ages it was redefined as willful opposition to the Catholic Church’s authority, often equated with treason. In 1415 the Czech reformer Jan Hus was convicted of heresy and burned at the stake, primarily because of his persistent refusal to acknowledge the authority of popes and councils to define orthodoxy. During the Protestant Reformation, confessional statements established new norms for orthodoxy and declared other churches heretical, and by the time of the Thirty Years War, accusations of heresy were a way to establish one’s political and religious identity. One exception was the Bohemian Brethren (also known as the Moravian Church), which emerged after the Hussite wars and faced persecution but never claimed to be the one true church. Their rejection of confessional exclusivity and state-sponsored religious persecution made them suspicious to many churches in the late medieval and early modern period. They played key roles in the two most famous ecumenical statements of the Reformation era: the Consensus of Sandomierz in Poland and the Confessio Bohemica in Bohemia. In the seventeenth century, the internationally known Moravian bishop John Amos Comenius continued to promote the Moravians’ practical ecumenism as part of his larger program of social reform and peace-making. In the eighteenth century, the Moravian Church was revived under the leadership of the Lutheran nobleman Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, who was often accused of heresy on both sides of the Atlantic in large part because of his ecumenism. Although the Moravians repeatedly affirmed their agreement with the ancient statements of Christian orthodoxy and Luther’s Augsburg Confession, their efforts to promote Christian union without violence was seen as dangerous to the social order. This paper will argue that much of the opposition to the Moravian Church in the early modern period stemmed from their irenic and ecumenical approach to Christian doctrine.