The story of the Moravian church begins, one may say, at Bethlehem. Not Bethlehem in
Pennsylvania but Bayt Lahm, Jesus’ birthplace in Israel.
From the night of Jesus’ birth in a stable to a believers’ community on the heights above
the Lehigh River an unbroken story of faith continues. It is a story other Christian groups
have often wished to invent for themselves, but with little success.
The Moravians, without invention, are an “Apostolic” church (a church that has kept its
succession of leadership unbroken from the apostles’ times to now). More than that, they
survived as a movement keeping its place in the love of Christ with far greater
faithfulness than most, through two thousand years. Yet their story, like the story of all
faith communities, involves struggle, confusion at times, and trials that obscured its way.
It is not as simple as some have been led to believe.
“As a church we descend from the movement of John Huss, burned at the stake in 1415,”
say tour guides at Moravian museums. At first I took what they said at face value. But the
more I learned of the facts behind that statement, the more I saw how potentially
misleading it could be. The Unitas Fratrum (the Brotherly Unity or Moravian church)
“descends” from John Huss in the same way, perhaps, as the Anabaptists from Martin
Luther, or the Quakers from Oliver Cromwell. Certainly, there was a connection, but to
speak of spiritual “descent” implies more than there really was.
The “renewed Moravians” (the Unitas Fratrum after 1722) were not Czech-speaking
people of Moravian background. True, they came across the mountains from Moravia—
the “hidden seed”—but their ancestors were German Waldenses who in their turn had
fled there for refuge. In Moravia their ancestors had linked arms with the Unitas Fratrum,
a Czech renewal movement. But even it had stood in sharpest opposition to John Huss’s
reformation from the beginning, and far from representing him now, bore the marks of
brutal suppression suffered under the rule of his followers for centuries.
To get the story straight we need to go back—far back beyond Moravia, the Hussites and
Waldenses, to early Christian communities in Asia. . . .