The Polish Brethren versus the Hutterites: A Sacred Community?
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Magdalena Luszczynska
Abstract
In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Hutterian Brethren of Moravia were a thriving religious movement, described by numerous visitors as an ideal of a sacred Christian congregation. The Hutterites themselves promoted a similar self-portrait, seeing their community as the embodiment of the apostolic Church described in the Acts of the Apostles, and of the Old Testament’s Chosen People. This image was challenged by another Reform Church, the Polish Brethren, or the Arians. Focusing on the example of those two communities, this essay discusses the process of Radical Reform identity formation. It examines the creation of the Moravian myth of a sacred community and the rebuttal of this myth produced in the milieu of the Polish Brethren. Different social makeup and political context of the Arians shaped their hermeneutics of the same sacred texts that served the Moravians and resulted in construing an alternative myth of a sacred community. The essay concludes that the latter narrative was instrumental for the Polish Brethren to establish their own, separate Christian identity.
Acknowledgements
The research for this paper was supported by Mandel Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities and Jewish Studies, which is a part of Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Foundation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Music, Rhetoric, and the Edification of the Church in the Reformation: The Humanist Reconstruction of Modulata Recitatio
- The Polish Brethren versus the Hutterites: A Sacred Community?
- Some Aspects of Jean Gerson’s Legal Influence in Sixteenth Century England: The Issue of Epikeia
- A Dowry, Will, and Blended Family of Calvin’s Geneva Put Anne Colladon, to the Test
- The Civil Magistrates of Geneva and the Placement of Pastors in France on the Eve of the First War of Religion (1562)
- The Muses in Mourning: Identity and Classicism in Calvinist Heidelberg
- Niels Hemmingsen and the Construction of a Seventeenth-Century Protestant Memory
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Music, Rhetoric, and the Edification of the Church in the Reformation: The Humanist Reconstruction of Modulata Recitatio
- The Polish Brethren versus the Hutterites: A Sacred Community?
- Some Aspects of Jean Gerson’s Legal Influence in Sixteenth Century England: The Issue of Epikeia
- A Dowry, Will, and Blended Family of Calvin’s Geneva Put Anne Colladon, to the Test
- The Civil Magistrates of Geneva and the Placement of Pastors in France on the Eve of the First War of Religion (1562)
- The Muses in Mourning: Identity and Classicism in Calvinist Heidelberg
- Niels Hemmingsen and the Construction of a Seventeenth-Century Protestant Memory
