John Amos Comenius

Life

Comenius (Czech name Jan Amos Komenský) was born on March 28, 1592, in Nivnice, Moravia, and grew up in nearby Uherský Brod. He lost his parents at an early age, and from 1608 he studied at the school in Přerov run by the Unity of the Brethren. The Unity of the Brethren was a church that carried on the reforming spirit of Jan Hus; known in Latin as the Unitas Fratrum, it is also called the Bohemian Brethren. He went on to study theology at the Herborn Academy, a Calvinist institution in Germany, and at the University of Heidelberg.

He was ordained a minister of the Unity of the Brethren in 1616 and became pastor at Fulnek in 1618. After the Habsburg victory in 1620, early in the Thirty Years' War, Protestantism was outlawed, and he was forced into hiding. During this period he wrote the devotional allegory The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart. In January 1628 he led members of the Unity into exile in Leszno, Poland, and he spent most of the rest of his life abroad. In 1632 he became a bishop of the Unity, and at the invitation of England, Sweden, and other countries he took part in educational reform. Although the Peace of Westphalia ended the war in 1648, it guaranteed neither religious freedom for the Brethren nor their return home. He died in Amsterdam on November 15, 1670, and was buried in Naarden in the Netherlands.

Ministry and Achievements

• Church leader: He led the Unity of the Brethren in exile. When hopes of returning to the homeland were dashed, he wrote The Bequest of the Unity of Brethren (literally, "The Testament of the Dying Mother, the Unity of Brethren"), a work framed as the Unity bequeathing the spiritual heritage it had preserved to various churches. He also sought to unite the Lutherans and the Calvinists, but without success.
• Episcopal succession: As the last surviving bishop of the Unity, he passed on the episcopal office to his son-in-law Petrus Jablonski (Figulus) and others. This line of succession is understood to have passed through his grandson Daniel Ernst Jablonski to the Moravian Church, which was refounded in the eighteenth century at Herrnhut, on the estate of Count Zinzendorf.
• Pedagogy: In The Great Didactic he advocated universal education, holding that all people ought to be taught. He became well known through his Latin textbook The Gate of Languages Unlocked (1631) and his illustrated textbook Orbis Pictus (The World in Pictures). He also conceived of "pansophia," an effort to teach all knowledge as a unified whole, and of Pampaedia, a theory of lifelong education. He is said to have left some 200 writings on education and theology.

Influence on the Korean Church

In Korea, Comenius has mainly been introduced in the history of education as a "pioneer of modern pedagogy." Within Korean churches, particularly in the field of Christian education, articles reexamining his theology and his work as a bishop have appeared in the Christian press. Some Korean writers have also sought to relate the Brethren's tradition of confessing sin and their communal faith to church renewal today.

Assessment

Comenius is highly esteemed in the Czech lands as a man who did not abandon his faith or his homeland even in exile. As an educator, he is credited with opening the way for modern pedagogy. Some have observed, however, that his fame as an educator long caused church history to overlook his role as a pastor, bishop, and theologian. He looked forward to the Second Coming of Christ and the millennium, and he regarded education and the reform of the world as preparation for the end times. Scholars differ in how they assess these eschatological expectations.