In Pursuit of Religious Freedom: Bishop Martin Stephan's Journey

by Stephan, Philip

  To this day, a sign hangs over the gate behind the town castle tower that says in Latin “Cuius Regio, Eius Religio,” that is, the ruler’s religion is everyone’s religion. This was the credo crafted to bring peace to the region. It applied only to Catholics and Lutherans as a means of solving the many turf battles. This short motto explains the history of the town and the nature of the underground church.

  During this mandatory expulsion from Bohemia some Hussites in Bohemia and Moravia fled to Germany instead of going underground. Other refugees moved to Pirna, near the German city of Dresden. Later they moved into that city and named their location Pirnassestrasse. There, in 1650, they formed a Bohemian-speaking evangelical congregation where the Martin Stephan of this study would serve as pastor from 1810 to 1838.

  Many of Martin Stephan’s ancestors who lived in Stramberg were named “Johann” or “Jan,” probably after John Huss. The first of the “Jan” Stephans was born in 1630. The genealogical records in Opava note “that he was long time head of town (purkmystrem, or mayor).” From the records of the town church it appears that when Jan Stephan was mayor of Stramberg, the town council and its eleven neighboring villages requested protection by the city of Neutitschein, another German enclave. This gave them additional protection from the warring armies that came marching through. Although not completely verified, tradition has it that during Jan Stephan’s time as mayor (1650–1700) the Jesuits built one of two church buildings in 1669–1674. He is an excellent example of how covert these “Hidden Seeds” had to be to survive.

  After the last “Jan” or “John,” died on November 20,1718, the next five generations of males were named “Martin.” The first Martin Stephan, born September 5, 1729, in Stramberg, was a cottager and weaver. He married his cousin, Mariana Stephan, daughter of Pavel and Barbora Stephan, on November 20, 1753. Marrying cousins was an acceptable practice at the time. A son, Martin II, was born to Martin I and Mariana on November 2,1754. Martin I died at the age of forty-five on April 22, 1771.3

  On June 18, 1776, Martin II married the daughter of Josef and Katerina Klor, Zuzana Klor (b. February 20, 1755). These Stephans were cottage weavers by trade and lived at No. 57 Dolni pred mesti, as had Martin I’s father. They raised five children here.4 Their eldest child, Martin III, born August 13, 1777, was named after his father and grandfather. This is the Martin who would eventually lead the Saxon Emigration. Within ten years four more children were born to them: Katerina, Jan, Magdalena, and Anna.5 These births were all registered at the Ascension of Our Lord Catholic Church of Stramberg, including the birth and the death of Martin’s youngest sister, Anna, who lived only six months. This fact suggests a continuing relationship with the Stramberg Catholic Church from 1630 until 1787, when it was again legal to be a Protestant. Prior to 1787 they secretly continued their Lutheran and Brethren religious practices.

  The town of Stramberg, with its Catholic cemetery, remains gently tucked between the beautiful rounded mountains of Moravia near the Polish border. The town’s travel brochure describes Stramberg this way:

  In the foothills of Beskyudy between mountains named Bila hora and Kotouc on the sides of Zamecky vrch, a town Stramberg was established in 1359 under protection of a castle. The civic houses around the sloping town square were walled in by a Moravian Lord Jan Jindrich. Most of the walls remain till our days. Because the number of citizens kept on growing constantly a large picturesque suburb has risen around the walls consisting mainly of log houses. Because of its antique character Stramberg was declared a historical town reservation. Besides the Truba (the castle tower) a visitor can see the town museum of a painter Z. Burian and a legendary mount Kotouc, with the cave Sipka where bones of a Neanderthal child were found.6

  The castle tower was part of the twenty-foot stone wall encircling the city that has been restored. A climb to the top on the inside staircase reveals a parapet or wooden walkway, used by lookouts to spot oncoming armies of Turks and other menacing warriors. A view from the top includes all eleven small rural peasant villages and the rolling countryside of farmland and groves of trees. On this mountain near the town square are well-preserved wooden log houses built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that are still occupied today. The town square is actually a rectangle of hotels, linen shops, and a bar and restaurant. All are dominated on the opposite end of the “square” by the beige plaster and stone Ascension Catholic Church, crowned by a maroon onion dome complete with a spindle steeple.

  A road just behind the church leads to the Stephan home at No. 57 Dolni pred mesti. Theo Stephan describes the house where Martin III was born:

  The old church records to which I had access in February 1921 ... give the No. 57, “Am Unteren Berge” (on the lower slope of the hill on which the town is located, the church and marketplace being on the top) as the birthplace (of Martin Stephan). My further inquiries, through Schuldirector, J. Smol of Stramberg, at the “Katasteramt” [real-estate registry] office revealed the fact that in all these years the numbers of the houses in the town had never been changed, and that no rebuilding of the house had taken place. The house, as shown, is therefore the actual place where the Stephans lived.7

  There are few hints as to the childhood experiences of Martin Stephan growing up in this village. Theo Stephan states, in his unpublished family history, that Martin’s father taught him to be a weaver, and he became an apprentice weaver by the age of sixteen. Martin’s mother, it is noted, “taught him the essentials of the faith, practice of prayer and life of piety,”8 the key concepts of the United Brethren piety. These practices carried over into the evangelical faith and practice later known as Pietism.

  When Martin III was barely sixteen, his father (Martin II, born 1754) died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-eight. Three years earlier, in 1790, Martin’s mother, Zuzana Klor Stephan, had died of consumption at the age of thirty-four. According to church records, when Martin Stephan II died, he was discovered to be “newly joined to the evangelical religion, Augsburg faith,” as written in his death record kept by the church register and preserved in Opava, Czech Republic. He was refused burial in Stramberg. Apparently he was buried by the evangelical pastor Szolba from Hodslivice, which at that time had the German name “Hotzendorf.” Contradictory records show Martin II was buried by the evangelical pastor in Stramberg on August 29, 1793, after succumbing to tuberculosis on August 27.

  This is the best evidence available to date that Martin II came out of the religious closet and as a result was prohibited from using the cemetery of the town because it was Catholic. However, church and family records are contradictory. When Martin II’s wife, Zuzana, had died three years earlier, the same records reveal that she too was buried by the evangelical pastor Szolba. Perhaps she was disinterred and reburied; or, three years earlier, it was acceptable to be evangelical. Maybe it did not matter if Zuzana was evangelical, since women were not considered the head of the household. The way the records are phrased in the Czech language, it appears that she had been first buried in Stramberg and then moved.

  Details of what happened to the orphaned Martin Stephan III after his father’s death are vague. There appears to have been some crisis around the time of his father’s death. In 1923, Theo Stephan searched the Stramberg Ascension Catholic Church records and the Stramberg Stephan house, with the help of the church’s presiding priest at the time. On a picture of the Stephan house Theo Stephan wrote, “Martin’s father was asked on whom he would confer the house.” This was when he was dying. He is reported to have replied, “Der Martin braucht es nicht; der wird einmal weit fort-kommen [sic].” That is, “Martin will need nothing when he escapes (or flees or goes far away).”9

  Theo Stephan also notes on the same house drawing that Martin fled from the town after his father was discovered to be “evangelical”: “the house, as shown is therefore the actual place where the Stephans lived, toiled, suffered prosecutions [sic] by their Roman Catholic fellow-citizens where our grandfather Pastor Martin Step
han was born, where his father died, and from where with his sister Wilhelmine and he fled under cover of darkness to Germany, to escape further prosecutions by the Roman Catholics, leaving his all behind.”10

  Even though the ban against evangelicals was lifted in 1787, there remained in many sections of Bohemia and Moravia a strong anti-Protestant attitude. In 1793 when Martin Stephan II died, the Jesuits still pursued and sought to eliminate Lutherans and other Protestants from the region. Evangelicals like Stephan and his family were not welcome in Stramberg.

  Apparently when the family was discovered to be evangelical, Jesuit soldiers began a search to expel the Stephan children or to kill them. Family history suggests that Martin and his sister left home and hid for two nights in the prehistoric Sipka caves on the edge of Stramberg. More than likely, the shortest route for these two refugees, traveling by foot and at night, was from Stramberg to the border of Silesa, then a German province, which was only sixty kilometers away. Nothing more is known about the Stephan children and their travels until five years later when Martin III showed up in Breslau, Silesia, then a province of Prussia but now in Poland.

  What happened to twelve-year-old Jan and the other girl at this time is only conjecture. According to genealogical records three other Stramberg families named Stephan were related.11 Most likely the brother and sister went to live with their uncles and aunts.

  Martin himself speaks of being orphaned, his escaping, and leaving his possessions in Stramberg. This single event affected him deeply. For any teenager the necessity of leaving many close friends and family where they grew up was traumatic. Within an instant they were stripped of their parental support, their family roots, culture, and their spiritual community. In 1825 Martin wrote, “I have lost my parents very early through death and I must fight through many miseries as a poor lost orphan.”12 That statement appears in a book of his sermons he preached during the church year of 1824 and printed in 1825 under the title The Christian Faith. It is in a footnote to the introductory prayer in volume 1, a prayer in which he gave thanks for all the help and grace that God had given him, especially when times were tough. “[My] mother and father have left or abandoned [German: verlassen] me. But you Lord have taken me and called me to your service and through all the sufferings and setbacks you have led me, and when my life and soul were menaced and upset you supported me with your almighty Arm.”13

  Stephan was nearly fifty years old when he published that prayer. He still felt a sense of abandonment. Although deeply personal, his feelings tied him to a long family history of painful experiences caused expressly by their commitment to the Huss and Luther evangelical Reformation: fleeing their homeland, feeling rootless, disconnecting from family.

  What he had learned at his parents’ knees—prayer and scripture from his mother, the weaving trade from his father—helped him survive. Being alone on the road for four or five years, he apparently sought out any Christian community, even if not Lutheran. The twenty-one-year-old Martin, working as a weaver, made his way to Breslau, Silesia, where he was invited to join a group of Christians. He felt part of a spiritual community once again.

  His tough life may have helped him to understand the difficulties and pains of others. When he became a pastoral counselor he was well respected and enjoyed a widespread reputation for listening and compassion. It was later said of him that he had claimed the “poor were his pearls.”

  NOTES

  1 Theodore M. Stephan, “Ancestors of Martin Stephan,” (unpublished ms., 1929), 2.

  2 David S. Schaaf, John Huss (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1915), 334.

  3 After Martin I died, his wife Mariana married another weaver from the town, Ignac Dreslar.

  4 Zemsky Archiv, Opava, Czech Republic. Genealogical Records of the Stephan family were taken from Ascension Roman Catholic Church, Stramberg, Czech Republic, in Moravian province.

  5 Katrina was born 1779; Jan on December 24, 1781; Magdalena on June 6, 1784, and Anna on April 4, 1787.

  6 Visitors Bureau, town of Stramberg, Czech Republic, brochure on town origins and visiting sites, 1999.

  7 Stramberg Visitors Bureau, brochure, 2.

  8 Stephan, “Ancestors of Martin Stephan,” 2.

  9 Unpublished notes about the Stephan house and Martin Stephan family written on photo reproduction (London, 1923), 2.

  10 Unpublished notes, 3. Theo Stephan mentions that Martin fled with Wilhelmine. However the genealogical records show no Wilhelmine. His sister Anna had died in childbirth and that left the next youngest sister Magdalena. Her middle name could have been Wilhelmine. Succeeding generations named children after their aunt Magdelena. Martin later named one of his daughters Wilhelmine.

  11 Other Stephan families from the lines of Thomas, Vaclav, and Pavel lived in Stramberg at the time of Martin’s birth.

  12 Stephan, “Ancestors of Martin Stephan,” 2.

  13 Martin Stephan, Der Christliche Glaube (Dresden, Germany: Konigl Buch-druckerei, 1825), xii.

  5

  The University Years

  Martin remained in German-controlled land where the evangelical faith was dominant, the church was state-run, and where he and his sister would be safe. It is clear from other writers who documented some of his early life that Martin had not completed his schooling, the basic German gymnasium (American high school and two years of college).1

  A young man of twenty-one, Martin settled in Breslau, Silesia (now Poland), in 1798, finally safe from the Jesuits’ search and kill efforts. There is no telling where he had been or how he survived for the past few years. However, by this time in his life he was a journeyman weaver. He sought out and was welcomed into a branch of the German Society for the Promotion of Pure Christianity who called themselves “Erwecht [Awakened].” They believed themselves to be the “awakened ones,” a people who had found a genuine spiritual life after being spiritually asleep. This “awakened” idea was a trademark of the Moravian and Bohemian Brethren. These groups became known as pietists according to Kenneth Scott Latourette:

  The Awakening [1750] was not confined to any one branch of Protestantism. It cut across existing denominational and confessional lines. It began with the Pietist movement in Germany in the seventeenth century and at first was most marked in Lutheranism. Mainly because the leadership of Zinzendorf, it had a striking manifestation in the rise of the Moravians and their spread from Herrnhut [the place to which the Moravian Brethren fled in 1629].... In whatever country or branch of Protestantism it appeared, the awakening had distinctive features. It was characteristically Protestant and stressed the authority of the Scriptures, salvation by faith alone, and the priesthood of all believers. It made much of a personal religious experience [as in John Wesley, who met the Moravians on his trip from England to the United States] of a new birth through trust in Christ, commitment to him, and faith in what God had done through him in the incarnation, the cross, and the resurrection. Indeed, some beliefs were so widely held by most of those touched by the awakening that the faith held by all came to be known technically as “Evangelical.”2

  The new time of “awakening” signaled the end of a period of dry orthodoxy in the church. Mary Todd, in Authority Vested, quotes Jaroslav Pelikan from his Luther to Kirkegaard, who notes that people had grown tired of the haggling and disputing of their professors and pastors which resulted in a less vital Christianity.3 Two major forces now emerged: Rationalism and Pietism.

  It appears that the people of the “Erwecht” not only greeted Martin warmly. There he found a new home, a place where he was comfortable in his faith and in his life. Martin impressed these folks by his ability to debate with opponents in the state church. He fought and argued with an “unbending sternness,” and he dominated his debating opponents. Because this “awakened “ group was quite missionary-minded, they desired to communicate the “sacred truths” to others. They observed in this young man from Moravia natural talents for speaking and debate. However, Martin lacked basic formal education.
The community urged Martin to enter Elizabeth College in Breslau.

  A friend of the group promised to support him during his years in college. He entered St. Elizabeth’s College in 1802, at the age of twenty-four.4 St. Elizabeth’s rector, Johann Ephraim Scheibel, gave him special training and served as a father and mentor. Koepchen described Martin as one who distinguished himself by his strict moral conduct, as well as by his energetic and determined manner.5 He concluded that Martin’s poverty drove him to be persistent in his work and determined to become a proficient minister.

  Because he was older than the other students, Martin had a difficult time relating to them, mostly aged fourteen to nineteen years. According to researcher P. F. Hanewinkel, Pastor Kummer, who eventually succeeded Martin at St. John’s in Dresden, believed Martin never closed the gaps in his interrupted education left by not learning the classical languages Greek and Latin. In spite of these shortcomings, he entered the University of Halle in 1804, spent two years there, and subsequently studied at the University of Leipzig. Kummer writes that his course of study was somewhat arbitrary.6

  Martin disliked, even distained, some courses of study such as philosophy ; he called them “carnal science.” This attitude was common at the time among the orthodox “Old Lutherans.” However, he was required to attend lectures in some of these so-called objectionable courses, because in those days German Lutheran theology was deeply influenced by the German rationalism that offended the young pietistic and confessional theologian. 7 This resistance to the prevailing philosophies of the day would be a major defining theme in Martin’s theological and ministerial development.