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The Reformer Johannes Honterus and Orthodoxy: “Early Ecumenism”

Abstract On the occasion of the commemoration of 500 years since the Reformation, this article, entitled “Reformation and Orthodoxy”, calls attention to the personality of Johannes Honterus (1497-1549), the Lutheran reformer of the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Transylvania, and reviews his relationship to Orthodoxy, a relationship which may be referred to as “Early Ecumenism”. Johannes Honterus, one of the most important personalities of the Transylvanian Saxons, was an outstanding scholar who had studied in Vienna, Krakow, Regensburg and Basel. He became the founder of the first school and the first publishing house in Brasov (Kronstadt), and – as Senior Pastor – was the reformer of his native town and eventually all of Transylvania (1547). Honterus had close contacts to Christian-Orthodox Romanians from surrounding areas, and in his publishing house not only Latin, Greek and German textbooks were published, as well as the two most important works about the Reformation in Brasov and the whole of Transylvania, but also – about 1540 –, among others, the so called Christian-Orthodox „Edition of Nilus“, with extracts from the Greek Patristic Literature by Evaragius Ponticus, Gregory of Nazianz and Thalassus. His dialogue with Orthodox visitors to his town inspired his work for the Lutheran Reformation among the Transylvanian Saxons. From 1556 to 1583, Honterus had in his publishing house the most important Orthodox publisher of the 16th century, Deacon Coresi. This “early ecumenism” became the basis for the well-known tradition of religious tolerance in Transylvania.