Josef Luki Hromádka

Nationality

Czechoslovakia

Date of Birth

1889

Date of Death

1969

Political
Preference

Christian

Josef Lukl Hromádka was born in Moravia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and studied theology in in Vienna, Basel, Heidelberg and philosophy in Aberdeen. Hromádka was Professor in Theology in Prague and was chairman of the Christian Peace Council. Initially a Lutheran preacher, he joined the Evangelical Church after the First World War. He was a founding member in 1918 of the unified Evangelical Church of Chech Brethren.

Hromádka was an opponent of National Socialism, and he worked closely in the 1930s with, among others, Karl Barth and the pastors of the Confessing Church in Germany. In 1939 Hromádka fled the Nazis into exile, taking up a post at Princeton Theological Seminary in the United States. During this time in the States, he was invited by the Commssion on a Just and Durable Peace to a group of European exiles to inform the American commissioners on the situation in and prospects for Europe. Hromadka was also one of the founding members of the CCIA in 1946.

He returned to Prague in 1947 to resume his post at the Comenius Theological Faculty, striving for a dialogue between Marxism and Christianity. He saw “real socialism” as an opportunity to free Christianity from bourgeois liberalism and anti-communism. At the Amsterdam Assembly of 1948, he famously clashed with John Foster Dulles over the nature of communism, with Hromadka ultimately gaining the upper hand among ecumenists present, leading Dulles to increasingly distance himself from the ecumenical movement as he embarked on a political career.

Hromádka founded the Christian Peace Conference in 1958. He strove for peace between West and East. In addition, he was a great advocate of freedom and social justice. He continued to be one of the rare voices from the Eastern bloc in the WCC, continuously questioning the primacy of capitalism or “the Western way” within the WCC.