Hungarian Church Press, 1968 (20. évfolyam, 2. szám)

1968-06-01 / 2. szám

Vol i-A Special Number

1968 No 2- 22 -(07664)

The boldness of speech calling sin sin and judgment judgment was heard, already during the war years, and has since been the grace of God whereby the prophetic message of God has been delivered in a pure and unmistakable manner» This message ha", been the word of God's judgment and the Word of His grace.

Now, let us see the specific indications of the Church's repentance.

The Church has had to ses'er the ties binding her to the old social system. This presupposed the admission of those political and social sins which had been committed by the church during World War II when, generally speaking, we mutely aoquiesced in the conditions cf social injustice weighing upon the wide strata of the Hungarian peoples For this reason, the Church has recognized the signal of God's grace in the vast social transformat ion which followed« » we are beyond measure grateful to God our Lord far his utterly unexpected and unhoped fcr grace that He has spared our life, that He has preserved the church and has not taken from us His ministry. Fcr we had awaited exactly this, and this is what we would have regarded as the just judgment of God over us» We do not understand the man who fails to perceive this wonder of God's grace and fails to attribute to his special grace that we, although covered with wounds and with our house fallen Upon us, may nevertheless live on and continue our work”.27)

It is quite easy today to speak of this, but at the beginning the full retroactive power of the past was yet at work and the church had to cany on a spiritual and theological fight in order to discover God's only saving and preserving love and to give up the false human hopes and illusions«

Beside this proclamation of the just judgment of God, the second message of tlie prophetic witness was the call to thanksgiving, not in general but in specific terms»

We had to thank God for His grace that he had preserved and kept us» Although the losses suffered in terms of human lives had been very great, He had brought us out cf the holocausté We had to thank Gcd for the opportunity to make an entirely new staifcu It was this spirit that was expressed in the first post-war declaration of the Reformed Church in Hungary on the new social trans format ion. 28)

This declaration of the Synodal Council was the first church statement in post-war Hungary to affirm the emerging new state and society and it was on the basis of this Declaration that our church as the first cf the churches of Hungary, concluded, on the 7th of October, 1948, an Agreement with the new Hungarian State» Similar Agreements were made later with the Hungarian Lutheran Church and still later even with the Roman Catholic Church»

c) The Congregation as _the Social Base of the Church

By malting these difficult decisions, the relation of the Hungarian Evangelical church to Jesus Christ, the Lord of the Church, who reveals Himself in the Word of God, has been clarified» The prophetic message and also the prophetic preaching in the congregations have made it clear that the Church can only