Sárospataki Füzetek 16. (2012)
2012 / 3-4. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Eberhard Busch: Az egyház értelmezése a Heidelbergi Káté tanítása szerint
God's Transcendence of Our Concepts God must himself encompass the contrast between good and evil. In spite of all inherent tensions with which this inclusive concept of God faces us, I am inclined to state that such a concept is preferable. The Reformed doctrine of predestination, covenant, image of God and calling teach us that God’s righteousness will never be in line with our ideas of righteousness. God doesn’t fit into our ideas of righteousness. Rather He is a God 'beyond good and evil’, not in the Nietzschean sense that we can leave behind us the notions of good and evil as developed in Christianity, but in the sense of a deep Christian awareness that our righteousness not always is also God’s righteousness. Our ideas of righteousness have first of all to ‘die’ and to ‘rise’ with Christ in the repeated celebration of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. In other words, they have to be put into the perspective of ‘another world’, revealed in Christ’s proclamation of the coming Kingdom of God. Especially in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper we are invited time and again to experience what it means our life experiences to bring to the border of the Jordan and to the foot of the cross. There we find our real identity. There, in our ‘lost self’, we find our ‘true self’. Immersed and crossed in Jesus’ death we are challenged to experience in his resurrection our own resurrection to a righteous, faithful life as a predestination to a covenant in which we interpret our responsibility as a corollary of the divine calling to be the image of God. Abstract The words of God, spoken by the prophet Isaiah that God’s thoughts are not ours, and that our ways are not His (Isaiah 55, 8), could according to the Reformed tradition adequately be applied to our concepts of righteousness and evil in relation to God. There is a huge gap between our ideas of righteousness and evil and an adequate qualification of God’s acts. That means that God is involved in our world in His own way. In the following text I would like to illustrate this divine way as the key to Reformed issues as predestination, covenant, image of God and calling. The analysis of these issues will show that the God-human relation is so variegated and so inextricably tied together, that there is no point in adjudging this relation from an outsider’s perspective. Only when the observer himself is involved in an act of engagement in God’s core revelation in Jesus Christ, an adequate position is taken in to adjudge God’s acts. This engagement — so will be my final conclusion — can only happen in the participation in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s supper. Only that participation will really change our ideas of righteousness and evil. 2012/3-4 Sárospataki Füzetek 91
