Calvin Synod Herald, 1975 (75. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1975-01-01 / 1-2. szám

4

CALVIN SYNOD HERALD

as a matter of fact, even the Bible tells us that nobody can see God with his natural eyes, but, with the eyes of faith, we see Him, in the sense of having the assurance that He is the ultimate reality of our life, the shaper of our destiny. When f say that we live in a period of God’s eclipse then I mean that those people who have the certainty of God’s presence and power, who have spiritual vision, are often in the minority. And even those people who call themselves Christian, can feel God’s reality only in certain special areas of life, in prayer, and in worship. They have, so to speak, a compartmentalized religion. A Sunday religion. In fact, they take care not to mix religion with their work, their business, — not even with their family life. That is not Reformed piety! And it is not Hungarian Reformed piety! Church History tells us that our ancestors in Hungary were people who did not reduce their religion to a sector of life but tried to live as Christians on weekdays as well as on Sundays, in their prayer and in their work, in all the realms of human life. If you enter the court of our College in Debrecen, you see a big inscription up on the wall in Latin: orando et laborando, by work and by prayer. This not only means that the two belong inseparably together, but it also means we must praise God by our daily work as well as by our worship as He is the Lord of the whole of human life. Our ancestors first sought God’s kingdom and His righteousness, and all the other things of life, also matters that pertain to our earthly life, to our culture, to our national culture, were added to them. That is how the leavening influence of the Gospel permeated the whole of the nation’s life. Even today, when the outlook of the political leaders in Hungary is not religious at all, it is generally recognized that the Reformed Church has made an immensely great contribution to national culture, to the whole life of the Hungarian nation. Just to give you one example: this year we observe the 400th anniversary of the birth of Albert Szenczi Molnár, one of the outstanding personalities of Hungarian literature, the man who gave us our Hungarian psalms which we still sing, and the anniversary celebrations are not at all limited to the church, many of our literary magazines and periodicals carry articles about the great man, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences recently dedicated a special session to the memory of Szenczi Molnár, in this way expressing the indebtedness of the whole nation to a great minister of our church who believed that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” as Psalm 24 says, the fullness of the created world, the fullness of human life.

So the first imperative of Hungarian Reformed piety is to dedicate the whole life of the family to the Lord. It maans, first of all, to play the natural roles which God assigns to us in the family: we must try our best to be good fathers, good mothers, good children, good brothers and good sisters. The Christian family today must be a “city set on a hill.” It must set an example. We are especially aware of this obligation in Hungary. The process of rapid industrialization in our country, together with the effects of secularization, has a disintegrating influence on family life. Our divorce statistics are bad. The generation gap is wide. Real fellowship is often lacking. The members of the family often have very little to share with each other as far as spiritual values are concerned. I know that you, too, in the United States have your serious problems. What is the special contribution of Reformed piety to family life? First of all the radiation of genuine Christian love. Verse 5 of chapter 5 in the Epistle to the Romans says that “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts.” If that is the

case, then the world must see — just as it saw in the first centuries — that Christians are people who love each other, who care for each other, who have real fellowship with each other, who can forgive each other, who bear each other’s burdens, who share with each other what they consider the greatest values of life. The rule of love is the soil in which the flower of Reformed piety grows.

Where, however, love reigns, that is, the light of the Gospel of God’s love irradiates life, there we also discern God’s commands, the requirements of His holy law. It is a permanent problem of the theory of education how we can reconcile the claims of loving fellowship with those of authority. The answer is in the relationship that exists between the Gospel and the Law of God. The Word of God includes both: the good tidings of love and the requirements of law. And where the Word of God reigns supreme, there is no conflict between what we may do and what we must do; there we may have loving fellowship with each other and obey, at the same time, the binding norms and commands which the Law of God puts before us. Otherwise the claims of fellowship and authority fall apart. Then education is either too soft or too strict. Then children grow up either in the way of never learning to obey, to respect the law, to respect genuine authority, that is to say, in the spirit of lawlessness, doing what they please to do, or, we may find the other extreme, an unduly strict, authoritarian education, with plenty of coercion and punishment, in the spirit of the military barracks, with no regard to the individual nature and personality of the child. Lawlessness on the one side, repression and lack of freedom on the other side. The two extremes can only be avoided where we obey the Word of God, where we know the joyous freedom of the children of God and, at the same time, we bow ourselves before the supreme authority of God’s holy Law. Reformed Christian piety is free and law-abiding at the same time, and it is in this spirit that we must educate our children: in Christian freedom, yet in obedience to God’s commandments, in the spirit of love and authority.

I have spoken so far about the natural requirements of education in the family. But I must also speak about the specifically Christian witness which also belongs to genuine Reformed piety. Our fathers considered the Christian faith as the greatest heritage they could pass on to their children. One is not born a Christian, and there are no human methods that could guarantee that our children grow up as Christians. But unless you really believe that the love of God is the greatest thing in this life and in eternity, you cannot hope to see that your children grow up as Christians! And mind you, our children notice whether our Christianity is genuine or not, whether the Gospel of God’s love is really the greatest thing in our life. The early years of life, long before the school-age are decisive. Even a baby feels the love of its mother, and even a little child is impressed forever by the religion of his or her parents if that religion is the genuine article. Just let us recall our own memories how our loving mother taught us to pray or took us to church or to Sunday School, how we noticed the seriousness of our father at the Lord’s Table, how we felt the joy of an old Christmas service when we worshipped together with our parents, all these things are unforgettable and kindle the feeling of gratitude to our dear parents for having shared their greatest treasure with us.

Of course, much of the Christian witness in the family is non-verbal, that is to say, it is without words. On the whole, that is the most important part of Christian witness in the family. In Peter’s First Epistle we read the advice to