Hungarian Church Press, 1950 (2. évfolyam, 4-13. szám)
1950-04-01 / 6. szám
-2 Why is it necessary to make, this confession? It is necessary in view of the misundorstanding with which this word ' liberation’, especially by people ha*d hit by the sufferings and ravages of the war. was received five years ago. And- even since that time, I nave often heard the argument among church people: why do not we speak of defeat, disaster or judgment.instead of a 'liberation'? I have had no doubts that what. happened was all this: defeat, disaster and judgment. I have seen, Ih ve known and I have felt that all these actually took place: we were defeated in the Second World Wa-r as well as in the First; it was an aw»ful disaster in the life of this small nation to be involved, aimlessly and against reason, in two world wars and to side, twice in succession with the losing side; and that the disaster that befell us was an act of righteous judgment by God, condemning our past and what then was our present. All this is true; those who asserted these could have hardly realized how right they were. How could they have expected to recognize the deepest meaning of these events? That it was really a liberation? Who could have made seriously and honestly the confession that wo were deservedly judged by God? Only he who realized the awful fact that it v/as without any real resistance, or, at least, without any really effective resistance that this country got inveigled into a war that ended in disaster.Whoever failed to accept this premise, is even to-day inaccessible to the decisive truth that our catastrophic defeat;’ in the last war, v/as not only an act of judgment, but, at the same time, an act of special mercy, thus showing us again that God "hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities". In His judgment, He manifested His mercy toward us. It was in thi3 gracious judgment that I received my liberation, I know that man is one and indivisible. Only the so-called "religious men" can manage to divide their life into two halves: a religious and a week-day hemisphere, as though their foot stood astride on two globes. Yet I had the peculiar experience, already during tho war, that I felt a separate shame of myself as man, as a Hungarian and as a Christian, A terrible anxiety was growing in me, beginning with the thirties, that we were living in an lawful deception which will load to catastrophic consequences. The outbreak of the war realized my forebodings. I was sure that Nazism, after an unforseoable course of disasters, will lose, and, in my sleepless nights, I saw the opening of an abyss which would engulf the wh.le nation and the church which had become like the 3alt that lost its savour. Those who did not feel this anguish - yet how little it.was to feel only this - will never understand what liberation means. To put it bluntly: for those v/ho found no fault with the years before or oven during the war, nothing else happened but defeat, disaster, and judgment. There were many such people, even among believing Christians. Why, it was possible t.o lead, individually, a good Christian life, to maintain one's Hungarian Church Press
