Itt-Ott, 1992 (25. évfolyam, 1/119-3/121. szám)

1992 / 1. (119.) szám

the Sabbatarians, who bad strong Judaic tendencies.

These changes in direction show Dávid setting off four times down his “road to Damascus.” While St. Paul was able to find his Redeemer after one sudden conversion, Dávid, as will appear later, never met his Christ, but only Jesus the Man, to whom he was unable as a believer to say a prayer. With the final precept of non adoramus, he ended his efforts as a reformer.

First Public Appearance, Dávid contra Stancaro

Francis Dávid first demonstrated his thorough grounding in theology and his debating ability in a theological dispute with the Italian-Jewish humanist Francis (Francisco) Stancaro. At the time of this debate Dávid faced Stancaro as a Lutheran. Francis Stancaro came from the University of Padua, where he taught Hebrew in the 1540’s and, as was the case with most humanist reformers of the time, proclaimed the new Mediterranean paganism. Stancaro was such a wild furor theologicus that once, meeting a humanist colleauge, Andreas Osiander, for a debate, the followers of both appeared in the lecture hall fully armed (Church 1923, 263).

Stancaro, as a well-versed Hebraist, debated at synods all over Europe, succeeding in causing scandals wherever he went, and for that reason was driven out of every country he visited. According to his rabbinical logic, Christ could only intervene as a human being. If Christ were equal to God, in what manner could one God appeal to another? He who appealed had to be below the one to whom he appealed. Therefore, if Christ were really God, he could not appeal to himself, and because of his divinity could not be an intercessor. He could only intercede in his human capacity.

After another escape, Stancaro arrived in Hungary around 1549. Here, too, he was condemned by the synods of the Church, but he did not back down. Among his enemies he especially slandered Phillip Melanchthon who, according to him, was a pseudo- Lutheran. In a petition he sent to the government of Transylvania, he demanded that his mendacious opponents be persecuted with the most ferocious mercilessness and be burned at the stake along with Francis Dávid, because they were all Arians (Magyar Református Adattár 1906, 150-51).

Dávid reacted in writing, using a remarkably calm tone and pointing out Stancaro’s errors (Dávid 1555). Altogether he devoted six theses to this; Stancaro dismissed them all as laughable aberrations. Dávid answered with an even more detailed documentation and summarized the arguments pro and contra (Dávid 1557), according to which Christ could act as intercessor and Redeemer in both natures, human and godly. Dávid summarized his theological views, which were Lutheran at the time, in sixteen themes; then he strongly attacked Stancaro personally, referring to him as Jew or Muslim and adding the term “deformer.”

Dávid warned Stancaro with the words of St. Paul: “Let us hold back our judgement in our obedience toward God!” He advised Stancaro to accept the Nicene Creed, which spoke of both the single substance and of the Holy Trinity. He added, “The Word is the Son of God... who is both human and godly and true God and true Man.” Then, with a concept which he later denied, he admonished Stancaro, saying “We must believe God’s Word even if our understanding is unable to grasp it or indeed advises the opposite.” Finally he asked Stancaro to see in the formula of the creed mysteries which pass human understanding. “So leave your mad, fierce arguments.” When Stancaro was finally expelled from the country, the main accusation against him was that “he carved a man out of Christ.” Not much time elapsed before Dávid himself faced the same accusation.

Stancaro had built his entire case on I Timothy 2:5, which he had interpreted wrongly: “For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” Stancaro, and later Dávid also, had borrowed this idea from the famous Liber Sententiarum of Pier Lombardo. Stancaro’s expulsion came in 1558, after his teaching had been discussed at the Diet of Torda and Dávid had advised his removal. After his departure, Stancaro settled in Poland. John Calvin warned the leaders of Polish Protestantism against the propaganda of this “mad dog.” In the end, Stancaro appealed to the archbishop of Cracow, saying that he wished to change from Judaism to Roman Catholicism, but his request was refused. The main reason for the misfortunes that befell his career was that, although he could have been a professor of the Hebrew language, he persisted in proclaiming his fantastic theological views instead. In these tormented years, signs of mental disorder began to appear [on him],

Stancaro jeered at the Catholic priests of Transylvania, called them “wine jugs,” and demoted the earlier fathers of the Church to the rank of “beer barrels.” At the same time, in a request written to the ruling Queen Isabella, he mentioned “God’s rights” and advocated the confiscation of priests’ property and the burning of priests at the stake (Sigler, 245-46). It would be appropriate, in connection with Stancaro, to point to the insincerity of the humanists with regard to tolerance while allegedly they were the representatives of God’s tolerance, because many humanists advocated the most merciless punishment and Sebastian Castellio, in his Traité des herétiques (Castellio 1915), as a great defender of heretics, wrote in support of the death sentence for all those who blasphemed the Lord. His subjective “truth” sounds like this: “Veritas est dicere quae sentias, etiam si erres,” or: the truth is what you proclaim, even if you know it is not true.

Dávid himself was unable to avoid the religious impatience of the neophyte. As Lutheran bishop, during the Synod of 1557, he wrote the Consensus doctrinae de sacramentis which, in its summary, dismissed, with curt impatience, the Helvetic creed, then known as the Sacramentalis (Pokoly 1905, 14, 117-18), which theology, according to him, was built on impossibilities of common sense. At the same time, Dávid strongly emphasized that “only the Word of God must be believed and followed (Dávid Prédikációknak...)," as this was the key to salvation.

Dávid was successful at the Synod in excluding ministers of the Helvetic persuasion “because they are

(TT-OTT 25. évf. (1992), 1.(119.) szám 23