Sárospataki Füzetek 16. (2012)

2012 / 3-4. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Eberhard Busch: Az egyház értelmezése a Heidelbergi Káté tanítása szerint

Martién E. Brinkman

God's Transcendence of Our Concepts of Righteousness and evil

Predestination

E

specially in the Calvinist tradition the doctrine of predestination plays a huge role as pointer to God’s sovereign choice to save or to damn people. Because of these two options one speaks sometimes of a ‘double predestination’: some people are predestined to be elected, other to be damned. Although predestination is thus not the same as election-election is the positive site of this double predestination- often both terms are equated in Calvinism, even with Calvin him self.

Within the history of Calvinism this doctrine has been a bone of contention. It has been fiercely contested, for example, by the most well-known Reformed theologian of the twentieth century, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth. The core of his criticism of this doctrine was the assumed arbitrariness of God and its lack of Christological references.1

Instructive is the way the Dutch church historian Heiko Oberman placed this doctrine in its historical setting. According to him this doctrine has to be understood against the backdrop of the ‘Reformation of the refugees’, namely a Calvinism in the diaspora of sixteenth-century Western Europe. In his latest book, The Two Reformations, published posthumously two years after his death in 2001, he deals with the Lutheran and the Reformed Reformation and epitomizes in a undoubtedly deliberate, modern terminology the kernel of the Reformed idea of predestination as following: “For those who had no permanent place of residence, not even a fixed stone on which to lay their heads, neither a valid passport nor a residence permit, predestination became their identity card”.1 2 * * S

Predestination meant in those days: being led by God’s hand. Predestination teaches us-so Calvin underlines-to put our trust in the free mercy of God, to exalt

1 Barth, Karl: Gotteserkenntnis und Gottesdienst nach Reformatorischer Lehre: 20 Vorlesungen über das Schottische Bekenntnis von 1560. Zürich: Zoliikon, 1938. Engl. Transl. Barth, Karl: The Knowledge of God and the service of God according to the teaching of the Reformation. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938. 94-103.

2 Oberman, Heiko; Two Reformations: The Journey of the Last Days to the New World. New Haven:

Yale University Press, 2003. 156-165 (“Election”). 157 and Oberman, Heiko: “Europe Afflicta: The

Reformation of the Refugees” Archive for Reformation History 83 (1992): 91-111.

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