Sárospataki Füzetek 17. (2013)
2013 / 4. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Szilveszter Füsti-Molnár: Can the Heidelberg Catechism be Neglected in the Life of the Reformed Church of Hungary?
Can the Heidelberg Catechism be Neglected in the Life... son to the old one (You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies ...” (Mt 5, 43-44) In light of our earlier perspective, when Jesus talks about loving our enemies he does not refer to a positive emotional attachment, but expanding its range of meaning he calls us to go beyond the friend - enemy distinction. The old commandment does not call us to have an emotional binding with my friend and to turn against my enemy emotionally, but to relate to a friend as a friend and to an enemy as an enemy: in other words, to act justly, since the new commandment does not require from us only an emotional response. Does this mean that the great commandment of love does not embarrass us anymore? Not at all. In a very strict sense, it is shocking and disturbing since, - similarly to our Heavenly Father, the Lord of the Holy Trinity, who “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good “ (Mt 5, 45) - the commandment of love wants us to step out from that structure of mutual recognition, which is controlled by the common ethical logic of suitability. By leaving this structure behind, the commandment of love indicates a broader context, and it only becomes understandable by the Jewish-Christian liminal eschatological way of thinking, which promises salvation from this world. This idea is expressed in the Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 113-115. It is Christ who teaches us the essence of the Law. An opportunity to stand by Gods side is given by getting close to Him through Christ. (Q&A 113). Referring to Buber, love is between the you and I. Whoever stands in this love and looks at the world from there, for him or her other persons will unfold from the world of hustle and bustle, good and bad, wise and foolish, beautiful and ugly, and their impersonality will turn into the most real personality - not by the standards of this worlds mutual recognition, but by grasping the existence opened up for us as belonging to Christ. Liminal experience means particularly the experience of the existing one as a whole in the Christ-story. People want to move beyond themselves or to somersault, because they know they are not what they are. Using Heideggers words: we can talk about the hiddeness of existence, or its resistance, that can be traced back to Parmenides and Heraclitus (up to 2500 years of the history of thought). However, the crucial point we want to make, is that the liminal experience can be grasped in communitas. As we have seen in regard to statuses and roles, rights and obligations, the disintegration of the objectified recognition-relations, pushes a person to cross the gaps, but this does not mean that we enter into nothingness: since whoever begins to recognize his or her new self as a member of the fundamental solidarity relationship given in communitas, becomes an existing one grasped in his or her existence, as a new being in Christ. Emphasizing the word of God, the Heidelberg Catechism teaches that the purest forms of the fundamental solidarity relationship is the love community of those who have died and been reborn in Christ. Where “in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body”. Sárospataki Füzetek 17. évfolyam 201314 53
