Reformed Presbyterian Church of Central and Eastern Europe

by Juhász Tamás

Antecedents

        After the 1989 East-European changes many kinds of missionaries came among us. The different kinds of sects and religious movements leaders' also considered Transylvania terra incognita, as a land whose inhabitants must be 'converted' from paganism.

        This kind of 'converter' fervor gave birth to the Theology and Missions School from Miskolc. This Institution recruits and trains young men with the purpose, that its graduates may be "missionary workers" in the Hungarian and successor states' reformed churches. It functions as a foundation, although it refers to itself with the attributes "Reformed and Calvinistic"; neither the Hungarian reformed Church nor the reformed churches of neighboring countries' have not recognized the school as theirs.

        The reformed theology teachers' stuff, the Coetus Theologorum in a letter in 1992 drew the Hungarian reformed churches' directing bodies attention to that fact, that the Institution which has no legal relation with reformed churches, causes disturbance. Uninformed young men thought this is a reformed school and they joined the Institute, whose founders and teachers spread fundamentalist and separatist ideas.

        It is a regrettable fact that none of the Hungarian reformed churches' directing bodies did not draw attention to the danger in time. Even in the course of the past few years, when several pastors in the early days had taught, and many young people who had enrolled, they realized it was a dead-end and left. What is more: the students of the Institute from Miskolc have preached at various Christian celebrations in the church, many of them just here in Transylvania. Some office-bearers of our church, officially or secretly even supported what the missionaries were doing.

        Then in 1997 every directing body of our church took stand on this matter and declared: we have nothing to do with the Mission Institute from Miskolc, nor with its American founder.

        But the "converting work" of a few graduates and students of the Institute had such a success in conversion among relatives, friends and acquaintances, that in Parajd, Szováta, Brassó, Szék and Marosvásárhely and else where, separate groups were formed with the intention that the groups be transformed into freestanding congregations. They spread their views and intentions by reproduced letters and handouts. In the following points I refer to two letters, one originated in Brassó and one dated in Szék.

 
The "confession" of Szék   

        One of them we present to the readers of the Üzenet. The stylistic and spelling errors, which are in the texts, were in the original handout, which we left in. Its author it is unknown because it is unsigned and only dated.

Confession

        1. We believe that the Bible is holy, inspired revelation from God, its original text is without error in every word and the only authority in matters of the Christian faith and practice.  We reject all those teachings according to which the Bible is not the Word of God, or that it is only a testimony of the Word of God or containing errors of human making.

         2.  We believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ must be understood in a Reformed Calvinistic sense according to the Second Helvetic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism and the Westminster Confession of Faith.

    a) We believe that by the fall of Adam all mankind became totally depraved and, by nature, is worthy of condemnation and it is lost.  

    b) God according to His eternal decree has ordered all things for His own glory. Without any regard to men, God from all eternity elected some to eternal life, other to eternal death.

    c) Jesus Christ offered a perfect sacrifice for the elect unto eternal life, through He has wiped away the sins of His people.

    d) All those whom God has elected unto life in His appointed time He enlightens their minds, renews their will and irresistibly draws them to Himself by His Spirit and Word.

    e) They whom the Father has accepted in His Son and called by His Spirit can never totally fall away from their state of grace, but will certainly persevere to the end and be saved.

        We reject all teaching, which denies the deity of Christ and the miracles of the Bible. At the same time we do not accept Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox teachings nor the teachings of every other sect, which does not confess that salvation is by grace alone (sola gratia), through faith alone (sola fide) and in Christ alone (solus Christus). Furthermore we reject also the charismatic movement 

     3.  We believe that God's Word must be followed exactly with regard to church government; therefore, we reject women's ordination to the ministry of preaching, ruling and administering the sacraments as being a perversion of God's order.

        4.  We believe that all ministers of the gospel are bishops.  There is no office of bishop apart from that of minister.

        5.  We believe that local churches need to be spiritually alive, therefore the discipline of the disobedient is necessary. Unbelievers are not permitted to come to the Lord's Table and their children must not be baptized.

         6.  We believe in the spiritual unity of believers, but we reject the false unity of the World Council of Churches. The ecumenism proclaimed by them is not based on the Word of God.

         We believe that in this confession God's Word teaches us the things we wrote, and that is why we make this covenant with each other before the face of God. All those who act or teach something different from this confession excludes himself from among us. We promise to take care of the spiritual health of one another by means of correcting, rebuking, encouraging and praying for one another.

        And we are doing this for the glory of God and for the pure preaching of the gospel among the nations.

        May the Lord help us in preserving in these things.
 

Szék, 27 June, 1997  

 
        Let us take into account the mistakes of this "confession" and let us see what our Reformed Church teaches on the basis of the Holy Scriptures.

        1. "The Bible is the Word of God... its original text is without error in every word."

It is a cheap thing to state something for which there is no evidence. We do not have the original text of the Bible at hand, but just copies of the original Hebrew and Greek texts. But not just the copiers made mistakes: the writers of the Holy Scripture were frail people who could err. The Bible is not "just a human product” but it has also a divine side. The wonderful unity of its message proclaims: God's Holy Spirit inspired the writers. The Bible is not literally inspired but according to its meaning it is an inspired book from God.

        2. We do not believe that the Bible must be "interpreted" in a Reformed or Calvinistic way, nor in Lutheran, Anglican or either Roman Catholic way. The Scripture must be interpreted by itself, by Scripture. If we must interpret it according to one or another confession, this would mean that the confession is superior to the Bible, and this is not true. The authors of the Second Helvetic Confession themselves wrote:

"If somebody would teach us something better from the Word of God, we would gladly obey in the Lord"

        We have no objections to the Westminster Confession of faith, which is highly esteemed by the English and the American Presbyterians. But why should this one be picked out from among the countless confessions of reformed churches. It would be possible to learn from of them. But the circumstance as why the Hungarian Reformed Churches refer to the Heidelberg Catechism and the Second Helvetic Confession as its biblical based expression of faith originates from that historical fact that one year before the appearance of the Westminster Confession of Faith, the National Synod of 1646 appointed these two confessions as authentic measure of preaching and teaching.

        The confessors from Szék have in large measure adopted the five subheadings marked with the letters of alphabet, from the Westminster Confession of Faith, which is built upon the Canons of Dort.

(Therefore God's Word has not taught it to them, as they claim at the end. If they would have quoted accurately, we would not have any objection against it, but they twisted the quotations.)

        b) God did not elect anybody to eternal death, but to eternal life. Even our logic says that if we elect some from a set of numbers, then we do not elect the rest of the numbers but we leave it. Somehow in this way we can follow God's merciful election also in thought (may be, but not necessarily):  He elected some to eternal life, and did not elect but "let" the others in damnation.  (Westminster Confession of Faith III, 3.)

        c) The atonement of Jesus Christ is universal, and did not only happen for the "elect" (John, 3:16; Heidelberg Catechism 20; The Canon of Dort II, 5-6).

        e) The point about the "unregrettable grace" is delusive, because it only quotes half of the confession. Both The Canons of Dort and The Westminster Confession teach this, but at first it says that those who were called, sanctified and justified by God in Christ will continue to live as sinners in the future as well, here on the earth. Therefore the list cannot be made of those "persevering saints", who do not fall from God's unregrettable grace.

        The deity of Christ and the miracles of the Bible, are not in the same category in our faith. It is not miracles we believe in but God who performs them. Even Jesus himself finds the miraculous faith to little (Mt. 12:39, Jn.4:48).

        It is an exaggerated and ignorant simplification to claim that the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox Church do not confess justification by grace through faith.  To count them among "every other sect" is express rudeness!

        3. It is not possible to exclude women from the pastorate on the grounds of principles. In 1Cor 11:5 the same apostle Paul speaks about the woman preaching (prophesying) the Word, who in 1Cor 14: 34-35 and in 1Tim 2:12 mentions her being into the background in the Church due to her social status. If it is not enough for somebody to know that almost two thousand years separate us from this social situation which by the help of the Gospel the Church was able to progress, then at least that person be humble enough towards God's Word to see the favorable view of woman throughout the Bible! It was pleasing to God to use women as his witnesses in the important moments in the economy of salvation and is it not pleasing to us to employ them in a more inferior ministry?

        4. This statement is a so-called sliding. And for those who have been trained in the Institute from Miskolc is worth knowing that in the Hungarian Reformed Church the bishop's office is a historical remnant and in principle it is nothing more than the office of president or moderator, among the other reformed people. Our canons however say that the bishop must be an elected pastor and should remain so.

        5. These two sentences are clichés: everybody acknowledges the truth of these in the Reformed Church. The second sentence should be understood literally: "Unbelievers can not be admitted to the Lord's Table". So only that man cannot take the Lord's Supper and cannot have his child baptized, who will stand in front of the congregation saying these words: "I am an unbeliever and I will not apologize for this!" It is our duty to forbid these kinds of people, but not anybody else, because a man cannot judge the faith or the unbelief of an other person.

        6. All the districts of the Hungarian Reformed Church are respectable members of the Word Council of the Churches. It is permissible or even required to criticize this as an institution.  But it would be unhistorical simplistic thing, to deny the truth of the ecumenical idea based upon the Word of God - the unity of Christ.
       

        Is Christ divided?

        "All those who act or teach something different from this confession excludes himself from us". But I hope that except for those few "missionaries from Miskolc" who are in Brassó, Marosvásárhely, Parajd, Szováta and Szék and profess faith in the above mentioned "confession", eight hundred thousand members of our Transylvanian Church will act and teach in a different way from the points objected to. And they will not exclude themselves from anywhere, because they are already in the manifested form of the universal, holy Church of Jesus Christ which is called: Hungarian Reformed Church.

        That person will exclude himself, who "acts and teaches" in a similar way to that apostle who in Jerusalem cowardly "began to draw back and separate himself...in his hypocrisy" (Gal. 2:11-13). In the previously mentioned Brasovian circular the authors are even boasting about the fact, that they hold a separate worship service. A quotation from their letter: "...the acts of the Hungarian Reformed Church are in contradiction with its confessions...the Reformed congregations often worship God with the Unitarians and Roman Catholics, and in many churches women preach...Nobody speaks against these signs of apostasy...(That is why) with our presence we cannot approve of those acts which are contrary to God's Word. We are filled with sorrow because of the separation from you, but for us the following of Christ and of His truth is primary. That’s why we are not ashamed, of worshipping God separately..."

        This is the sound of provocative questions and pride (whom do they think they are to believe that their presence or absence is so remarkable?!) that completely covers the concept of hypocrisy.

        Moliere the French dramatist wrote "The Comedy of Errors". We cannot laugh at the mistakes that we find here. No, because here we don't just talk about types of people or about human frailty, which we can make fun of, but we talk about people living among us, about members of our church, of our congregations who became victims of a seduction or deception. We talk about parents and brothers, friends and former schoolmates, who amazingly and painfully, are often straying parts of this separation. This is a sad game.

        It is even more sad even tragic, that it concerns the body of our Church, our congregation: the sanctified communities in Jesus Christ. It concerns that community, which in the midst of the troubles of a thousand year history, it is changing and perishable, but it is always upholding, because with its traditions, reformed in accordance with God's Word, it undertook and it undertakes today its place and its mission, given by God, "Christ's Transylvanian mandate"; so that with the entrusted Gospel would penetrate and make that people and nation Christian of which it is a part. Both the people and the nation and all our neighborhood is opposed to this mission, but we cannot separate ourselves from it, we cannot give it up because neither did Christ. Many outward attacks against the Transylvanian, Hungarian body of Christ have failed. But against the opposers attacking from the inside we are almost helpless. The trainers and sponsors of the "missionaries" from Miskolc certainly know very well what they are doing. But do the separatists themselves know that they have become janissaries of the "fifth division", which entered our Church's body as a wedge.

Üzenet,
May 1, 1998