Baptistic Theologies, 2009

pt (1995), pp. 22-23. Revival among Hungarian Baptists in Transylvania 55 1. The search for an evangelical spirituality In the second half of the nineteenth century in Transylvania, Protestant theological thinking and spiritual life were dominated by liberalism and rationalism. Religious orthodoxy was expressed in the teaching of doctrines and rules without an evident living out of an authentic spirituality. It was this lack which created a search for evangelical spiritual experience. The origins of evangelical spirituality have been thoroughly analysed by David Bebbington. He describes in his important work, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, how the decade beginning in 1734 ‘witnessed in the English- speaking world a more important development than any other, before or after, in the history of Protestant Christianity: the emergence of the movement that became Evangelicalism’. 4 Bebbington has argued that evangelicalism is a movement comprising all those who stress the Bible, the cross, conversion and activism and has traced how this was evident in the movements that sprang out of the eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival. 5 However, Bebbington does not look at the evangelical movement in Eastern Europe, where evangelical revival was also evident. This study is one attempt to extend the analysis. Theological trends in Hungarian Protestantism A liberal approach to theology, which influenced thinking among the Reformed churches (and in Protestantism more generally) in Hungary in the mid-nineteenth century, accentuated the superiority and priority of reason over the revelation of God in Scripture. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Protestant churches were deeply affected by this trend as the following examples from Mihaly Markus show. Most of the Protestant ministers on Good Friday would preach about ‘suffering for the truth’ rather than the atoning suffering of Christ. On Easter Day ministers preached about the victory of ideas rather than the victory of Christ over- death. They also taught that Jesus of Nazareth was not the Christ nor the Son of God but a perfect man and a perfect moral example. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity was rejected as a polytheistic teaching that had nothing to do with Christianity. The teaching about the Second Coming of Christ was seen as absurd. 6 Endre Toth, in The Hungarian Reformed Church by the turn of the Century, (1951) describes the thinking of two leading theological teachers, Lajos Varga and Gusztav Nagy. He suggests that they 4 D.W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 20. 5 Ibid., pp. 2-17, for the four distinctives. h Mihaly Markus, Liberalizmus es uj Ortodoxia, Tanulmanyok a Mcigyarorszdgi Reformdtus Egyhaz Tortenetebol, 1867-1978 [Liberalism and the New Orthodoxy: Essays on the History of the Reformed Church in Hungary 1867-1978] (Budapest: Studia et Acta Ecclesias