Baptistic Theologies, 2009

tica, 1983), p. 157. 56 Baptistic Theologies considered the church to be a human association based on religious values, saw Christ as one among the prophets, and believed the resurrection was a dream of the disciples. 7 Endre Toth speaks about 62,000 Reformed Church members in Budapest in 1900, but about all the churches being empty. This may exaggerate the position, but clearly there was a serious crisis. In terms of spirituality, those who wanted to live a truly Christian life, to read the Bible, to sing Christian hymns and to pray or support Christian activities o were mocked as pietistic. This situation helps to explain the attraction of Baptist life, with its commitment to personal spiritual experience. The situation was not identical in the Lutheran and Calvinist churches and the Catholic Church had its own tradition of spirituality. Kornel Gyori remarked: At the end of the last century [the nineteenth century], the Catholic Church... was able to tie to herself people who were longing for God. The Lutheran Church, although it had less decoration, still provided something for the eyes. But when from the white, Puritan looking, undecorated churches, the Calvinists with their new fashionable theological trend expelled the living Word of God from the church, because of lack of alternatives, the Protestant church lost her attraction.. . 9 It is significant that it was from the Reformed or Calvinist churches that new Baptist communities emerged. 10 The new theological orthodoxy Within the Hungarian Reformed Church a new trend in spirituality appeared by the turn of the twentieth century as a reaction to theological liberalism. Markus Mihaly argues that ‘when Reformed preachers went so far as to deny the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a reaction set in, and out of this reaction a new orthodoxy began to make its presence felt in the life of the Hungarian Reformed Church’. 11 Two important representatives of this new evangelical theology were Imre Revesz and Ferenc Balogh. Imre Revesz was the first in this group to read the sermons of John Calvin. It was Revesz who translated these sermons and published them in Hungarian. There was a close friendship between him and John Duncan, 7 Endre Toth, A Magyarorszdgi reformatus egyhaz a szazadfordulo idejen [The Hungarian Reformed Church at the Turn of the Century] (Budapest: Reformatus Egyhaz, 1951), p. 42. 8 Ibid., p. 42. 9 Kornel Gyori: A Baptista Parasztprofetdkrol [About the Baptist Peasant Prophets], in Theologiai Szemle [Theological Review] 1967, pp. 154-155. 10 For Reformed beginnings in Hungary see Philip Benedict, Christ's Churches Purely Reformed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 271-280. 11 Markus, Liberalizmus es uj Ortodoxia, p. 158. Revival among Hungarian Baptists in Transylvania 57 the leader of the Scottish Free Church mission in Budapest. The presence of the Scottish mission was important for Baptists