7. Hungary

The Reformation was brought to Hungary probably around 1520, above all by students who had studied at Western universities. From 1526 on Hungary was under Turkish rule. Subsequently the country was divided into three parts. The West became part of the Habsburg dominion; the middle part became Turkish, and Transylvania remained at first independent and then became a Turkish protectorate. This foreign rule, which was incomprehensible to the greater part of the Hungarian population, was taken up as an argument by the Reformers in Hungary insofar as they saw it as a consequence of the perverted state of the Church. They thus called for conversion. Their sermons were successful. After Lutheran beginnings, the Reformed orientation gained great influence from the 1640s on. Mihály Sztárai (+ 1578) and István Szegedi Kis (1506-1572), who were influential preachers, are to be mentioned in this connection. In 1567 the first synod assembled in Debrecen and adopted the “Second Helvetian Confession” (Confessio Helvetica Posterior, see lesson 6). However, a uniform church was not established because it existed in various different territories.

Great Church of Debrecen

In the 17th Century as a reaction against the stale orthodoxy in Hungary, there arose a puritan pietistic movement, which is still important today. This emphasised above all else the “praxis pietatis” of everyday life. In the Habsburg territories the Counter-Reformation raged from 1671 on. More than 40 pastors and teachers who were not willing to convert were sentenced to the galley. At the end of the 17th Century Habsburg conquered the Turkish middle part of Hungary and exerted Counter-Reformational pressure on the Protestants. From 1711 to 1718 the situation improved insofar as the Counter-Reformation ceased from being bloody. Up to the end of the 18th Century, however, the Counter-Reformation caused severe decimation in the Reformed Church of Hungary, to which the majority of the population belonged. As a result of the “Patent of Toleration” of 1781 of the Habsburg emperor Josef II, the Reformed Church gained outward freedom. First, organisational superstructures for the whole of Hungary were planned and many new churches were built. In 1881 at the General Assembly of Debrecen the Reformed Church was officially established. However, this outward strengthening and independence went together with an inner emptying which took place in connection with liberalism. Only after the First World War did a phase of new orientation begin. The church leadership itself tried to strengthen its influence on the state by approximating to nationalistic positions. Thus it was scarcely able to criticise the pro-fascist policy of the Hungarian government during the Second World War. In the time after 1945 there were also occasional problematic relations to what was by this time the socialist state.
Roughly 2 million members of the Reformed Church live today according to a synodal-presbyterial principle in four church districts in Hungary. The Reformed Church has two faculties in Budapest and Debrecen.