Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Hungarian Unitarian Catechism

Unitarianism has been in the Transylvanian part of Hungary for hundreds of years. To see the significant difference between what they believe and what American Unitarian Universalists "believe", check out the English translation of the Hungarian Unitarian Catechism.

Just one example is the second question:

How do we know that God exists?

Whether we look to the universe and its order, or to ourselves and our talents, we obtain the conviction that there exists one God, who created, maintains and manages everything.

Pretty darned different.

After writing the above, I read the initial comment below, and added the following:

"Pretty darned different" was perhaps too cryptic.

  1. The catechism expresses beliefs which do not exist in my congregation as a whole.
  2. A catechism, as I remember the meaning, and as defined by Wikipedia, is "is a summary of Christian religious doctrine. Catechisms are doctrinal manuals often in the form of questions followed by answers to be memorized, a format that has been adopted for secular or non-religious use as well". The UUA does not have a doctrine. Although the Hungarian Unitarian site says
    It has been said that we Unitarians have no Doctrine, only Principles of faith. The difference between these two words is that Unitarians possess no articles of faith enunciated by church meetings which are compulsory and unchangeable.
    It also repeatedly refers to Jesus ...
    The basis of the Unitarianism is the Gospel according to Jesus. The rules of Unitarianism are rooted in the teachings of Jesus. The seed of continuity in Unitarianism is the seed which represents ideas accepted in the Gospel, the inferences of humanism and social liberalism are significant only as they relate to this seed.
    The catechism refers to lots of things that look like a creed, not the least of which is "we obtain the conviction that there exists one God, who created, maintains and manages everything." as I quoted in the beginning.
I don't believe that the majority of members of churches belonging to the UUA believe what I perceive to be the creedal (from the word "credo" - "I believe") part of the Hungarian Unitarian Catechism. The basis of Unitarianism when it first began was the teachings of Jesus, but it isn't now.

Let me finish by saying that I posted this primarily so that non-Christian UUs could see a big difference between them and the Hungarian church. It was not meant to try to teach the Christian UUs among us on the net anything - I have learned, and will continue to learn, more from them than they will ever learn from me.

posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 9:35 AM

1 Comments:

At 2:01 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Transylvanian Unitarians are now pretty much old-time American Unitarian Deists of the last century, and there are not an insignifcant number of us left (Bill Sinkford being perhaps the most prominent.) Notice also that they specifically reference Buddha, Confucious, etc., as modern UUs do (though not specifically as prophets of "God.")

The problem with making a point that Transylvanian Unitarians are SOOOO different than contemporary UUs is that there is no single UU baseline/catechism with which to compare, which is the point of contempory UUism - we are all on our own spiritual paths. And thus it makes the comparison rather meaningless. And, since at least a few of us are on similar paths as those of our Transylvanian brothers and sisters, it also makes the comparison not accurate.

 

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