Church and Religion

Most laymen equate religion with the teachings, received views - in short, dogmas and liturgies - of the church in which they grew up. Even if someone drops out of that church, or of religious life entirely, the (often unformulated) "definition" he or she holds of religion in general is based on whatever the individual is accustomed to.

Even theologians often maintain that church and religion go together, that you cannot have one without the other. Your private beliefs do not a religion make - they maintain -, religion is a belief system of a community.

That system may be complex, as in the case of Catholicism, or relatively simple, as in evangelical Protestantism. Catholics are supposed to accept all commandments, traditions, teachings and practices of their Church, which they maintain is the one and only true one; most Protestants tend to be more liberal, in that they recognize any church as Christian as long as it preaches "the living Christ", and any individual who "accepts" (whatever that may mean in actual fact) Jesus Christ as Personal Savior. Beyond that, most Protestants neither know, nor care about the detailed questions of their faith, and what differrentiates the teachings of one church from those of another.

Yet the teachings are there. Do we have free will or not? Are we all born sinners? Can all humans be saved, or only the "elect"? These were burning questions once (in the sense that you could be burned at the stake if your answer displeased God, that is, the religious authorities). Today, people seldom pay them any heed, and often think some of them ridiculous, or only of historic interest.

And the teachings do evolve. The Catholic Church is perhaps the most honest about this, in that it looks not only to the Bible as authoritative, but also to tradition, i.e., the decisions of church councils and Papal edicts through the centuries. Protestant groups berate the Catholics for this, but in practice they, too, rely on interpretations, and interpretations of interpretations, by synods, councils, individual theologians. Luther and Calvin founded schools of theology - but in more modern times so have Schleiermacher, Bultman and Barth, to mention but a few. Sometimes such teachings become fashionable, sometimes forgotten in time.

How about Unitarians, UU or HU, who claim to have no dogmas? They, too, rely on various declarations, agreements, assembly minutes, the opinion of their theology teachers and other respected thinkers. In Hungarian Unitarianism, such thinkers have tended, not surprisingly, to be Transylvanians.

It is not without reason that the great composer, Béla Bartók, himself a Unitarian, has stated that the Unitarian was the only church founded on Hungarian soil. Through centuries of persecution, it has survived to this day, loyal to its own strong principles and traditions, on which it can continue to build the future.