Grace

CRITICAL: Hungary uniquely in this pipeline has two large, historically entrenched Christian traditions holding opposite theological instincts about grace within the same language community. The Hungarian Reformed Church (centered historically on Debrecen, called the ‘Calvinist Rome,’ and closely tied to national resistance against Habsburg Catholic imperial rule) holds a Calvinist doctrine of irresistible, monergistic grace (ellenállhatatlan kegyelem), while the Roman Catholic majority holds the Tridentine doctrine of grace infused and increased through merit and the sacraments. Romans’ argument for unmerited grace (4:4-5; 11:5-6) must be translated to Paul’s own argument without silently adopting either community’s fully developed systematic framework.