Sins Causing Separation from God in the Thought of 16th-Century Hungarian Protestant Theologians

Abstract

Most of the Hungarian Protestant theologians of the 16th-century Reformation concluded, after a shorter or longer sojourn in Wittenberg and careful study of the Old Testament Scriptures, that God punished the Hungarian people for their “gross sins” just like He had punished the Jewish people thousands of years earlier. It is well known, based on historical sources dating back to the Mongol invasion of Hungary, that the conception of analogical reasoning was not a new one. The aim of the present study is to examine, on the basis of several authentic contemporaneous texts, the influence earlier views on sins had on the thought of the aforementioned theologians.