The Lutheran Church in Romania in the aftermath of communism

Abstract

In 1921 Bishop Friedrich Teutsch entitled the first volume of his history of the Lutheran Church in Transylvania The History of the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Transylvania from 1150 to 1700. Teutsch had no doubt that the church he led after the First World War was identical with the communities of Catholic believers who migrated to Transylvania during the middle of the twelfth century. The immigrants then came as 'hospites' 'invited ones'. They were invited by the Hungarian king, who guaranteed them certain special rights called 'freedoms' or 'privileges', although the meaning of the word was at that time quite different from the meaning it assumed in the eighteenth century. Medieval Hungary was formed out of many different ethnic groups. Each group had its own special arrangement with the king, such as that made by the Croatians when their country was incorporated into Hungary, and those for the invited western immigrants from Flanders and the Rhine. They agreed to settle in Transylvania under strict conditions. These were the so-called privileges, among which we find conditions concerning church life. The settlers won the right to elect their priests, thus taking this right from the bishop; the right to use their tithe in their parish, instead of paying it to the bishop; and finally the right to resolve many problems of church law within the local congregation. These three privileges clearly constituted remarkable exceptions to general canon law, which was itself developing just at that time. Our late Bishop Muller, himself a remarkable historian, presumed that the hospites belonged to a revival movement in their home territory that is, modern-day Belgium and its surroundings where Bernard of Clairvaux had preached the Second Crusade in the 1140s. Bishop Muller believed that it was this revivalist experience which prompted the settlers to demand rights of self-government not only for their political but also for their religious communities. Maintaining self-government was the cornerstone policy of the settlers, who