Balázs Németh (pastor)

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Balázs Németh (born July 8, 1931 in Budapest ; full name: Balázs Péter Akos Németh ; † December 29, 2018 in Vienna ) was an Austrian Evangelical Reformed pastor .

Life

Németh went to school in his eastern Hungarian hometown of Nagykörös . As a teenager he experienced the pre- fascist Horthy regime and the German occupation. After graduating from high school , he studied theology at the Reformed Theological Academy of Budapest from 1949 to 1954 and was then initially vicar at the archives of the church district on the Danube of the Reformed Church in Hungary in Budapest. In 1956, the year the Soviet Union put down the Hungarian popular uprising , he left the country and went to Austria to look after Hungarian refugees on behalf of the World Council of Churches in Geneva. 1957/1958 he studied theology at the University of Heidelberg and from 1958 to 1960 at the University of Vienna . Németh's thinking was shaped by the work of Georg Lukács and the theology of Karl Barth . He has always seen similarities between Christianity and Marxism or socialism .

In Austria he was entrusted with the pastoral position at the Zwingli Church in Vienna-West in 1964 , where he had previously completed a teaching vicariate and a vicariate from 1960. Until his retirement on July 1, 1998, he was a pastor and from 1986 a senior church councilor at the same time representative of the Evangelical Church HB in Austria . He was already a member of Synod HB from 1964 and for a long time a member of the theological and social-therapeutic committee of the General Synod A. u. HB

From 1969 Németh was editor of the Reformed Church Gazette . In 1975/76 he was involved in founding the journal Critical Christianity . Since then, his articles and sermons have been a constitutive part of "KC" - and are reprinted by magazines at home and abroad. He was a member of the board of directors of the editorial association "Aktion Kritisches Christianentum".

In 1984 Németh was one of the founding members of the ecumenical community of action "Christians for the Peace Movement " and was deputy chairman until March 2011. He was a member of the Christian Peace Conference and - from 1965 to 1985 as youth pastor HB - was involved in the (pan-European) Ecumenical Youth Council .

In 1995 he expressed his solidarity with the theologian Kurt Lüthi in an open letter to the Evangelical Reformed Moderamen in the Evangelical Church of Brandenburg with the pastors Renate Schönfeld and Dieter Frielinghaus .

In 2001 he completed his dissertation on the "Evangelical Reformed way of life between continuity and change - Hungary in the 16th century as an example", which was published in 2003 under the title ... God does not sleep, he winks at us ... in book form and also translated into Hungarian has been. In 2002 he received his doctorate at the Institute for European Ethnology at the University of Vienna .

Until his death, Balázs Németh represented the Evangelical Church in Austria in the national minority advisory council for the Hungarian minority.

Németh lived in Vienna-Strebersdorf , was married to Christiane Német (nee Nungesser) and had three sons and four grandchildren.

Fonts

  • … Isten nem aloszik, rejánk pislong… Magyarországi Református Egyház Kálvin János K., Budapest 2005.
  • God doesn't sleep, he winks at us ... Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003.
  • On community autonomy, justice and social responsibility. An open letter from the Reformed ecumenical movement to the Evangelical Reformed Moderamen in the Evg. Church in Berlin-Brandenburg to discriminate against Renate Schönfeld and Dieter Frielinghaus by Kurt Lüthi and Balázs Németh .
  • The Protestant parish HB Wien-West . In: Peter Karner (ed.): The Evangelical Community HB in Vienna . Franz Deuticke, Vienna 1986, ISBN 3-7005-4579-7 , pp. 194-198.
  • Church - capable of learning for the future? (1998). Festschrift for Johannes Dantine on the occasion of his 60th birthday , Tyrolia Verlag 1998.
  • Essays and sermons in the magazines Critical Christianity and Reformed Church Gazette .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter Karner : Reformed pastors and teachers . In: Peter Karner (ed.): The Evangelical Community HB in Vienna . Franz Deuticke, Vienna 1986, ISBN 3-7005-4579-7 , p. 151.
  2. ↑ Issue 3/1995 . Weißenseen Blätter website, accessed August 31, 2012.
  3. ↑ Publications ( Memento from July 30, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ). Website of the publications of the Evangelical Academy Vienna, accessed on August 31, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Németh, Balázs
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Németh, Balázs Péter Akos (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian evangelical reformed pastor
DATE OF BIRTH July 8, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest
DATE OF DEATH December 29, 2018
Place of death Vienna