" I have a burning kiss from God

... to preach truth..."

--Dávid Ferenc [Francis David,

Gellérd Imre was born in 1920 after Transylvania was ceded to Romania in an attempt to breakup the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Fatherless before five, he was sent to the village of his mother's relatives where he was a shepherd. But this “exceptional talent” (as he was always known throughout his lifetime) was soon discovered. He progressed and eventually would begin a university education in Kolozsvár, the old Hungarian city and capital of Transylvania. Besides the Unitarian Seminary he studied in four more faculties, unusual at that times, and passing exams in each.

He graduated during the Second World War and was sent to Székely-Kerestúr, the second great center of Unitarian culture and learning. All other ministers and the faculty of the Unitarian college had fled. He did everything there: director and sole lecturer in the college, minister to the district. He did brilliantly and was recognized as one of the greatest talents among Unitarians for decades.

When the Romanian Communist Party won the elections in 1948, he was faced with life-defining choices. He had joined the party as a Christian socialist, an idealist and theoretician. The college was nationalized and he was invited to be the representative of the Hungarian minority in Bucharest. He chose instead to be the pastor a Unitarian village church. He was immediately expelled from the party. In Simenfalva Gellérd focused entirely on preaching and pastoring, believing that the divine kingdom could be created in a village by its people becoming fully human--by becoming like Jesus in their actions.

He continued to write and prepared himself to become the professor of practical theology at the Unitarian Seminary in Kolozsvár. But the future would not be kind to him. The same idealism that would not allow him to compromise in day-to-day life became an obstacle for his acceptance in a church that needed to make many compromises with a totalitarian government. So he would get caught in the net of "conceptual trials" of the early 1970s and spend five years in one of the harshest prison systems in the world, and losing his civil rights for an additional five years. He was assigned to a "punishment church" far away from church leadership--because he was an “ex-criminal.” Even from this grave his writings made him a threat to some within his church who were using the system; one especially used his connections with the secret police to prevent Rev. Gellérd's dissertation from getting him the vacant chair in practical theology. Even the doctorate was prevented from being awarded although this dissertation was proclaimed “one of our greatest works in this century,” considering the kind of restrictions and research facilities were available at the time.

Finally, cut off from influencing a revitalization in his church, he did what many Transylvanian idealist poets and writers have done in times of conflict and compromise. Following a new threat of prison, he ended his life on his sixtieth birthday. No church officials attented the funeral, yet seventy Unitarian ministers braved the bitter January cold of 1980 to stand with him in death.

But his writing were painstakingly gathered up by his daughter, Gellérd Judit, a medical doctor who had immigrated to Hungary. Over a period of ten years she collected copies of his writings: his sermons, poems, songs, novels, thesis and dissertation. Some things were confiscated at the Hungarian-Romanian border. Finally, in California she got the chance to translate her father's work for the world.

Gellérd Imre had conceived of a new discipline within practical theology, that of the history of the literature of sermons. He became the first (and possibly the last) person to read through thousands of handwritten manuscripts from the founding of Transylvanian Unitarianism in the sixteenth century through the present. This study combines the master’d thesis (which covered the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries) and the dissertation (which encompassed the nineteenth).

Gellérd believed that the minister is centrally involved in both of the essential functions of the community of Jesus: education as preaching and living by the principles of axiological Christianity. Gellérd sought a community which intends to serve truth and justice. He added a new discipline to this concern for applied ethics in the pulpit: the study of the literature of sermons. His theories and practice made him one of the great orators of his church, yet he preached only once in Kolozsvár after his student days--at the funeral of his professor in practical theology.

Rev. Gellérd lived at a time when he would not be rewarded for his merit, achieving excellence in both scholarship and ministry, or his service to his church, seeking its renewal according to the principles of Dávid Ferenc. He lived in a time when petty ambitions of a few unworthy ministers of every denomination would be cultivated for the express purpose of demoralizing their churches. This was articulated best by Rev. Tökés László, the hero of Temesvár, (The Christian Century, May 2, 1990) stating that "opportunistic church authorities, collaborating bishops and preachers of ecumenism in Romania 'succeeded in misleading their sister churches and the public opinion of the ecumenical movement abroad in exactly the same fashion as the Ceausescu regime deceived the international diplomatic community.'" But Tökés would survive the era of totalitarianism and its systematic demoralization of the churches and become a major force for renewal--one of the new bishops of the Reformed (Presbyterian) Church in Transylvania, Romania.

But the injustices heaped upon Rev. Gellérd in life are being reversed after the fall of Ceausescu’s totalitarianism. On October 30, 1995 Gellérd Imre will be awarded post-humorously an earned doctorate from the United Protestant Seminary at Kolozsvár--for the work on this study.

This study must be contextualized. At times it may not seem Unitarian by current standards. Its “God language” may seem of another century--more like the eighteenth. Rev. Gellérd may seem narrow or even sectarian--while Unitarians are known worldwide for their ideals of inclusivity and tolerance. But despite being isolated in time and without international contacts his insights approach what Prof. Sidney Mead called those “high generalities” of the greatest thinkers.

Writing today Rev. Gellérd would not need to use "the language of flowers," a coded language to survive in times of persecution, writing such phrases as "The prudence of the serpent has been a life-condition for us." He wrote specifically for his church in a context of totalitarianism--which means that the state intended to control everything, especially religion. Yet what he writes allows us to view a church under the full weight of totalitarianism with greater understanding.

Rev. Gellérd reminded his church that Unitarians had always believed persecution and tribulation-to be meaningful (from God, because of opposition from evil doers, to become human through suffering). They most often identified with Jesus' suffering. Gellérd concluded:

It must be considered positive that our preachers have escaped from the spirit of resignation, desperation, losing heart, passivity, alienation, exaltation, ill fantasy, sectarianism and anti-humanism as a consequence of suffering. We can always wonder--in spite of so much suffering, misery and disappointment which constituted more than a sufficient psychological condition for all of the ministers of this period to become disappointed with humanity and to cause the appearance of a pessimistic religious viewpoint--why our religion was able to produce one of the most optimistic, constructive and humanistic religious systems. ...Through suffering special powers and qualities are born in us: unity, solidarity, strong faith, adequate self-knowledge, a sense of historical orientation.

Perhaps this monograph will be remembered as one Unitarian minister's view of ministry as humble service. He suggested that his service had to be worked out in the pulpit. "If every minister resembled Jesus just a little, there would be happiness on earth," he quoted from another minister, Geyza.

It is to this implicit theme to which Gellérd returns repeatedly: despite the epoch with its own mix of opportunity and suffering, the minister preaches and lives a gospel of becoming human. The standard is Jesus; one can and must become Jesus. Slowly over four centuries, Transylvanian Unitarians come to mean this rationally in mind, actionally in deeds, emotionally in heart and conviction, and at last mystically [although they would resist any form of mysticism] in intuition and will. Perhaps this last stage is only implicit as "mysticism" remains like a Jungian fourth function--dim, slightly feared, and less known. But this situation may well be remedied with new world contact in the nineteen nineties.

Prof. George M. Williams

California State University, Chico