Abstract » Bryćko
Cracow 2009
Educational Reform, Philosophy, and Irenicism
Dariusz BRYCKO
The Irenic Theology of Daniel Kałaj
Daniel Kałaj (d.1681) was a Polish Reformer of Hungarian background, born in Little Poland (Małopolska) and trained in Franeker, Friesland, under some of the most brilliant Reformed theologians of seventeenth-century Europe, such as Cocceius and Cloppenburgh. Kałaj’s ministry in the Reformed Church of Little Poland was abruptly interrupted when he was wrongly accused by Catholic authorities of spreading then outlawed Arianism and being called a ‘Calvinoarian’. Kałaj became the first Polish Protestant minister to receive a sentence of capital punishment as a result of the new anti-toleration law issued in 1658 against Arians, under the false pretext of military treason during the Second Northern War (1655-1660). He escaped the axe by fleeing to Lithuania (and later to Gdańsk), where he wrote his best-known work, A Friendly Dialogue Between an Evangelical Minister and a Roman Catholic Priest.
The Friendly Dialogue is both Kałaj’s own personal defense and a compendium to Polish Reformed doctrine, which has a strongly irenic disposition. In contrast with many Reformed thinkers of his day, Kałaj is capable of communicating Reformed doctrine in a friendly and peaceful manner. He places special emphasis on the unity of the Universal Church, as expressed in his statement that ‘Catholics, Reformed and Lutherans are all part of one church’, while at the same time retaining his Reformed orthodoxy. In this presentation, I would like to go beyond the existing literature on Kałaj and seventeenth-century Reformed Polish theology, analyzing selected aspects of Kałaj’s irenic soteriology, while setting them back against the intellectual trajectory of Reformation and post-Reformation thought.
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