Post by hibernicus on Oct 16, 2009 12:14:21 GMT
Since Lutheranism has come up on this thread, this post from TOUCHSTONE's MERE COMMENTS blog on the reasons for the "Low Church" characteristics of Norwegian Lutheranism and the ways in which even Norwegian secularism retains quasi-religious overtones may be of interest.
Pietism was a wider movement within eighteenth-century Protestantism (especially in the German and Scandinavian countries) which tended to downplay intellectual/scholastic elements and church organisation in favour of personal religious experience and inward faith. It has been seen by some commentators (e.g. Fr. JT Burtchaell's book on the secularisation of Christian universities, THE DYING OF THE LIGHT) as the ultimate ancestor of modernism; certainly there was a significant pietist influence on the German Enlightenment and German Romanticism.
This does not mean pietists were necessarily modernists in the full sense of the word - by the sound of it Hauge somewhat resembled John Wesley (whose populism included an Arminian reaction against Calvinism).
BTW I saw a book review recently by Eamon Duffy which argued that St. Alphonsus Liguori (with his concern for popular evangelisation and advocacy of a milder penitential standard than was then the case) represented a trend in eighteenth-century Catholicism in some ways resembling what Wesley was to Anglicanism (except of coursde that Wesley wound up forming his own denomination while St. Alphonsus founded a religious order). Any thoughts on this?
merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2009/10/looking-for-the-kingdom-in-oslo.html#comments
Looking for the Kingdom in Oslo
I think it falls to me to say something analytical and profound about the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama the other day. I don’t consider myself a Norway expert, but I’m of Norwegian extraction, speak the language, and have made some study of the country’s history. I also try to keep vaguely up to date on current events.
The Nobel Peace Prize award was delegated to Norway by the Swede Alfred Nobel, because Norway was (grudgingly) united with Sweden at the time. He wanted to make the award itself an olive branch from the very outset. The gesture failed to preserve the union, which seems to have been a harbinger.
What explains this “award for nothing,” an award for “not being George Bush?” I think the ultimate reason is a religious one—in a sense.
Norway is the most religious of the Scandinavian countries today, though far from an observant nation. It has a higher level of church participation than Sweden or Denmark, but—and this is the point—even its politics seem to have a sort of religious base.
In Norwegian history, it’s impossible (which doesn’t mean it hasn’t been tried) to separate the rise of democracy from Christian faith, more particularly evangelical, pietistic Lutheranism. The democratic movement in Norway came at the same time as a phenomenon known as the Haugean Awakening, a religious revival led by a lay preacher named Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771-1824). Hauge was more than a revivalist. He was an entrepreneur, a popularizer, and a rough-and-ready engineer. He saw it as part of his Christian calling to help farmers improve their agricultural methods, and to establish industries that would provide decent jobs for those who had no opportunities on farms.
Although his own activities were effectively squelched by arrest and long imprisonment for holding illegal meetings, government officials found Hauge’s ideas impossible to suppress. A generation of peasants who’d learned to read books and invest their money became a social force that would not be denied a place in government.
Norway’s first liberal party, called the Venstre (Left), began as a party of Haugean farmers. Their politics were animated, not only by a desire to reallocate political power to the lower classes, but to do good and promote a Christian society.
Eventually the Venstre was taken over by the “Rene” (Pure) Venstre, inspired by Continental atheist and socialist impulses. The old Haugean farmers were driven out. But (I believe) the religious impulse never really went away. The Norwegian Left sees the Kingdom of God in the offing, awaiting only the success of True Believers in preparing the way of the Lord.
The Nobel Peace Prize Award, I think, was an act of faith.
Posted by Lars Walker at 07:29 PM | Permalink
This is a very interesting post. The pietistic revival did have a profound impact on Norway, and upon its State Lutheran Church. Before the revival, of all Lutheran lands, Norway was the one (except possibly for Iceland) where the greatest number of what might be termed "Catholic practices" or "popular piety" survived after the Reformation both among the common people (pilgrimages to holy wells, the keeping of saints festivals, prayer for the dead) and in the official Church Order (elevation of the host and chalice at the consecration, discarded everywhere else in the Lutheran world, save Schleswig-Holstein, by 1650, was mandated in Norway in 1685 and survived in some areas till 1814; use of full Catholic vestments at the Eucharist and the like).
After the revival, all of this was largely swept away. In fact, Norway became, and remains, the one Scandinavian Lutheran church in which provision for "lay celebration" of the Eucharist (by a candidate for ordination, or even a "mere" layman [or laywoman]) in the absence of a pastor is formally allowed, and it remains a distinctive feature of Norwegian Lutheran identity. (Of course, the Norwegian State Church has an episcopal structure, but in Norway, as in all other Scandinavian Lutheran churches, bishops can -- or could; Sweden abolished this practice in 1786 and Finland in 2002 -- delegate the performance of ordinations to other pastors, deans, theology professors and the like.)
In Sweden, the "high-church" movement attracted a great deal of support from the 1920s onwards, under Anglican influence, although much of this took the form of a sort of liberal romantic nationalistic "medievalism," while in Norway the "high-church" element was much smaller, but also much more compact. In Sweden, many of them struggle on in the former State Church in the face of its ongoing apostasy (now leading to the imminent acceptance of "same-sex marriage") while in Norway many of its leading figures, both clerical and lay, have since ca. 1998 either become Roman Catholic or else founded the small but dynamic "Nordic Catholic Church" which has left Lutheranism altogether. Unfortunately, in Norway the practice of the ordination of women, introduced only in 1961 although allowed by a law enacted in 1938, has won much greater acceptance in conservative Lutheran circles than it has in Sweden, although in Norway until the 1990s a much smaller number of women were ordained than in Sweden, and the Norwegian government was much fairer to opponents of WO than was the case in Sweden (this largely ceased with the appointment of the first woman bishop in Norway in 1993). Put differently, in Sweden it was the struggle over WO both before and after it was accepted in 1958 that seemed to determine the ruling elite to transform the State Church into a liberal bureaucratic autocracy, while in Norway it was, first, the phenomenon of widespread clerical and lay opposition to the 1977 liberal abortion law, and then, in the 1990s, the push for acceptance of homosexual "life partnerships," that brought about the same effect in Norway.
Posted by: William Tighe | Oct 13, 2009 8:50:25 AM
Pietism was a wider movement within eighteenth-century Protestantism (especially in the German and Scandinavian countries) which tended to downplay intellectual/scholastic elements and church organisation in favour of personal religious experience and inward faith. It has been seen by some commentators (e.g. Fr. JT Burtchaell's book on the secularisation of Christian universities, THE DYING OF THE LIGHT) as the ultimate ancestor of modernism; certainly there was a significant pietist influence on the German Enlightenment and German Romanticism.
This does not mean pietists were necessarily modernists in the full sense of the word - by the sound of it Hauge somewhat resembled John Wesley (whose populism included an Arminian reaction against Calvinism).
BTW I saw a book review recently by Eamon Duffy which argued that St. Alphonsus Liguori (with his concern for popular evangelisation and advocacy of a milder penitential standard than was then the case) represented a trend in eighteenth-century Catholicism in some ways resembling what Wesley was to Anglicanism (except of coursde that Wesley wound up forming his own denomination while St. Alphonsus founded a religious order). Any thoughts on this?
merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2009/10/looking-for-the-kingdom-in-oslo.html#comments
Looking for the Kingdom in Oslo
I think it falls to me to say something analytical and profound about the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama the other day. I don’t consider myself a Norway expert, but I’m of Norwegian extraction, speak the language, and have made some study of the country’s history. I also try to keep vaguely up to date on current events.
The Nobel Peace Prize award was delegated to Norway by the Swede Alfred Nobel, because Norway was (grudgingly) united with Sweden at the time. He wanted to make the award itself an olive branch from the very outset. The gesture failed to preserve the union, which seems to have been a harbinger.
What explains this “award for nothing,” an award for “not being George Bush?” I think the ultimate reason is a religious one—in a sense.
Norway is the most religious of the Scandinavian countries today, though far from an observant nation. It has a higher level of church participation than Sweden or Denmark, but—and this is the point—even its politics seem to have a sort of religious base.
In Norwegian history, it’s impossible (which doesn’t mean it hasn’t been tried) to separate the rise of democracy from Christian faith, more particularly evangelical, pietistic Lutheranism. The democratic movement in Norway came at the same time as a phenomenon known as the Haugean Awakening, a religious revival led by a lay preacher named Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771-1824). Hauge was more than a revivalist. He was an entrepreneur, a popularizer, and a rough-and-ready engineer. He saw it as part of his Christian calling to help farmers improve their agricultural methods, and to establish industries that would provide decent jobs for those who had no opportunities on farms.
Although his own activities were effectively squelched by arrest and long imprisonment for holding illegal meetings, government officials found Hauge’s ideas impossible to suppress. A generation of peasants who’d learned to read books and invest their money became a social force that would not be denied a place in government.
Norway’s first liberal party, called the Venstre (Left), began as a party of Haugean farmers. Their politics were animated, not only by a desire to reallocate political power to the lower classes, but to do good and promote a Christian society.
Eventually the Venstre was taken over by the “Rene” (Pure) Venstre, inspired by Continental atheist and socialist impulses. The old Haugean farmers were driven out. But (I believe) the religious impulse never really went away. The Norwegian Left sees the Kingdom of God in the offing, awaiting only the success of True Believers in preparing the way of the Lord.
The Nobel Peace Prize Award, I think, was an act of faith.
Posted by Lars Walker at 07:29 PM | Permalink
This is a very interesting post. The pietistic revival did have a profound impact on Norway, and upon its State Lutheran Church. Before the revival, of all Lutheran lands, Norway was the one (except possibly for Iceland) where the greatest number of what might be termed "Catholic practices" or "popular piety" survived after the Reformation both among the common people (pilgrimages to holy wells, the keeping of saints festivals, prayer for the dead) and in the official Church Order (elevation of the host and chalice at the consecration, discarded everywhere else in the Lutheran world, save Schleswig-Holstein, by 1650, was mandated in Norway in 1685 and survived in some areas till 1814; use of full Catholic vestments at the Eucharist and the like).
After the revival, all of this was largely swept away. In fact, Norway became, and remains, the one Scandinavian Lutheran church in which provision for "lay celebration" of the Eucharist (by a candidate for ordination, or even a "mere" layman [or laywoman]) in the absence of a pastor is formally allowed, and it remains a distinctive feature of Norwegian Lutheran identity. (Of course, the Norwegian State Church has an episcopal structure, but in Norway, as in all other Scandinavian Lutheran churches, bishops can -- or could; Sweden abolished this practice in 1786 and Finland in 2002 -- delegate the performance of ordinations to other pastors, deans, theology professors and the like.)
In Sweden, the "high-church" movement attracted a great deal of support from the 1920s onwards, under Anglican influence, although much of this took the form of a sort of liberal romantic nationalistic "medievalism," while in Norway the "high-church" element was much smaller, but also much more compact. In Sweden, many of them struggle on in the former State Church in the face of its ongoing apostasy (now leading to the imminent acceptance of "same-sex marriage") while in Norway many of its leading figures, both clerical and lay, have since ca. 1998 either become Roman Catholic or else founded the small but dynamic "Nordic Catholic Church" which has left Lutheranism altogether. Unfortunately, in Norway the practice of the ordination of women, introduced only in 1961 although allowed by a law enacted in 1938, has won much greater acceptance in conservative Lutheran circles than it has in Sweden, although in Norway until the 1990s a much smaller number of women were ordained than in Sweden, and the Norwegian government was much fairer to opponents of WO than was the case in Sweden (this largely ceased with the appointment of the first woman bishop in Norway in 1993). Put differently, in Sweden it was the struggle over WO both before and after it was accepted in 1958 that seemed to determine the ruling elite to transform the State Church into a liberal bureaucratic autocracy, while in Norway it was, first, the phenomenon of widespread clerical and lay opposition to the 1977 liberal abortion law, and then, in the 1990s, the push for acceptance of homosexual "life partnerships," that brought about the same effect in Norway.
Posted by: William Tighe | Oct 13, 2009 8:50:25 AM