# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1857_S380
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

380 The Lutheran Church in the North of Europe.

confessionally faithful consciousness of faith has turned outward as good armor and weapon, breaks off and blunts. If our church were willing, like her fathers and great witnesses, to confess aloud and to contend courageously, she would certainly have more cross, but also more victory; she would be covered with more disgrace, but light and right would fill her, so that the longer the more she would remain the salt of the earth.“ — In Sweden the official state church is confronted partly by opposition within its own borders, partly by separatism outside it. The Reader movement within the church is not a sect but a tendency, similar to our German pietism. In contrast to the mechanical routine of the official church it demands a living, practical Christianity, and in contrast to the newer rationalizing books of doctrine and ritual it goes back to Scripture and to the older Protestant devotional writings. Among the Readers within the church two tendencies are distinguished, Schartauism and Evangelicism. The former insists upon conversion as something that must precede before one may take comfort in justification; the latter emphasizes the joyful certainty of justification and contends against pietism. The antinomianism of this tendency leads to separatism and further to Baptism. Baptism is no small danger to the Swedish church, as it will doubtless become much more so for our German churches as well than it already is now. In vain does one proceed against it from above with penalties, while from below the people often stand over against it without counsel. For the size of the parishes makes pastoral care impossible. It is asserted that in all three Scandinavian lands there is a great number of people who never in their lives see a church. — The church in Norway, however, stands at present in a struggle with Grundtvigianism, which has come over to it from Denmark. The emphasis on Nordic nationality leads to a contempt for the Lutheran confession because it is German; the emphasis on the living Word of the church leads to a disparagement of Scripture as being its coffin. But the livingness of the Word and the freedom that is emphasized turn into externality and legalism. For in the end that living Word reduces itself to the Apostles' Creed, which, as given by the Lord Himself in those forty days, becomes the sum and law of faith; and the Christianity of the individual reduces itself to the daily reciting of the creed. At such a price the foundations of the existing church are imperiled. — But from Denmark our church in Schleswig is being devastated in an unheard-of manner. One may judge of the rising of the duchies and of the participation of the clergy as one will — what is now happening cries to heaven. Grundtvig himself has recently acknowledged the injustice of the proceeding. And truly, when one cares nothing that the churches stand empty, so long only as the Danish tongue be heard from their walls; that the congregations be without pastoral care and the clergy unworthy men, so long only as Danes sit in the benefices; that the children