# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1860_S315
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Present State of the Lutheran Church in Norway. 315

the best lay talent for the church by drawing it into the ministry — this
alone, I believe, can help against the undeniable evil. It is a great
grace of God that in recent times the highly learned and purely
Lutheran Professor Johnson has gained great influence over the wide
circles of the "awakened" and enjoys their unconditional trust. This
trust now extends as well to all the young clergy coming out of the
university.

The other danger threatening the Lutheran church of Norway is
the troublesome Grundtvigianism that has come out of Denmark, which
works toward a dissolution of the old Lutheran church. This powerful
error flatters national vanity with a Scandinavian church and theology;
it lends support to a light, superficial Christianity, boasts of
scholarliness, and seeks to gain mastery of the schools, in which it has
unfortunately succeeded in part. This false doctrine is a semi-Catholic
tendency; it regards Scripture merely as a dead word; against this it
holds the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the renunciation formula
of baptism, and the words of the Holy Supper to be a living, oral word
that has come immediately from the person of the Lord himself; that
the divine image has not been wholly lost; that the Ten Commandments
and the law in general are to be banished from the catechism
altogether; no proper preaching of repentance; the possibility of
conversion after death; that the chief doctrine of Christianity is not
justification by faith alone — which has only a subordinate significance
— but baptism; that every baptized person is regenerate, whether he
be unbelieving and let sin rule over him, so long as he has not yet sinned
against the Holy Spirit; the Lord's Supper excluded from the concept
of the church; absolution regarded as a sacrament, likewise ordination;
a striving toward the dissolution of the parish bond (already achieved
in Denmark), toward freedom of doctrine for the pastors, and hence
also toward the abolition of subscription to the Lutheran confessions.
Even genuine Lutheranism counts, in the eyes of Grundtvigianism, as
Pietism, from which not even Luther himself was free. These are the
essential teachings of this perverse tendency, which has already half
swallowed up the Danish church and wishes to swallow up the
Norwegian one as well.

As may well be imagined, it has, through this very opposition, only
promoted the pietistic element among the people, and brought it about
that the "awakening" has grown distrustful of Lutheran churchliness
as well. This has come about especially through an earlier falsification
of the Pontoppidan catechism, the people's treasure. So the little ship
of the Norwegian church hovers between Scylla and Charybdis, and
needs in the highest degree the intercession of all friends of the
Lutheran church. Yet the true helmsman is, thank God, aboard it, and
has not left himself without witness. It is unmistakable that the
awakening is moving toward the Lutheran church. The university, too,
now works entirely in a Lutheran spirit, and Professors Johnson and
Caspari are engaged in translating the Book of Concord, so as to put it