# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1864_S142
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

142

Grundtvig.

Last year the following work appeared: The Nature and Significance of Grundtvigianism in the Danish Church. By Christian Hansen. Published after his death by Prof. Dr. K. Wieseler. Kiel, 1863. From this work the Hengstenbergian Evangelical Church Gazette of Dec. 2 and 5 of last year gives some excerpts, from which we communicate the following for our readers:

Unmistakably, Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, through his volcanic spirit, has affected the movements within the Danish church — in comparison with his contemporary Tegnér — in the opposite direction, and one may indeed say that, without him, these movements would not have taken on the stormy character that distinguishes them. In general it must be said that all the demands which the most extreme ecclesiastical rationalism among us sets up as its final goals appear there already to have been carried through, or well on the way to being so. Unlimited religious freedom for the laity as well as for the clergy — for the latter especially a complete lack of restraint by confession and liturgy — and, corresponding to this, also the right of the laity to choose their pastor freely; and in addition, the settling of ecclesiastical affairs by a body of popular representation that is, in principle and to a great extent probably also in fact, without religion — these are principles from whose being carried through we are accustomed to expect the certain downfall of the church. In the Danish church, not much is now lacking for their complete realization. In 1855 the parish bond was legally dissolved; every member of a congregation is given the freedom, should he wish it, to attach himself in church matters to someone other than the parish minister, and equally without restriction to return to him again; he need only give notice each time to the provost, let the necessary information reach the parish-register keeper, and pay the dues resting on his property to the proper office. And by an ordinance of the Ministry of Worship of October 2, 1862, the final consequence of this law has at last been drawn as well, in that every minister is now permitted to baptize in other men's churches, to perform weddings, to administer the Lord's Supper, and to hold funeral orations in other men's churchyards!

And the man who exercised a predominant influence in these innovations, who — if he did not bring them about outright — nevertheless, through the power of his spirit and by means of the party attached to him, helped chiefly to carry them through, and who in doing so has almost identified himself with the radical spokesmen of unbelief — is he himself, then, some indifferentist, faithless child of the modern worldview? Nothing of the sort! It was Grundtvig.

Grundtvig is an enemy of the Germans; he has done them much harm, and in Schleswig especially he has grievously wronged the German language and nationality. This must not lead us into an unjust judgment of him. The unbelieving academic wisdom of Germany, to which he attributes the ruin of the church of his—