The Nordic Churches and the Ecumenical Movement

Related to this is a rejection of how the Porvoo document uses the expression "visible Unity". Thus one parish council writes that "the people is the church, and with that the church is visible; therefore, we do not need any Porvoo statement". Here the people of God, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark and the national Danish people merge effortlessly into a single identity. The starting point for the critique of Porvoo's use of "visible unity" is that it does not take seriously the existing identity in the parish between people and church or, put in another way, the identity between the national people and the Christian people of God, which is seen as the characteristic sign of the identity of the national church. "We care for our broad and comprehensive national church, which is something unique and well adjusted to our Danish tradition and understanding of Christianity. We are happy as we are."

But none of the responses reflects on what it means for the theological self-understanding of the national church -- or for its idea of the parish as the principal administrative and theological unit -- that the identity between people and church is in fact disintegrating. Not only are there parishes in which fewer than half the residents are members of the national church, but an ever-smaller part of the Danish population are members in the legal sense. Yet it is still generally believed in the parish councils of the diocese of Aarhus that the parish church forms the visible unity of the church. This narrow, geocentric determination of the church collides with the ecumenical understanding of the unity of the church, which emphasizes both the unity in the local worshipping parish and the communion in faith, preaching and sacraments among Christians and their churches across confessional and national borders.

Here we cannot go into detail about the origins of the particular Danish theology of the parish, but it should be noted that all church groups share this positive theological assessment of the parish. What belongs to the unity of the church and, more broadly, the official views of the national church are decided from the theology in the parish. Against this background the opponents of Porvoo see it as a sneaking catholicization of the national church and thus rooted in a theology other than that of the Reformation. It may be noted that in so doing these tend to consider the Porvoo common statement as a new confession rather than as a collaboration agreement.

There are differing opinions among the opponents on whether the church in an evangelical Lutheran sense is to be described as invisible, visible or something inbetween. A few parish councils assert, without further argument, that the church is invisible; others are more nuanced, claiming that

   the visible church becomes, in Porvoo, an institution whose Christian
   character is secured by the bishops' teaching authority. To talk like this
   about the visible unity of the church is deeply problematic for evangelical
   Lutheran opinion. Of course the church is is not invisible, but the true
   church is hidden, and it is fortunately not possible for any person -- lay,
   pastor or bishop -- to point it out or to delineate it.