Content provided in partnership with

The Nordic Churches and the Ecumenical Movement

Ecumenical Review, The, April, 2000 by Peter Lodberg

<< Page 1 Continued from page 17. Previous | Next

Similar paraphrases of Porvoo, without reference to its own terms, feature in other responses, which create a straw figure only to shoot it down -- for example:

   We believe that our present office of pastors and bishops is as evangelical
   as a church institution can be. We are thus concerned about the authority
   given to the bishops in the document. It is un-Danish, it is un-Lutheran.
   It is popish. It is making an office divine. This is basically what we have
   to say about it!

In short, such responses seek to apply Luther's confrontation with the church of the middle ages to the Anglican Church of today. The basic point of view is that Catholics (and Anglicans) are guilty of "too much church". What the response forgets, due to its polemic form, is that there is much more than this to be said about Lutheran ecclesiology. The Danish version of a Lutheran understanding of the church expressed in most of the responses to Porvoo ends up either in a Platonic separation between visible and invisible church or in a one-sided anti-Catholicism that verges on the fanatical. The opponents who accentuate the visible-invisible dichotomy impose a theological framework on the Porvoo document which the text itself does not use and which has furthermore been abandoned in modern debate on ecclesiology. It would carry us too far afield here to describe how this visible-invisible framework has come to monopolize ecclesiological debate in Denmark and isolate us from the ecclesiological discussion in the surrounding European churches, but it is evident that the national church has a theological deficit in this matter.

Finally, I want to point out another theological deficit revealed by the responses to the Porvoo document. Practically none of the responses is framed in theological terms. The closest one comes from a paraphrase of Luther's claim (in An den christlichen Adel) that anyone who has been baptized is already pastor, bishop and pope. Luther said this in order to accentuate the dignity of the Christian, not as the theological basis of an ecclesiology of the office of pastor or bishop. This was interpreted by Hieronymus Emser and Henry VIII to mean that Luther would ordain without bishop and taught that all Christians have the same authority concerning the ministry of the word and the sacraments. Both were rebuked by Luther, but they were not the last to misinterpret his views. Thus the opposition to Porvoo uses Luther's statement on the dignity of the Christian as an argument against the attempt by the common statement to formulate a contemporary understanding of apostolicity. This was bolstered by a misunderstanding of what Luther said about the ordinary priesthood as a principle of organization for the church; and this wrong formulation of the problem made the Porvoo document look like a mediaeval Catholic text.

But this talk about the ordinary priesthood as a critical principle over against the theological content of the office of bishop fits perfectly with the Danish idea of "the church from below", in which there is an identity between people, nation, state and church. This corresponds to the most fundamental myth undergirding the selfunderstanding of the national church: that it has been built up from the bottom, parish by parish, by independent Danish farmers. Until recently, theologians and historians have not doubted that the farmers together built the many village churches, sharing the expenses in solidarity with each other. The Danish church is thus supposedly not merely a folk church, but just as much a people's church. The people literally built their own church. Despite the doubts cast on this view -- for example, by archaeological investigations -- the beautiful myth has persisted that some sort of mediaeval cooperative created the grounds for a democratic, popularly rooted church. The continued power of this myth is revealed by the overwhelming resistance against the Porvoo common statement.

The Nordic Churches and the Ecumenical Movement

Ecumenical Review, The, April, 2000 by Peter Lodberg

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Reference

Most Popular Articles in Reference

Most Popular Publications in Reference