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The Nordic Churches and the Ecumenical Movement

Ecumenical Review, The, April, 2000 by Peter Lodberg

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This latter was never carried out. Rather, one can interpret the discussion and administration of freedom of religion in Denmark after 1849 in line with Thorkildsen's question of how a Christian state combines an established church that is popularly based with freedom of religion in new social and political situations. First of all, an administrative practice has evolved in which it is the minister of ecclesiastical affairs who decides on behalf of the parliament which religious persons have the right to issue church certificates (for example, marriage certificates) with state authority and enjoy the right of tax exemption. Technically, this is done through the minister's executive power. This role of deciding de facto the limits of religious freedom through administrative action has recently been severely criticized by Prof. Henning Koch.(12) He points out that the Danish constitution does not regard freedom of religion as a right in itself, but as a minority right defined in the light of the majority right. According to Koch, this negative definition of religious freedom results from the fact that the Lutheran church is described in the article of the constitution on state powers, which puts it in fourth place, after the legislative, judicial and executive powers. Behind this lies Monrad's and Lehmann's understanding of democracy as the minimizing of the power of the absolute monarch in state, church and society in favour of the people as the new power base. The Evangelical Lutheran Church, as both the church of the majority and as the fourth state power, is thus a mixture of old elements from the absolute period and new elements from the democratic period after 1849. Koch describes this mixture of old and new as the "well-ordered anarchy" in the structure of the Evangelical Lutheran Church.

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However, one could also interpret the dilemma of the established church in terms of how it could continue under new political conditions to take part in what Tim Knudsen has called "the process of formation of the state".(13) From this perspective, the Reformation in 1536 began a process of formation of the state, and through the secularization of church property the king was able to lay the foundation for a new agrarian economy, build a new fleet and pay his debts. The absolute period from 1660 -- after the defeat by Sweden in 1658 -- was a political response, which the church through theologians like Hans Wandal helped to legitimize. In 1849 the subject for the process of the formation of the state was no longer the king, but the people, and the church allied itself with the new power. After the military defeats by Germany in 1848-50 and 1864, theologically legitimized nationalism becomes the most important issue, and Danes are still struggling to overcome this mentally and socially. Seen from the point of view of the gradual development of the Danish nation-state, the decline of the pastor's official duties as a public servant is not only a result of secularization but much more of democratization and bureaucratization as the driving forces in the Danish process of nation-building.

The Nordic Churches and the Ecumenical Movement

Ecumenical Review, The, April, 2000 by Peter Lodberg

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