Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1943, Síða 121

SWEDISH AND DANISH CHRISTIANITY 115
sonal confession. He established private Communion congrega-
tions instead, and this gradually led him to a breach both with
the Church and the Fosterlandsstiftelsen. His followers joined in
the Svenska missionsförbundet (‘The Swedish Mission Associa-
tion’), which is still very active and in many places draws people
from the church to the missionary chapel. It also carries on an
extensive foreign mission of its own.
Alongside of these typically Swedish revivalist movements
there are also others of a more international type, such as those
of the Methodists and the Baptists, and the Pentecostal Move-
ment. They have in Sweden a much greater distribution than in
Denmark. Religious disunion particularly in certain tracts of
Sweden is very great, and only a part of Swedish Christendom
although the greater part feels at ease within the forms of the
Church.
The fact that in this way much religiosity has broken away
from the Church, has on the other hand contributed to the Swedish
established church obtaining a more uniform character than the
Danish church and to the development of a real church conscious-
ness which is without any parallel in Denmark. Church and theo-
logy have been collaborating here. Not least in recent times this
church consciousness has been sharpened, and theology has con-
centrated on the importance of the idea of the Church. A result
of this work was En bok om kyrkan (1942, ‘A Book on the
Church’), drafted by a number of theologians and very represen-
tative of Swedish theology of today. Among its most noted con-
tributors are Professor Anders Nygren, the systematist, of Lund,
best known as the author of the great work “Eros and Agape”,
and Professor Anton Fridrichsen, the exegete, of Uppsala, born
in Norway, who enjoins on the reader that the Church is Jesus’s
own creation and is not a later invention of the Christians.
This church consciousness has strong roots in Swedish tradi-
tion. We may particularly refer to Henrik Schartau, who in the
beginning of the I9th century was a clergyman at the Cathedral
of Lund. If it may be said about Wallin and his trend that
they have particularly stood for the first article of the Christian
faith, emphasizing God’s greatness in creation, and Rosenius and
his followers for the second article on the work of the propitiation
of Christ, Schartau in his preaching principally dealt with the
third article. He spoke of how the work of the Holy Ghost in