I’ve been neglecting you folks recently, because of the pressure of graduate school work. Tonight I’m going to compound the offense by using this space for homework purposes.

The two fellows you see above, reading from top to bottom, in photographs from the H. Larson Studio circa 1904, are Georg Sverdrup and Sven Oftedal, professors at Augsburg College, Minneapolis, and founders of the Lutheran Free Church, of which my current employer, the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations, is the spiritual descendant. Both born in Norway and respected scholars, they are nevertheless best remembered for the bitter controversies they were involved in (and often initiated), especially in the 1880s and ’90s.

As an assignment for one of my classes, I have to help assemble a “Digital Library Project” at Omeka. This involves posting, and coding with metadata, certain items relating to the theme of a group project. My project involves Scandinavian Culture in the Upper Midwest. Two of the items I chose to post were the above photographs, which reside in the archive I oversee at work. I took the pictures myself (obviously), and my lack of competence is apparent. But the instructions require a link to an external source for the photographs, so I’m making this blog post the source. (I’m not even sure that’s ethical, but I can’t think of another way to do it.)

But since I’m posting anyway, I want to discuss something shocking I’ve learned in my studies of these two men.

The most unbelievable thing I’ve learned about these guys, who started the movement which my very conservative church body carries on today, is that they were liberals.

Now bear in mind I’m talking about them in the context of their time. And in their time being a liberal had nothing to do with challenging traditional standards of morality. It certainly had nothing to do with challenging the reliability of the Bible.

In those days, especially in Europe, where these two came from, being liberal was about how you wanted the common people treated.

Conservatives believed in the old social order. The nobility, the church hierarchy, and the officials should run things. Common people should do as they were told, because they didn’t have the training, education, or breeding to have a say in how the world was run.

Liberals believed that the common people could be raised by education to complete equality. The old classes should be swept away.

Sverdrup and Oftedal wanted to extend this principle to church government. The members of the congregation, with the help of their servant pastors, could control their own affairs very well, and did not need bishops or synods to guide them — providing they were truly revived.

Their opponents called them anarchists, and there was some justice in the accusation.

I can understand the objection.

But we’ve done OK so far.