{"id":2392,"date":"2009-01-30T19:58:34","date_gmt":"2009-01-31T00:58:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=2392"},"modified":"2009-01-30T19:58:34","modified_gmt":"2009-01-31T00:58:34","slug":"herding-norwegians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=2392","title":{"rendered":"Herding Norwegians"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some days a blog topic leaps out at me <\/strong>and takes me by the proverbial throat. Other days I\u2019m like a wallflower at a dance, watching all the topics foxtrot past; everyone else in a couple and me the odd man out.<\/p>\n

Not that I ever went to a dance.<\/p>\n

So I shall free-associate. The thing I heard today that impressed me most was something a pastor said at the meeting of the board of the Georg Sverdrup Society, which I attended in my capacity as Journal Editor.<\/p>\n

He was talking about the history of Scandinavian Lutherans in America.<\/p>\n

In general, he said, there were two kinds of Swedes in America\u2014those who belonged to the One Lutheran Church (called the Augustana Synod), and those who left Lutheranism altogether and became Baptists or Evangelical Free Church or nothing at all.<\/p>\n

And among the Danes there were also two sorts\u2014those who belonged to the One Lutheran Church (called, I think, the Danish Synod), and those who left Lutheranism altogether and became Baptists or Pentecostals or Salvation Army (for instance) or nothing at all. (My mother, who was half Norwegian, half Danish, was raised a Methodist, and some of her family were Baptists). <\/p>\n

But among the Norwegians, you had 57 varieties of Lutheran (this pastor guessed there were somewhere between ten and twenty different denominations): Free Lutherans, and Haugeans, and Lutheran Brethren, and Eielsen Synod, and others even I know nothing about.<\/p>\n

Nowadays it\u2019s common to laugh at all those old Norwegians who couldn\u2019t get along with each other, and so split into schisms over the shape of the pastor\u2019s beard or points of punctuation in the hymn book, but the end result was that more Norwegians (by percentage) stayed Lutheran than did the Swedes or Danes. In the long run, it was good for the Lutheran Church.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure where to take this idea. \u201cDiversity\u201d is an overworked word in our day, one we have trouble using because everybody\u2019s got their own definition. Is diversity better served by bringing diverse people into one group and demanding they all get along with each other, which can easily produce counterproductive results? Or by allowing everyone to go their own ways, and run the risk that they\u2019ll snub and stereotype each other, and never realize how much they have in common?<\/p>\n

And who was being diverse in the case of the Scandinavian Lutherans? Those who tried to shoehorn all the factions into one central church where everybody was a little uncomfortable, or those who broke up into splinter churches?<\/p>\n

I love an old saying, which I\u2019ve heard attributed to Philip Melanchthon, Luther\u2019s close associate (except that he didn\u2019t say it. It was the Moravian John Comenius, or else St. Augustine. I\u2019ve done a web search and I\u2019m still not sure.) It goes like this: \u201cIn essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Of course nowadays we don\u2019t even agree on what the essentials are.<\/p>\n

For instance, those little soul patches are definitely not appropriate for a pastor\u2019s beard.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some days a blog topic leaps out at me and takes me by the proverbial throat. Other days I\u2019m like a wallflower at a dance, watching all the topics foxtrot past; everyone else in a couple and me the odd man out. Not that I ever went to a dance. So I shall free-associate. The … Continue reading Herding Norwegians<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2392\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}