Today, the Church of Sweden is a Lutheran joke. It was perhaps the first to ordain women and its clergy are now between 50-60% female. It was a largely secular agency of the government for too long and while the buildings were preserved, the faith decayed. It was overcome with political ideology. An example of this was revealed when Sweden’s biggest morning paper, DN, in May 2025, published an interview with one female priest who admitted that she wasn’t really that interested in Jesus but originally went to church and communion to meet other lesbian girls. In 2013, a female archbishop was elected primarily on the basis that she was a woman, would be the first female archbishop, and this was a witness against a patriarchal and misogynistic history and culture that preceded her.
The buildings have been preserved but at the cost of the faith. Such was the cost of the deal between church and state in which the state had power over what was believed and how it was practiced. I am half Swedish and it is with great sadness that I acknowledge the loss of this history and identity for what was once a vibrant Christian stronghold. Lord knows that the population of the Mid-West states of the US was filled with Swedes who brought their faith with them to America. Apparently, they did not leave much of it back for those who stayed at home. Now Sweden is a rapidly aging country with an ever increasing Muslim immigrant population that is radically changing the shape of the nation and its culture. In fact, it is hard to call the Sweden of today Lutheran in any real sense of the word.
A number of years ago my home town celebrated an anniversary which focused on their Swedish past. When a number of Swedish dancers were brought in as part of that celebration, my mother invited them to her home to feast upon the treasured foods of their Swedish past. From pickled herring to lutefisk to Lingonberries, and so much more, she cooked and served them what she grew up eating. They were not impressed and called the meal "museum food," part of their past but not what they wanted now. Perhaps that is also the state of affairs in the Lutheran Church of Sweden today. It is a museum church, preserving a semblance of their history and past but without the faith and confidence in Scripture or the Augsburg Confession today. It is sad to me and perhaps a poignant reminder of where everyone of us will end up unless we resist the temptation to surrender doctrine to political ideology. Gustavus Adolphus must be turning over in his grave.
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What happened to the Swedish Lutheran church warns of the dangers of “surrendering doctrine to political ideology” as you said, sadly undermines the Gospel. If sexual and other sins are no longer described as sins of the flesh, for what purpose did Our Lord Jesus suffer in agony on the cross? Why be a Christian in the first place and seek forgiveness and redemption if what was once considered wrong is now acceptable and approved? Many churches in Europe began this dangerously progressive journey long before it reached across the sea onto our shores. It is here now and has settled in America too. Some have said that the mission field of the world is not only restricted to third world nations, but prosperous Western nations too.As we see this decline in America and abroad, we know that this is something that the Bible documents for our edification as a reason human nature remains basically unchanged and wholly under the curse of original sin. But Our Lord said, in Luke 19, “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.” In the midst of this trouble and chaos, we are called by God to persevere and remain faithful. Soli Deo Gloria.
I like King Sigismund better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigismund_III_Vasa
This background is from Dr. William Tighe:
Actually, it was the Church of Denmark which was the first of the Scandinavian Lutheran churches to "ordain" women, in 1848. It was a purely governmental action, with no input from the country's Lutheran bishops, eight of whom (out of 10) were actually opposed to WO at the time. When it turned out the the only two women qualified to be ordained were in the Diocese of Copenhagen, whose bishop was at that time (he hanged his mind a few years later) opposed to WO, another law had to be passed to deal with the situation. It enabled the Cabinet Minister for Church Affairs to pick any Church of Denmark bishop to do the ordaining, and if all the bishops were opposed - by 1968 all the opponents had retired, and no opponent of WO was ever after appointed - he could pick any Theology Professor (presumably "ordained") to do the ordaining.
In Norway the first woman was "ordained" in 1961, but actually it was the Lex Mowinckel of 1938, which opened all "civil service positions" to women that made it possible. The Church of Norway bishops refused to act on it, and the heroic conduct of these bishops during the Nazi occupation of Norway from 1940 to 45 gave them the "street cred" to ignore the law. So in the 1950s the government went out of its way to find liberals to make bishops, and thus the first woman pastor was ordained in 1961. One has to say this for Norway, though: for some decades there was a great deal of regard for the consciences of pastors and ordinands opposed to WO, and opponents of WO were occasionally appointed bishops, the last opponent retiring in 1998. It was only when the first "flaminica" was appointed in 1993 and the Cabinet Minister made his notorious statement in the face of strong opposition to her appointment from the clergy of her diocese, Staten går foran, kirken følger etter = The State leads, the Church follows, that opponents of WO were marginalized and excluded from promotion.
Iceland began to ordain women in 1974. I know nothing of the circumstances. It excludes from ordination all and any opposed to women's ordination and homosexual marriage.
Part 2
Finland began to ordain women in 1986. The Church of Finland has a strong and relative autonomous (from the State) Church Assembly. It requires a three-quarters majority of the delegates to effect major changes, and it took five such votes between 1962 and 1986 to effect that majority to ordain women. The Church of Finland is the only Scandinavian Lutheran not to "marry" any individual to any other individual without regard to the sex (or "gender") of the individuals concerned. It does, however, bless same-sex "civil partnerships." In other words, the liberals have as yet been able to cobble together a three-quarters majority for gender-free "marriage."
The fight in the Church of Sweden attracted much media attention in and also in England, because of the 1920 intercommunion agreement between the Church of Sweden and the Church of England, based on the supposed claim of the Swedes to have retained the "apostolic succession" of its bishops at the Reformation. It came as a vast shock to the generality of Swedes in 1957 when its Church Assembly rejected WO with IIRC seven of its 13 bishops voting against it. A vast media campaign was launched against the CofS, the government threatened to disestablish the CofS and confiscate its endowments, and finally called for elections for a new Church Assembly meeting in 1958. These elections had formerly been non-political, but the ruling Social Democratic Party put up its own list of candidates, and the liberals triumphed. At the 1958 Church Assembly meeting a number of bishops disgracefully turned their coats, and I believe, again IIRC, that eight or nine of the 13 bishops his time voted in favor of WO. Ordination candidates in favor of WO still managed to find bishops to ordain them down to the 1980s, and while the government tried after 1958 to exclude any pastors opposed to WO from becoming bishops, the manner in which episcopal elections were conducted allowed two to slip through. All but one of these bishops had died or retired by 1980 save for the indefatigable Bertil Gartner of Gothenburg (1924-2009), a one-time NT Professor at Princeton, who played a notable role in animating the opposition to WO in Sweden, both before and after his 1991 retirement, but his leadership was IMO double-edged, since he insisted that the "orthodox opposition" remain in the CofS and not "go into schism," which, again IMO, was a death sentence for the opponents, and a cause of enduring division among them.
The Church of Estonia began to ordain women in 1967. The Church of Latvia's then archbishop, Janis Matulis, began to ordain woman on his own authority in 1975; his successor, Eriks Mesters, stopped ordaining them when he became in archbishop in 1986; his successor, Karlis Gailitis, started it up again in 1992; and his successor, the heroic and just recently-retired Janis Vanags, stopped it in 1993, and in 2016 IIRC the practice of WO was formally declared contrary to the Lutheran Confessions and heretical. Amen! I interviewed Vanags for Touchstone in 1999 and again last year.
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