Trinity Sunday C Matthew 13:44-46; Romans 5:6-11

June 10, 2001 The Rev. Beth Ernest

Last week we talked about history—the history of the religious revival in 19^th century Sweden that led to the formation of the Mission Friends. These ancestors of today’s Evangelical Covenant Church of America and the Swedish Mission Covenant knew the importance of an educated laity, and held the Bible as the final authority in matters of faith. They believed the church to be a voluntary group of people who belong based on a conversion to the Christian gospel, and they held the sacraments in high regard. Their faith was joy-filled, which is felt in their music and seen in their attitude toward life.

Today we will find out more about one of the early leaders of the movement, Paul Peter Waldenström, (1838-1919). You may remember that Waldenström was the Lutheran pastor and Greek scholar who served as editor of the influential Pietist magazine. He was the one asked to serve communion to over 300 lay people in the chapel of the Mission Society of Uppsala. This act brought the Lutheran authorities down on his head because the attendees wanted to take communion with other believers only and rejected the idea that any Swede born into a Lutheran family should be allowed—even required—to take the sacrament if not converted to Jesus Christ.

Waldenström believed he was justified in serving this communion because, as he said, "I see nothing in God’s word which prevents God’s congregation from gathering for communion as long as they can gather for the hearing of God’s word." (Genom Guds nåd, Stockholm, 1953, p. 57, translation Karl Olsson).

That Waldenström said this about the Bible is significant, for one of the questions he asked that became a battle cry for the emerging movement, was "Var står det skrivet?" Where is it written? Where in the Bible does it say that we should do such and such, or believe this or that? If it isn’t biblical, then why believe it?

For hundreds of years, ordinary people had been used to believing something because their parish priest had told them so, or because the catechism said so. The bible, which most people couldn’t read, didn’t enter into the question. As we heard last week, the rise in literacy opened the biblical world to ordinary people. So when Waldenström asked, "Where is it written?" they went to look it up! He strongly criticized theologians and clergy who pondered weighty questions, trying to find answers in science and philosophy, rather than in the Bible. For him, the great questions had to be lived in the life of faith, not dissected in theological debate or chiseled stone in credal statements.

One of the topics that Waldenström turned his biblical lenses on was that of the atonement, the way that we are made right with God, the way in which our broken and shattered state is made acceptable to God.

In his monumental tome on Covenant history, Karl Olsson tells it this way:
In 1870, young Waldenström was having some conversation about the atonement with some fellow pastors. They were talking about the official Lutheran position called in Latin, satifactio vicaria, the idea that "the suffering and death of Christ had been the means of satisfying God’s wrath. Justice demanded that God punish man eternally for his sin against the majesty of God, but Christ had intervened between God’s justice and man, had appeased God’s wrath, and how his (Christ’s) righteousness could be imputed to man for the latter’s justification" (Olsson, Karl, By One Spirit, Covenant Press, Chicago, 1962, p. 109). So as the pastors where talking about this, Waldenström asks his famous question, "Var står det skrivet?" Where is it written?, the pastors laughed! (BOS, p. 110). Waldenström conducted a lengthy search of scripture and found no where in the Old or New Testament that God was the one reconciled. God’s position did not change in the atonement. Rather, our position did.

In a famous sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, 1872, published in The Pietist, Waldenström used our gospel text for the day and outlined the reasons why the official Lutheran belief in the atonement was all wrong for those who live as citizens of the Kingdom of God. He had five points in his core argument:

1. "That through our fall no change has entered the heart of God.
2. That because of this it was no severity or anger against man which through the fall rose up in the way of man’s redemption
3. That the change, which occurred in the fall, was a change in man alone, in that he became sinful and thus fell away from God and from the life which is in him.
4. That for this reason an atonement indeed is needed for man’s salvation, but not an atonement which appeases God and presents him as being once again gracious but (an atonement) which removes man’s sin and makes him once again righteous, and
5. That this atonement is in Jesus Christ." (Covenant Roots: Sources & Affirmations. p. 119-120).

In other words, the death of Christ does not change God from a wrathful God to a loving God. God has always been gracious and loving. And yes, God has hated sin but God has not hated us! It wasn’t humanity that God was wrathful about, but sin.

Now, one could argue that if one read everything Martin Luther wrote that one would not find a consistent message about God being wrathful against humanity. Luther talks a lot about grace, and he also talks about our inability to see God’s love due to our own sin, therefore we see wrath. Luther speaks in this way to encourage people to try Christ, who alone can put away this wrath of God. (Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, Fortress Press, 1966, p. 171) But Luther does talk an incredible amount about the wrath of God, the law which we can never keep and which therefore leads us to despair and sin, and therefore, deeper into God’s wrath (Althaus, p. 177).

In the Swedish church of the day, the Lutheran teaching was that of a wrathful, angry God who needed the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ to be merciful. Waldenström investigated this thoroughly, and decided that it was not God who moved in the atonement, but humanity which is made righteous as before the fall. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and each of those personae is love. Waldenström defines the role of Christ as the representative of God "to take away our sin," rather than "our substitute in order to take away the wrath of God." (Covenant Roots: Sources & Affirmations. p. 123)

Doesn’t Paul make it very clear that "we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son" (Rom 5:10) rather than the "God was reconciled to us through the death of his Son?" Waldenström points out verse after verse in which God is doing the reconciling, not being reconciled himself. In the Old Testament it is clear that the many references for the need for atonement is remove the sin of the people, not to change God (Lev 16). From Leviticus, "For on this day atonement shall be made for you, to cleanse you; from all your sins you shall be clean before the LORD" (Lev 16:30).

And clean we must be if we wish to approach God, who is righteous. Christ’s death and resurrection allows us to be made clean, giving us fellowship with God.

This is a summary of Waldenström’s sermon. He ends by tying in the verses from Matthew about the kingdom of God, a kingdom in which this treasure of righteous is ours. But what happened to Waldenström after this sermon was published and what does it have to offer us?

Criticism was fast and sharp. He was told by the foundation that published The Pietist to write a different sermon for that day. Of course, he refused (BOS, p. 111). Waldenström returned to University of Uppsala to further his studies on the atonement. In Europe, most advanced study is done on one’s own, so he stayed clear of most faculty and produced a dissertation which criticized both the church’s view of the atonement and the creed’s abilities to teach properly about the faith (BOS, p. 111). He then went a step further and, after more examination of the Bible, addressed the issue of how atonement actually takes place. He found that "atonement takes place at that point where the gift of grace is accepted by the sinner…Salvation takes place at the point where the individual confronts Christ, the Savior" (BOS, p.p., 112-113). The emphasis departs from the suffering Christ on the cross to the person of Christ. Waldenström writes, "Christ’s acts are not acts which he performed for God in our place, but acts which God performed through him for our salvation" (Genom Guds nåd, Stockholm, 1953, p. 35-36). Salvation made simple for those who believe. The people who wanted to understand their faith, such as those who gathered in homes to read the Bible and other religious materials, rallied around Waldenström who explained their salvation in a way they could understand. But others abandoned him, and a deep rift in the evangelical wing of the church developed. It was in this time that the fateful meeting at Pentecost took place, in 1876. As the powers aligned themselves, Waldenström’s position became more outcast. His followers and other free church folk met to find their own similarities. Out of those meetings, a group of local mission societies formed the Swedish Mission Covenant, sort of a denomination, sort of a group of congregations covenanted together for their common mission. At the same time across the Atlantic, movements were afoot among Swedish immigrants, many charged by the ideas of Waldenström, to form a new denomination. We will hear about that next week.

What questions does all this raise for us today? I can think of two.

First, is the Bible really so easy to interpret just by reading scripture alone? (And remember that Waldenström would have us reading it in Hebrew and Greek.) When the Bible contradicts itself, aren’t we helped by the studies of scholars past, and the knowledge of the time and situation to which the Bible was written? Is there ongoing revelation to which we should remain open? (As a Pilgrim forefather said, "God has more light and truth yet to break forth from his holy word." )

It is interesting that Waldenström attacked higher education when he himself was a Greek scholar with a Ph.D. from a prestigious university and, later, a college teacher. It is also interesting to note that while the American Covenant formed a couple of schools, notably Minnehaha Academy in Minnesota (whose most notable graduates are Lonnie Anderson and, I believe, Jim Thompson, former governor of Illinois), and North Park College (now university), yet, the Covenant has not been a denomination which has produced a host of great theologians and scholars. Yes, there have been some, like Karl Olsson, for instance. Rather, the Covenant has produced great preachers, people who interpret the Bible for daily living.

There is also a pastoral question that arises from Waldenström’s battle with the Lutherans. Do we believe in an angry God who burns in anger at us because of our sin? That is not just a theological question, it is deeply pastoral, spiritual, even psychological question. Life is bad enough when mom or dad is eternally angry with us; it is even worse if God is mad at us and we can never make it right. We try and try and try to appease this angry God, to make him happy in some way, to get God to move. Of course, we can never do enough. We are bound by chains of guilt; cement blocks of hopelessness keep us earthbound. We get caught in a works righteousness cycle, or we just get deep-down depressed. The idea of heaven is not a comfort but a torment, as we face a final judgment in which we are truly, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

Don’t we need a God of grace? And doesn’t scripture show us again and again that God loves us and forgives us all that we do. Doesn’t scripture chronicle God’s anger at sin, and forgiveness of the repentant sinner, the prodigal sons and daughters? Nehemiah described God’s actions on behalf of the errant Israelites: "But you are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and you did not forsake them" (Nehemiah 9:17) Or this from 1 John 4:9-10: "God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins."

What a difference this makes to the person who can never be quite sure if God loves them, or forgives them. Where is it written that God loves us? On page after page of scripture, yes, it is written there. But it is also written on page after page of the history of the church, in the lives of the faithful, and in the hymns of a band of renegade Swedes. We can bank on the unchanging nature of God to be loving, not wrathful. So can our lives know joy and peace and the assurance of our salvation. Praise be to God.

Althaus, Paul. The Theology of Martin Luther, Fortress Press: Philadelphia, 1966

Olsson, Karl A. By One Spirit, Covenant Press: Chicago, 1962.

P.P. Waldenström, Sermon for the Twentieth Day after Trinity, 1872. Translated by Herbert Palmquist. Found in Covenant Roots: Sources & Affirmations. (Anderson, Glen P., ed.) Covenant Press: Chicago, 1980. (pp. 114-131).