(Unfinished) Oxford and Uppsala: The English Roots of the Lutheran High Church Movement in Sweden and Beyond

This is an unfinished research project about the Lutheran high church movement and its links to the Oxford Movement. It remains one of my greatest disappointments that I was unable to finish this, since I was so invested in it.

A handful of Swedish theologians have emerged from the twentieth century and found recognition outside their homeland. The World Council of Churches pushed Nathan Söderblom to the fore. The book is Christus Victor was responsible for the successes of both its author, the Bishop Gustaf Aulén, and the genesis of renewed debates over the theology of atonement. Yngve Brilioth penned Eucharistic Faith and Practice: Evangelical and Catholic, a landmark in the field of liturgical studies. Quite apart from their nationality, the three have one thing in particular in common: they were all influenced to one degree or another by the ideas of the Oxford Movement across the Ocean in England. Owing in part to the geography of Europe, the Reformation arrived relatively late in Scandinavia. When it did, it was less explosive than in other parts of Europe, and instead it seeped out to the palaces and spread by royal decree in a more quiet and dignified fashion. What this meant is that the Scandinavian church had retained a number of more Catholic elements that had been purged by the Reformers elsewhere in Europe, and they avoided the characteristic Protestant iconoclasm. Church architecture survived relatively unscathed. Images were unmolested. Priests generally celebrated the reformed mass ad orientum. The Nordic folk churches therefore were uniquely primed to adopt the ideas of the Oxford Movement. They also adopted ideas that came from the stream of thought of the liturgical movement, which had at this point already spread out from Catholic cloisters. This burgeoning high church movement in the Scandinavian church became a reaction to modernism and the increasing liberalisation in the Lutheran churches, fears that the Oxford Movement was very much concerned with for the Church of England. Similar developments took place in Germany and other places, but the present work focuses on the established impact that John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement had on the Swedish clerics who discovered its ideals.