Norwegian Woes
by William J. Tighe
A crisis erupted in the Church of Norway in February 1999, and although it is not clear whether it will produce dramatic effects (perhaps even the disestablishment of the Church) or prove but a flash in the pan, it offers material for Christian reflection, as well as piquant analogies to the situation of orthodox believers in many mainline churches of the West.
The Church of Norway is a state church like the churches of Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Iceland. It is, like these other church bodies, episcopal in its structure and governance. All the Scandinavian state churches are Lutheran, in that they subscribe to the major Lutheran confessional documents, but they all exhibit a broad spectrum of Christian and subchristian stances. They also all ordain women to their ministry.
In Norway, civil legislation authorized the ordination of women in 1938, but the bishops refused to act upon it until 1961, regarding it as civil legislation about which the Church had not been consulted and upon which they could not be obliged to act. When they did act, most of the bishops prepared to ordain women did so under the impression that ordained women would function as hospital chaplains or in other “specialized ministries” rather than as parochial clergy, and for decades thereafter the number of women ordained, as well as the proportion of women in the clergy as a whole, was notably smaller than in Denmark and Sweden.
It was thus a matter of some surprise that Norway was the first Scandinavian state church to have a “woman bishop”: Rosemarie Koehn, appointed Bishop of Hamar in 1993. (She was only the third Lutheran female bishop worldwide, one having been chosen in Germany and another in America the previous year.) The Danes followed subsequently with two in 1995 and the Swedes with two in 1997–1998.
It was surprising not only because of the smaller number and proportion of women clergy in Norway, but also because in Norway alone, in contrast with both Denmark and Sweden, opponents of the ordination of women had not been blacklisted from appointment as bishops after the introduction of women clergy. Although the number of Norwegian bishops opposed to ordaining women fell from four in the 1970s to two in the 1980s, opponents were selected in 1983 and again in 1991, so that by 1993, when Koehn was appointed bishop of Hamar, there remained two opponents among her colleagues (one of them retired last year and the other one, Odd Bondevik, has changed his mind and now ordains women).
Since 1993, however, the level of tolerance toward opponents has diminished markedly in Norway. Six months after Koehn’s appointment some of the clergy of the Hamar diocese who refused to recognize her authority were forced to resign by an order of the Royal Ministry for Church Affairs. Their only options were to accept her authority or leave the diocese—an initiative by the state that caused a good deal of embarrassment to the Norwegian bishops.
Homosexuality & Credibility
David Mills has written in Touchstone and elsewhere of the manner in which Evangelicals in the Episcopal Church, and no doubt other churches, have accepted the ordination of women while in many cases not really approving of it, under the claim that “it is not an issue worth fighting for,” or not worth losing one’s job over. But when other departures from the received Christian tradition of doctrinal and moral teaching arise about which they have stronger feelings—such as the acceptance of homosexuality—they find that their ability to contest these innovations credibly has been sharply diminished. So it has proved in Norway as well.
While homosexuals are welcome at the Lord’s Table in the Norwegian state church, without any distinction between “practicing” and celibate homosexuals, homosexual clergy are expected to live a celibate life. This is the stated policy of the Norwegian Bishops’ Conference, formulated in 1995 and repeated in subsequent years.
In 1994 Koehn ordained a self-professed lesbian, Siri Sunde. Before appointing her to a chaplaincy in 1996, however, she requested and received a letter from Sunde stating that she understood and accepted the bishops’ stated policy.
William J. Tighe was Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, until his retirement in 2024. He is a member of St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.He is a senior editor for Touchstone.
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