Till your hair turned white.
During his most lonely years Grundtvig once comforted himself with the words
of a Greek sage: “Speak to the people of yesterday, and you will be heard by the people of tomorrow.” Thus it was, no doubt, a great satisfaction to him that the first public honor bestowed upon him should be accorded him by his nation’s youth.
From that day his reputation and influence grew steadily. He became an honored
member of several influential societies, such as the Society for Northern Studies, and the Scandinavian Society, an association of academicians from all the Scandinavian countries for the purpose of effecting a closer spiritual and cultural union between them. He also received frequent invitations to lecture both on outstanding occasions and before special groups. His work as a lecturer probably reached its culmination at a public meeting on the Skamlingsbanke, a wooded
hill on the borders of Slesvig, where he spoke to thousands of profoundly stirred listeners, and at a great meeting of Scandinavian students at Oslo, Norway, in 1851, to which he was invited as the guest of honor and acclaimed both by the
students and the Norwegian people. When Denmark became a constitutional kingdom in 1848, he was a member of the constitutional assembly and was elected several times to the Riksdag.
Meanwhile he worked ceaselessly for the development of his folk and
educational ideals. After his conversion, he felt for a time that his new outlook was incompatible with his previous enthusiasm for the heroic life and ideals of
the old North, and that he must now devote himself solely to the preaching of the Gospel. But the formerly mentioned decline of all phases of Danish life during
the early part of the nineteenth century and the failure of his preaching to evoke any response from an indifferent people caused him to suspect a closer relationship between a people’s religious and national or folk-life than he had hitherto recognized. Was not the folk life of a people, after all, the soil in which the Word of God must be sown, and could the Word bear fruit in a soil completely hardened and unprepared to receive it? If it could not, was not a folk awakening a necessary preparation for a Christian?
Under the spur of this question he undertook the translation of the sagas and developed his now widely recognized ideas of folk life and folk education, which later were embodied in the Grundtvigian folk schools. The first of these schools was opened at Rødding, Slesvig in 1844. The war between Denmark and
Germany from 1848 to 1850 delayed the establishment of other similar schools.
But in 1851, Christian Kold, the man who more than any other realized Grundtvig’s idea of a school for life—as the folk schools were frequently called
—opened his first school at Ryslinge, Fyn. From there the movement spread rapidly not only to all parts of Denmark but also to Norway, Finland and Sweden. The latter country now has more schools of the Grundtvigian type than
Denmark, and Norway and Finland have about have as many. [11]
To extend the influence of the movement lecture societies, reading circles, gymnastic societies, choral groups and the like were organized in almost every parish of Denmark. Thus before Grundtvig died, he had the satisfaction of seeing his work bear fruit in one of the most vital folk and educational movements of
Scandinavia, a movement which has made a tremendous imprint upon all phases
of life in the Northern countries and which today is spreading to many other parts of the world.
Grundtvig held that the life of a nation, Christian as well as national, never rose above the real culture of its common people. To be real, a culture had to be national, had to be based on a people’s natural characteristics and developed in accordance with native history and traditions. The aim of all true folk-education was the awakening and enrichment of life and not a mere mental or practical training. The natural means for the attainment of this aim was a living presentation of a people’s own cultural heritage, their native tradition, history, literature and folk life. But in all cases the medium of this presentation was the living, that is the spoken word by men and women who were themselves spiritually alive. Christianity, in his opinion, had not come to destroy but to cleanse and vivify the folk life of a people, and, since the latter was the soil in which the former had to grow, the fruitfulness of both demanded a living inter-action so that national life might become Christian and Christianity national.
In the practical application of these educational theories, Grundtvig took no active part. Aside from his conception of the idea and the development of much
of the material used in the folk-school, his greatest contributions to their work are probably, his innumerable Biblical, historical and folk songs that were and are used in the schools.
Meanwhile he by no means neglected his religious work. Rationalism had been
defeated, a sound Evangelical movement was fast revitalizing the church, and he
could therefore concentrate his energy on a further development of the view that had come to him during his years of struggle. Among innumerable other works,
he produced during his later years the splendid Enlightenment of the Church, published 1840-1844; Teachings of Our Christian Childhood, published 1855-1862; The Seven Stars of the Churches, published 1854-1855; and The Church Mirror, a series of lectures on the main currents of church history, published 1861-1863.
Although Grundtvig’s views, and especially his distinction between the “living”
and the “written” word, were strongly opposed by many, his profoundly spiritual
conception of the church, as the body of Christ, and of the sacraments, as its true means of life, has greatly influenced all branches of the Danish church. In emphasizing the true indwelling of Christ in the creed and sacraments, he visualized the real presence of Him in the church and underscored the vital center of congregational worship with a realism that no theological dissertation can ever convey. Nor did he feel that in so doing he was in any sense diverging
from true Lutheranism. The fact that Luther himself chose the creed and the
words of institution of the sacrament as a basis for his catechism, showed, he contended, that the great Reformer also had recognized their distinction.
Despite frequent charges to the contrary, Grundtvig had no desire to engender a
separatist movement in the church. He constantly warned his followers against any such tendency. In a closing speech to the Meeting of Friends in 1863, he said, “You can no more forbid the world to call you Grundtvigians than those whom Luther called to the Lord could forbid anyone to call them Lutherans, but
do not yourself adopt that name. For history shows that some have let themselves be called Lutherans until they have almost lost the name of Christians. If anyone wishes to name us after any other than Christ, we ought to tell them that we accept nothing unto salvation except what the Christian church has taught and confessed from generation to generation. To or from that we neither add nor detract. We acknowledge without reservation that word of faith
which Paul says is believed to righteousness and confessed unto salvation. The
manner of teaching and believing that faith so that the Old Adam may be put off
and the new put on, we hold to be a matter of enlightenment in which we shall
be guided by Grundtvig, as we are guided by Luther, only in so far as we are convinced that he has been guided by Scripture and the Spirit. We also disclaim
any intention of making our conception of Scripture an article of faith which must be accepted by the church.” Grundtvig’s followers would, no doubt, have
profited greatly by remembering this truly liberal view of their leader.
