Om »Omkring Grundtvigs vidskab«

Resumé

Concerning »About Grundtvig's Vidskab«

By Bent Christensen

Bent Christensen’s contribution presents three texts, viz .firstly his introductory speech at the public defence of the dissertation »About Grundtvi’s Vidskab« An Inquiry into N.F.S. Grundtvig’s »View of the Knowledge Aspect of the Commitment to Life that is a Necessary Part of Christianity« - and, secondly, replies to the two officially appointed critics, as they appear in Grundtvig Studier 1999.

In his introductory speech Bent Christensen describes the disciple relationship to Kaj Thaning which has, admittedly, developed into an increasingly critical direction as far as the evaluation of .1832. and the circumstances attached to that year are concerned, but which remains unchanged with respect to the recognition of Kaj Thaning's pioneer work as regards the understanding of the radicalism in Grundtvig’s view of the »intrinsic value«, given in creation, of human life. The divergence is due, more than anything else, to a generational difference in church views. Bent Christensen’s main concern, however, is the question what importance the commitment to life here and now has for the Christian's relation with God and the Christian expectation of the Kingdom of God.

The keyword is precisely »importance«. The famous stanza from »The Seven Star of Christendom« really says it all:

If our people and our fathers' land

To us are empty words and sounds,

If we know not what they signify,

Beyond a crowd and soil and strand,

Then vain is every word we speak

About God's Kingdom's mount and vale,

About God’s people and His flock.

For what is said here, of course, applies to the total involvement in life, of which the scientific activity of understanding is only one particular part. In the most elementary experience of life as well as in science and scholarship on the highest level, we have to do with a consciousness of God - if an indirect one - without which all the words of the history of salvation become »empty«.

In his reply to Anders Pontoppidan Thyssen Bent Christensen defends his - in a certain sense - looseness of method, and he denies the implication that his thesis could be seen as a »thesis of vidskab on tottering feet« .I have not from the outset had so much method nor so much thesis that I have been prevented from seeing the hitherto unnoticed, indeed hitherto neglected, aspects of Grundtvig which have been uncovered and interpreted in my dissertation..

Bent Christensen refers to the introduction to the thesis, where he has given a detailed account of how it became clear during his work with Grundtvig’s life and writings that .Grundtvig’s view of the knowledge aspect of the commitment to life that is a necessary part of Christianity. must needs be seen precisely as a side or partof an all-embracing totality of life and culture. In the technical terms of a dissertation, the thesis corresponds to what is written on the back of the book’s cover: On one hand it is pointed out that absolutely supreme scholarship (of a humanistic and life-interpreting character) is the upper layer in the all-embracing cultural totality that Grundtvig dreamt about and worked for.

But on the other hand it is described in detail how both inner, crucial, factual and positive factors and external, partly highly negative factors cause Grundtvig from around 1835 to concentrate more and more on the preservation, awakening, activities and enlightenment of Danish cultural and national life - with Grundtvig himself in the centre as the great »total poet« of church and people.

Responding to Anders Pontoppidan Thyssen’s criticism of the way in which the aspects of church policy and church view are dealt with, Bent Christensen insists that Grundtvig’s 1832-solution assumed its particular form very much as a consequence of the clerical jam that he had to wriggle out of.

In the reply to Theodor J.rgensen Bent Christensen denies that his own culturaltheological vision should have put a slant on his work. He is not disappointed that Grundtvig did not attempt to a still larger extent to maintain a Christian unified culture, but on the contrary criticizes Grundtvig, on the one hand, for taking a very exclusive view of the .free congregation of Jesus Christ., but on the other hand for seeking nevertheless, through rather diffuse constructions in church view and »secondary theology«, to preserve an at least kriste-lig (i.e. Christ-like) unity in the Danish society.

Bent Christensen goes on to state his reasons why his work has not been more systematically problem-oriented or contextually based on the history of ideas. The decisive fact is that all the influences that Grundtvig obviously received are melted into his Christian universe to such an extent that it would not have been profitable if the reading of Herder and Schelling for example, which was of course a fact, should have entered explicitly into the presentation.

Finally, Bent Christensen declares himself in agreement with Theodor J.rgensen’s concluding observations as far as the relation between the universal and the particular in Grundtvig is concerned. Grundtvig’s concept of a national and cultural organism is only part of his view of the whole human race as an organism, so that he cannot be cited in support of a nationalistic self-sufficiency. This is true also of the »superuniversity« in Gothenburg, which, for one thing, was to be a shared Scandinavian project, and which, for another thing, was expressly intended to be the specifically Nordic contribution to the universal-historical scholarship and development of clarification of the collective human race. The same thing applies concerning Grundtvig’s understanding of the relationship between the small Danish congregation and »the horizon of understanding to the catholicity of the Christian church«. In his ecumenical activity Bent Christensen himself has experienced »how good it feels to have the ecumenically universal Grundtvig with him when travelling the world«.