Today a great spiritual father of my church said farewell and was heading back to Finland. In light of this, I’d thought it worth doing a little research into the history of Finnish Church and see what interesting stories lay hid.
I found it fascinating that until 1889 there were laws against Nonconformity in matters of religion, everyone had to be a member of the Lutheran State Church, or a member of the Orthodox Church. In England the last of these types of laws was made in 1829 when Roman Catholics received emancipation (or perhaps in 1951 when spiritualism was legalized and the final witchcraft laws were removed from the books). There’s so much that could be said about the issue of religious toleration, both for or against it, just as there could be much said as to the merits or demerits of state churches.
Like so many Lutheran churches the Church of Finland has relatively little English literature about it. The only real figure depicted often is Michael Agricola, whose translation of the New Testament, like the King James, or the Luther Bible, helped shape the vernacular language altogether. His feast day is also a national holiday in Finland, which I think is great. Agricola spent twenty years translating the New Testament. That’s probably how long it would take me to do it from Latin (I’m terrible with languages). So I’ve been thinking about that. Who spends two decades doing anything these days? Or especially in those days, when you’d die at 50.
The tragedy of the route the Church of Finland has taken now is manifest, but perhaps the Spirit of the Lord will stir up some zeal for new Finns to be as passionate about the Word of God as Bishop Agricola was.