"No Lutheran Lay preacher gained as much national attention as Ludvig Hope (1871-1954), an erstwhile construction worker who received his formal training in
Bergen at a school which that city's domestic missionary society conducted for training evangelists. The fact that Hope, almost certainly unlike most other lay-preachers, carefully drafted and read his sermons did not seem to reduce his effectiveness. Like many other unordained evangelists in the Church of
Norway , his attitude toward the church was at best lukewarm. Some of his opponents considered his distinguishing the state church from the genuine communion of the saints a departure from Article VII of the Augsburg Confession, which defined the church as “the assembly of all believers among whom the Gospel is preached in its purity and the holy sacraments are administered according to the Gospel. Hope was frequently alleged to regard the state church as "a scaffold on which we stand while building the
Church of
Christ ," a folk-pedagogical institution whose task was to prepare people for revivals. This position, of course, hardly ingratiated Hope and like minded evangelists with the clergy, but his attitude was nevertheless popular. Like many other Norwegian and Scandinavian Lutheran revivalists, Hope cared little for what he regarded as confessional minutiae, preferring instead to find his theological guidelines in the Scriptures." (From Modern Christian Revivals, by Edith Waldvogel, Randall Balmer, Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993) Go to Chapter one
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