The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark (the Danish National Church) could be facing a major internal debate on basic Christian doctrines after two priests told the media they don’t believe in Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead.
“Jesus did not physically rise from the grave”, was the headline of an article in Copenhagen’s local newspaper Fyens. “I cannot believe it,” Lutheran priest Ulla Charlotte Hansen added in the interview. The minister also voiced her doubts about the biblical account of Creation, and would say that scientists have a theory about the Big Bang if she were asked how the world came to be.
According to Christian Today, Hansen is not the first voice of the Danish National Church that speaks out against fundamental Christian doctrines recently.
On Christmas day (25th December), the national newspaper Jyllands-Posten published an interview with Per Ramsdal (a priest leading a church in Denmark’s capital) in which he stated that he finds it difficult to believe in a literal Resurrection.
“That gets a bit too supernatural for me,” he said, and added: “But it's a really important story.”
TWO OPPOSED VIEWS FROM THE BISHOPS
Peter Skov-Jacobsen, the Bishop of Copenhagen, reacted to Ramsdal’s statements asking him to correct his opinions and join a training course on “recent interpretations of the Christian faith.”
On the contrary, Hansen’s remarks received a very different reaction. Hansen ministers under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Funen, Tine Lindhardt. After reading Hansen’s remarks, Lindhardt even encouraged the ministers and priests under her diocese to pursue an open discussion to talk about their views on the Resurrection. “The resurrection of Jesus is the basics of Christianity, but how he rose from the dead, no one has seen,” she said. “And it is an event that is so special that language should be stretched to the limit in order to capture it.”