In my last post, I introduced Gisle Johnson as a forgotten figure who had done theology “the Norwegian Way.” A significant theologian in the ecclesiastical life in Norway, Gisle had inspired a profound experiential faith in his fellow countrymen that was a unique blend of piety and proposition, viewing Christian faith as a living entity engendered by the Living God. I left off with a question: what were the characteristics and emphases of Gisle Johnson’s own theological writings that so inspired students and parishioners alike? It is this question that I wish to answer by considering the characteristics of his thought.
In his lectures on systematic theology, he demonstrates the need and impact of God’s grace in the heart to realize what it means to be truly human
In his chapter on Gisle’s theology and the influence of Kierkegaard on his thought, Svein Christoffersen considers the main characteristics of Gisle’s theological profile as threefold: revivalist, experiential, and confessionalist.[1] This is a helpful outline for exploring Gisle significance and thought, but it also helps indicate something unique about his life, in that he was all three of these at once, and not simply one to the exclusion of another. In analyzing the contours of renewal theology, Richard Lovelace considers the usual dualism posited between the head and the heart, noting, “One of the central theological issues confronting the Christian church in our generation and seriously dividing it is the problem of the function of sound teaching in the body of Christ.”[2] Charting the historical progression of the debate, Lovelace calls attention to the dangers of a “dead orthodoxy” (if the somewhat cliché term is allowed) on the one hand, and a contentless, experiential faith on the other. In Gisle’s context, the pendulum had swung radically between pure rationalism and pure romanticism: “Eighteenth century rationalism distrusted creeds because they were full of irrational mysteries like the Trinity, and not clear and reasonable like the Bible. Nineteenth-century Romantics, on the other hand, found an excessive clarity in systems of doctrine which contrasted harshly with the mystery and wonder of biblical religion.”[3] In contrast to this, Lovelace calls attention to the need for a “live orthodoxy,” where “the key to live orthodoxy … is the proper balance between the Spirit and the Word with appropriate attention given to the role of each.”[4] This apropos balance and holistic spiritual life is embodied perfectly in the teaching and example of Gisle Johnson: “Faith is a tree known by its fruits. As ‘living in the Spirit,’ the believer must also ‘walk in the Spirit,’ walk just as Christ walked, keep his commandments, do what he has commanded.”[5] Let’s consider separately these three strands in the cord of Johnson’s spiritual life and emphasis.
Revivalist
Gisle’s theological emphasis was profoundly practical, and the content of his classroom led to great practical output throughout Norway in the 19th century. His systematic theology itself is uniquely structured: beginning with an expansive prolegomena on faith, he moves into salvation and the twin doctrines of justification and regeneration. Utilizing the motif of seeking and finding, he sounds like Augustine when he writes,
As such a grace-seeking faith, such a longing faith, the gospel faith is not yet able to fully satisfy the longing that the law awakens in the sinner’s heart … the sinner will only be able to open a full liberation from the slavery of sin and death, full peace of heart, and full strength to love God when his search for faith has passed into finding, when his conviction that God for Christ’s sake will take him into grace, having become a complete conviction that for Christs sake he really has been taken into grace by God and therefore now stands in grace with him. The longing faith is thus still only the Christian faith in its beginnings; as such, it is essentially determined to pass into another, higher form of faith, in which this can first be said to have reached its fullness: the believer’s full conviction of his standing in grace.
Likewise, in his lectures on systematic theology, he demonstrates the need and impact of God’s grace in the heart to realize what it means to be truly human:
The immediate gift of nature becomes a gift of God’s grace … It consists in God giving the sinner a life which he does not have, and thereby primarily freeing him from the power of death, again putting him back into the normal state of life lost by sin and thus “renewing” him, creating in him a “new man” after his image and thus making him a new creature.[6]
Gisle’s certainty of the need for this reality of rebirth, grace, and faith was emphasized to dynamic affected in his namesake revivalist movement, “The Johnsonian Revivals.” For example, Nils Hertzberg records the intensity with which Gisle preached:
I was always present at the Bible readings Johnson held in the 1850’s over Luke’s Gospel. In my long life I have read and heard many sermons and Bible readings, but none like the ones he gave then. I certainly heard him later too, but nothing with the glow and breathtaking power that he had initially … The characteristic feature of his preaching was that it was strongly stirring. His voice had a heart-winning sound of its own, which also did its part to pave the way for his words. He had a strange ability to make the text he spoke over vivid and practical: what can often occur by a superficial reading an everyday or insignificant thing, obtained through his explanation a surprising novelty and depth. Unforgettable for all those who were present was thus the hour when he spoke of the sinner, who wet the Lord’s feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. Here it was important to read the apparent contrast between the Lord’s words to Simon the Pharisee: “Her many sins are forgiven her, because she loved much,” and His words to the woman: “Your faith has saved you, go in peace.” He points the wise self-righteous Pharisee to her love, but the sinner, who felt how poor her love was, he points to the faith that has driven her to him.[7]
Likewise, this is seen manifested in accounts of his revivalist ministry:
People poured into the meeting place and sat spellbound while he spoke, often for as long as two hours. His words seemed to grip his hearers with an almost mystic power. He was not an emotional preacher, but he was a strong preacher of repentance. One is reminded of the awakening under Jonathan Edwards when one reads about Johnson that when in a thin and quiet voice he read the words ‘There is no peace for the ungodly, saith my God’ a visible tremor ran through the audience.[8]
In terms of how these meetings looked, Norwegian church historian Einar Molland observes, “Johnson’s devotional meetings were held in the most widely different places in the city, eventually settling in the cathedral,” referring to the ancient Oslo domkirke in the city center.[9] This Bible teaching ministry was done in relation to the galvanization of the Inner Mission Society, of which Gisle was chairman of the board, and it must be restate that this was meant to rise to the exigencies of spiritual need in the rapidly-growing demographic of Norway’s metropolitan life, Kaasa noting that “At that time, the capital city had 30,000 inhabitants and only one parish Churchy with three pastors.”[10] Importantly,
The Inner Mission Society was to serve as an arm of the church and help to preserve its integrity. The whole inner mission movement was regarded as a voluntary enterprise on the part of the church to further the work of spiritual awakening through the use of carefully selected lay people who were to distribute Christian literature and seek to help the spiritual and physical needs of these people who ordinarily did not seek the church.[11]
Gisle’s lay ministry was active and vital, and this translated into his family life. Years later, his son, Jonathan Johnson, would recall an average morning in the Johnson household, one that was marked by piety and service:
What characterized life there first and foremost was the healthy, fully realized Christianity. The house service was never neglected. Every single morning at 7 o’clock we sat together; the children were supposed to be at school at 8 o’clock and had to have a word of God with them. Before the service, father would go for a walk to Sankthanshaugen, winter and summer, while mother, however, out in the spacious entrance hall (the hallway), would speak warmly and fervently to the one or more of the poor, mostly men, who came, especially to get their hot porridge and milk, but also to hear the service. I have never understood what drew them there. But they came. When the service began, they moved into the main room with its bench.[12]
Experientialism
Gisle’s emphasis on lived Christian faith-experience is one of the hallmarks of his theology. By this one can easily discern the influence of Scandinavian Pietism—indeed, Gisle would have grown up with the Erik Pontopiddan’s Truth Unto Godliness as his catechetical material, itself a distillation of German Pietist Jakob Spener’s large Simple Explanation of Christian Doctrine.[13]Likewise, the spiritual landscape of Norway had been dominated by Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771-1824), a pietist and revivalistic preacher: “It is therefore my admonition, brethren, that you let your first love burn, especially with a desire for Christ’s teaching and a heartfelt reminder not to let anything distract you from true self-denial, so that you love God and His commandments, and let nothing hinder or avert you.”[14]In fact, Gisle had many influences on his spirituality growing up that helped shape a distinctly practical piety. His father admonishing him, “…keep yourself to the one true God and to Jesus Christ as your one and only sure guide in life.” it was mentioned that he grew up in a home that was generally Pietistic, its spiritual tone having been sent by the Haugean revivals. It was, in fact, a Haugean, Ole Pedersen Moe, who would chart Gisle on a course toward ministry and ordination; Gisle’s biographer, Godvin Ousland, records a first-hand account by church historian H. G. Heggtveit, who knew Gisle personally:
When Johnson entered the aforesaid shop, the old man (Moe) was always very friendly, treated him differently in the little things, which he knew children think about, and took advantage of said opportunity to talk about God’s paternal love and especially about Jesus as the great childhood friend in such a childishly understanding and heart-winning way, that it became a blessing for his whole life.[15]
It was this emphasis on childlike faith, the need for a heart change and a radical discontinuity with the sinful self, that proved to be an ineradicable foundation for Gisle’s theological thought, and it is telling that in his Dogmatik he defines justification not only in legal terms, but with particular attention to familial fellowship language of adoption: “The justification of Christ, then, more closely defined, consists exactly in God’s imputation of Christ’s, righteousness, His simultaneous merciful acceptance of the sinner because of Christ’s merit His forgiveness of his sin, and His adoption of him as His child.”[16] In a similar and winsome fashion, Gisle will define the ethical life of the Christian in his Christian Ethics in familial terms: of love, “The believer’s love for God is essentially the love of the child of God for his heavenly Father in Christ, grateful love in return for the God of love, gratitude to God for His grace revealed in Christ and accepted in faith”; and even of fear, “the believer’s fear of God is thus not a fear of slavery; it is childlike, a child’s fear of its father.” In fact, for Gisle, the whole of the Christian faith is defined by the simple experience childlike trust:
An essential moment in the believer’s childlike love for his God is his childlike trust in Him as a heartfelt acknowledgment of the heavenly Father’s faithfulness and omnipotence, in which he, with abandonment of the heart’s natural self-confidence and defiance as well as of its equally natural timidity and anxious concern in holy Seriousness and joyful Boldness, unconditionally entrusts and surrenders to the will of God the all-governing Father and rests in it with complete security.[17]
Confessionalism
For Gisle, confessionalism was contained in two parts: fidelity to the biblical text, and a secondarily-ordered fidelity to the documents of the Lutheran church. Trygve Skarsten notes of Gisle’s didactic method, “When a question arose, Gisle Johnson would usually respond by asking two questions in return. What does the Bible say? What light do the confessional books of the Lutheran church throw upon the subject?”[18] This was ultimately where Gisle’s own system was regulated, the authority basis by which he worked out his conclusions. In other words, whereas he was intensely experiential in his emphases, these experiences were ultimately reined in by testimony of God through the church. Speaking in somewhat scientific terms, Gisle defines the process of systematic theology this way: “…during the development of its content one must constantly compare the result obtained thereby with the objective testimony of the Church and the Scriptures, so that the retrospect the ecclesiastical consensus and verification of the Holy Scripture becomes an organic component of the systematic endeavor itself.”[19] In fact, in his introduction to his translation of the Book of Concord into Norwegian, Gisle writes this:
The Christian must and will confess his faith both in word and deed. In word: this also applies to him, that, ‘The mouth speaks out of the abundance of the heart’ (Mt. 12:34); he believes, therefore he speaks (2 Cor. 4:13); what he, ‘with the heart, unto salvation” (Rom. 10:10). But also in deed: this ‘with the mind to confess that one knows God,’ and then at the same time ‘denies him with one’s works’—that is no Christian confession (Tit. 1:16). Thus the whole life of the believer in the world can be said to be a ‘Christian confession.’[20]
In other words, Gisle held that the believer’s relationship to God and the world was something organic; like a tree, it grows and flourishes when nourished by the confessed Word, “like a mature fruit from its fertile, vigorous, and wholesome sprout.”[21]
The Gisle Johnson Project
Gisle’s life had a profound impact on his students during a time seismically shifted by modernism, liberalism, and the emergence of globalism. In fact, it was during Gisle life that the “Amerikafeber,” or America-fever, was taking hold of Norway. Millions of Norwegians immigrated to America from the 19th into the 20th century, this year marking the bicentennial of the first wave of Norwegian migration.[22] Thus, although attitudes were polarized during the time, Gisle took a conciliatory approach:
Gisle Johnson sought to instill a different attitude in the new generation of pastors who were being trained at the university. He encouraged many of the young men to go to America and establish a daughter church among the Norwegian immigrants. His influence upon Norwegian-American Lutheranism during its formative years came largely through the 107 theological students and pastors who emigrated to America and brought with them the confessional-pietistic outlook which they had acquired from their teacher, Gisle Johnson.[23]
In fact, his theological writings would be used in Scandinavian seminaries in the Americas from as early as the 1860’s (curiously, preserved via a Swedish edition of his works) and as late at the early-mid 20th century. Sadly, his works were never published in English, and this is the goal of the Gisle Johnson Project: to preserve and make accessible the printed voice of this forgotten yet significant individual, whom Roger Nostbakken refers to as “a theologian of stature and importance.”[24]
[1] Svein Aage Christoffersen, “Gisle Christian Johnson: The First Kierkegaardian in Theology?” in Kierkegaard’s
Influence on Theology, Tome II: Anglophone and Scandinavian Protestant Theology, ed. Jon Stewart(Burlington: Ashgate, 2012).
[2] Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of the Spiritual Life (InterVarsity Press, 1979), 270.
[3] Lovelace, 272.
[4] Lovelace, 279.
[5] Gisle Johnson, Forelæsninger over den Kristelige Ethik (Kristiana: Jacob Dybwads Forlag, 1898),“Second Part: The Christian Faith-Life as the Believer’s active moral life.”
[6] Gisle Johnson, Grundrids of den Systematisk Theologi (Kristiana: Jacob Dybwads Forlag, 1898), s. 71.
[7] Nils Hertzberg, Fra min barndoms og ungdoms tid (Christiana: Aschehoug & Co., 1909) 139-140.
[8] Roger Nostbakken, The theology of Gisle Christian Johnson: an inquiry into its sources, its nature and its significance, dissertation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1962), 227.
[9] Einar Molland, Church Life in Norway (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1957), 37.
[10] Harris Kaasa, The Doctrine of the Church in Norway in the Nineteenth Century, dissertation (Durham: Durham University, 1960), 333.
[11] Trygve Skarsten, Gisle Johnson: A Study of the Interaction of Confessionalism and Pietism (Dissertation; Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago, 1968), 225.
[12] Jonathan Johnson, “Gisle Johnson intime,” Norsk Teologisk Tidsskrift 39 (1938): 224-235 [225].
[13] Erik Pontopiddan, Truth Unto Godliness, trans. Brian J. Lunn (Upsala, MN: Pontopiddan Press, 2025).
[14] Hans Nielsen Hauge, A Godly Contemplation: Prayers and Meditations by Hans Nielsen Hauge, multiple contributors(Upsala, MN: Pontopiddan Press, 2024)
[15] Translated by the present author from Godvin Ousland, En kirkehøvding: professor Gisle Johnson som teolog og kirkemann (Oslo: Lutherstiftelsens Forlag, 1950), 13.
[16] Gisle Johnson, Grundrids af den Systematisk Theologi (Kristiana: Jacob Dybwads, 1897), s. 66.
[17] Gisle Johnson, Forelæsninger over den kristelige Ethik (Kristiana: Jacob Dybwads, 1898), 7.
[18] Skarsten, 47.
[19] Grundrids, s. 5.
[20] Gisle Johnson trans., Konkordibog (Kirstiana: Jacob Dybwads Forlag, 1882), 1.
[21] Forelæsninger over den kristelige Ethik, 8.
[22] “Utvandring 2025,” https://www.nb.no/utvandring2025/
[23] Skarsten, 36.
[24] Nostbakken, 4.