CAMINO DE PERFECCIÓN

Abstract

religious revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries known in America as the Great Awakening had its parallel among the Readers of Sweden and other Scandinavian countries. Largely a movement among rural laity, it attracted some of the clergy as well, as in the case of Osterunda parish, Uppland, in which the pastor, Johan Jacob Risberg, was known widely as a lasareprast, i.e., a pastor sympathetic to the Readers. Among those most eager for theological conversation was his parishioner Erik Jansson (1808-50), a young farmer who in 1830 had had a vision calling him to be a preacher. To preach without a theological degree was then illegal, but Jansson was encouraged in his endeavors by his pastor and acted accordingly. There is no real understanding of how Erik Jansson arrived at his most extreme theological positions, a change in attitudes that seems to have occurred in the Spring of 1844. One view has it that he went to those extremes as a way of psychologically separating his followers from their immediate culture, so as to make the move to America more acceptable.1 Certainly, his teaching focused more and more on the set of beliefs known as perfectionism, a view denying that humanity is inherently sinful (Original Sin). It sees all sin as originating outside mankind and, as a consequence of this, draws the conclusion that human beings are free of sin and that to acknowledge otherwise is to accept sin. Believing themselves free of sin, Janssonists consequently could not join in the Confession of Sins, which was a condition of admittance to Holy Communion, and if they did not commune at least once a year, they breached civil as well as church law. Thus, acceptance of Jansson 's teaching meant the surety of conflict with civil and religious authority. In this perfectionist aspect, Jansson's teaching has many points of contact with Primitive Methodism, but it is unclear whether or not Jansson knew much about that movement (Elmen 37-39, 43-47). If Jansson's teaching had stopped with the doctrine of perfectionism, the friction between his followers and local authority might have in time abated. Indeed, there was a growing movement then among members of the Swedish parliament, as well as in the press, toward religious and civil toleration, a movement that would ease restrictions on internal and external travel and on religious expression, among other issues, through proposals to drop passport regulations and to scrap the Conventicle Edict of 1726, which forbade religious meetings without the presence of a pastor. Puritanical movements were no new thing, after all, especially not in northern Sweden, but Jansson's went much further than other move-