Church History is one of the classic disciplines of Theology. P.G. Lindhardt (1910-1988) became the discipline’s first professor in 1942 at the young Aarhusian faculty. He had recently been awarded a doctorate for his thesis on pietism and its administration. As a student of J. Oskar Andersen, he had learned historical source criticism, the so-called Erslev method, at the University of Copenhagen, but he was to further the development of this rather rigid method. In 1951 he criticized, for example, the historiography of the revivalist movements, which he claimed was determined by the Augustinian view of history (that God acts in history, that he leads his people forward towards a destiny). It was easy for the revivalists to interpret their history as the result of God’s will, of God’s hand and guidance in history. Inspired by the social historian Hans Jensen and influenced by Hans Kirk’s novel Fiskerne (“The Fishermen”), Lindhardt took a materialistic view of history. The hard and risky life at sea and in the cabins prepared the ground for the Indre Mission (“Inner Mission”) movement, which promised “a better spring”. Meanwhile, the cheerful and satisfied Grundtvigians, who benefitted from the large grain and pork exports to England, were already living in the golden years. This was presented by Lindhardt in the book Vækkelse og kirkelige retninger (“Revival and Ecclesiastical Movements”).
Such polemical use of church history is not found in the work of Jakob Balling (1928-2012), who in 1963 was employed as professor of Early and Medieval Church History. He had worked on the relationship between Emperor and Pope in the Middle Ages but became increasingly interested in theology and poetry as well as in historiography and universal history. He read works such as Dante’s and Milton’s in their original languages with the students. His book De unge skal se syner (“The young ones shall see visions”) from 1997 was the result of a collaboration with two students (Ulla Morre Bidstrup and Torben Bramming) in connection with a university exercise. It was an annotated translation of the Passion of Perpetua (the account of the suffering and death of the young woman Perpetua during persecution in Carthage in the early 3rd century), a text that is particularly intriguing, as it may contain autobiographical records from Perpetua and thus a rare female point of view on confession and martyrdom from ancient times.
Traditionally, there was one professor and two associate professors of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, while more recent and contemporary periods are handled by one professor and three associate professors. This staffing gradually disintegrated around the year 2000, and in 2023, two associate professors and an assistant professor oversee research and teaching in Church History at the Department of Theology.
When Jens Holger Schjørring (b. 1942) was appointed professor of Church History in 1997, there was no period limitation. Thus, one professor now had to cover the whole of church history. Schjørring’s work focused especially on the 20th century, specifically the churches in Eastern Europe under Communism and African Church History. He had a particularly warm interest in international ecumenical work.
Per Ingesman (b. 1953), who replaced Schjørring as professor in 2009 and held the position until 2021, also had to cover the entire history of the Church. Ingesman’s main interest was the Danish Church History of the late Middle Ages. Regarding this, he found important new source material in the Vatican archives in Rome, which led to his 2003 dissertation on the Papal Supreme Court, the so-called Rota Romana, and its handling of Danish cases in the Middle Ages. In the past decade, he has taken an interest in the Reformation and confessionalization in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The two associate professorships in Ancient and Medieval Church History are held by Nils Arne Pedersen (b. 1959) and Jakob Engberg (b. 1971). With his dissertation The Sermon on the Great War. Investigations of a Manichaean-Coptic Text from the Fourth Century (1996), Nils Arne Pedersen struck the tone that would make him internationally recognized as one of the leading researchers of the Manichaeans, their Coptic and Syriac writings, and the Old Church refutation of Manichaeism – expressed in the fact that from 2017-2022, he has been president of the International Association of Manichaean Studies. In his work with Manichaean texts, e.g. within the FKK-funded project Biblia Manichaica, which he led, Pedersen combines careful exegesis and text-critical work with the church historian’s ability to contextualize the textual material both socially and liturgically. Among the topics within ancient Church History that he has dealt with are apologetics and the criticism of Christianity, Athanasios’ Festal Letters, and how the early Christians developed an aversion against suicide. In recent years, Pedersen has also dealt with a subject from the 19th century: Grundtvig’s baptismal theology.
Jakob Engberg came to Theology at Aarhus University from History at the University of Southern Denmark, where he had written a PhD thesis on the early Roman Christian persecutions, which was published in 2007 as a book: Impulsore Chresto. Opposition to Christianity in the Roman Empire c. 50-250 AD. In 2009, he was employed as an associate professor in Church History with special responsibility for coordinating the Master’s program “Religious Roots of Europe.” Since 2012, Engberg has been the head of the Center for the Study of Antiquity and Christianity – an interdisciplinary center for research into ancient Christianity, which has continuously attracted many foreign visiting researchers on research stays as well as external grants. He himself has participated in externally funded research projects, e.g., the project Migration of Faith: Clerical Exile in Late Antiquity, which has contributed important new knowledge about the relationship between the Christians and the Roman authorities approx. 300-600.
For several years, the associate professorships in more recent and contemporary periods of Church History have been held by Carsten Bach-Nielsen (b. 1955) and Liselotte Malmgart (b. 1968). The latter had written a PhD thesis at the University of Copenhagen on the development of Danish diakonia in the 20th century (2002) and joined Church History in Aarhus as an assistant professor in 2005. As a permanent associate professor from 2009, her research was characterized by an effort to see the latest Church History in Denmark from a European perspective. She has continued to focus on diakonia but has also worked with The Danish Church’s role in society and its relationship with other churches. Since 2012, Liselotte Malmgart has served as head of studies for the Department of Culture and Society and is therefore currently not overseeing research and teaching tasks.
As a church historian, Carsten Bach-Nielsen is a student of P.G. Lindhardt, but has his own profile as a researcher. It is not least characterized by his ability to link the theological discipline of Church History and the humanistic discipline of Art History, in which he has a minor. Bach-Nielsen has mainly worked with the Early Modern Period. Here, he is familiar with both Danish and general European Church History, and he has written many peer-reviewed articles on this. To a greater extent than any other Aarhusian church historian, however, he has also emphasized communicating his knowledge to a wider readership. He has written several books for a non-specialist audience, in which he has utilized his extensive knowledge of Art and artists to turn Church History in a cultural-historical direction. Among them can be mentioned Kingo CCC. Studier udgivet i 300-året for salmedigterens død (“Kingo CCC. Studies Published on the 300th Anniversary of the Psalmist’s Death”) (2002); Sømanden og døden - en ikonografisk skitse om de druknede og de reddede i nordisk kirkekunst (“The Sailor and Death - An Iconographic Sketch of the Drowned and the Saved in Nordic Church Art”) (2009); and, most recently, the highly praised account of the Danish cultural history of the Bible: Bibelen i Danmark. 500 års kirke- og kulturhistorie (“The Bible in Denmark. 500 Years of Church and Cultural History”) (2019).
However, Bach-Nielsen also has great competence in and interest in Church History after 1800. For example, he has taken up a topic almost completely neglected in Danish Church History: The Church History of the Danish West Indies prior to the sale of the islands in 1917. Carsten Bach-Nielsen retired from the lectureship in 2020.
Since 2022, Mattias Sommer Bostrup (b. 1989) has held an assistant professorship in Church History with a main focus on recent and contemporary periods. In 2019, Sommer Bostrup received his PhD from Aarhus University for a thesis on the Danish reformer Niels Hemmingsen and his writings, which aimed to order the society according to the new Lutheran theology. Since then, he has dealt with subjects related to Pietism and the 19th century; for example, studies in confessional controversies on the Schleswig-Holstein Wadden Sea Island Nordstrand. He currently works with questions related to war, nation, mission, and borders in Danish and Southern Jutland Church History since the interwar period.
