Feb. 17, 2019, column:
Historic church provides glimpse into early years of Christianity in Norway

By Mike Haynes

            The tall, dark, wooden building rising out of the snow looked more like a chieftain’s meeting hall in the “Vikings” TV show than a church. My wife, Kathy, and I tilted our heads back to see the sixth roof at the top, a cupola stacked above other steep layers of wood, with each level a little smaller and a little higher up.

The Gol Stave Church in Oslo, Norway, built

around the year 1200, is located in the

outdoor Norsk Folkemuseum, or Norwegian

Folk Museum. (Photo by Kathy Haynes)

            It was the Gol Stave Church, part of the Norsk Folkemuseum, or Norwegian Folk Museum, in Oslo, Norway, one of about 30 such buildings left in the country. When we visited it on a cold afternoon last month, its multiple roofs were covered in snow contrasted with its dark, rough-hewn walls.

            There’s a reason for the Viking look. The region of Europe next to the North and Norwegian seas was home to the Norse gods. Odin, Thor, Freya and the rest held sway until Viking seamen began encountering Christians in Ireland, England other parts of Europe for 300 years starting in the 700s. Some Norsemen were converted, and when Olav Haraldsson became king of the united nation of Norway in 1016, he forcibly made the country Christian.

            Olav was killed in the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030, and legend has it that a year later, his body still had not decayed. He was named a saint.

            The Gol Stave Church was built around 1200, and like many such buildings, it includes hints of the pagan religion such as dragon heads protruding from the roofs and runic symbols on a wooden pillar that say, “Kiss me, because I am so sad.”

The small interior of the Gol Stave Church in Oslo,

Norway, includes a mural of the Last Supper.

The church was built around the year 1200.

(Photo by Kathy Haynes)

            But it’s a Christian church, with a painting of the Last Supper above the altar. When the Reformation spread in the 1500s, most of Scandinavia, including Norway, became Lutheran, so the stave church in Oslo is Lutheran, as is 71.5 percent of the Norwegian population, according to the CIA Factbook. Even the Sami people in the north, Norway’s indigenous, reindeer-raising group, are mostly Christian.

            Of course, like much of Europe, much of that 71.5 percent is in name only. Churches in Norway aren’t especially well-attended on a weekly basis, but they remain relevant, if nothing else for their architecture. In 1965, the “Arctic Cathedral” was completed in Tromso. It looks like an A-frame with a dip in the middle and reminds me of the beautiful Air Force Academy chapel in Colorado Springs.

And in 2013, the “Northern Lights Cathedral” opened in Alta, one of the northernmost cities. With an outer layer of titanium sheets intended to reflect the Aurora Borealis, the striking building spirals up to a bell tower. Those two photogenic churches seat only 600 and 350 people, respectively.

 Kathy and I tend to notice churches in the places we get to visit, and Norway has its share of more traditional brick and stone places of worship. Our tour group visited one small, white, hexagon-shaped church about 200 years old. On one sanctuary wall hung 16 colorful, paper angels, and red

The massive posts, or staves, that support

Norwegian stave churches give the buildings

their name. Shown here is the interior of

the Gol Stave Church in Oslo, Norway.

(Photo by Kathy Haynes)

Norsk hymnbooks rested on a shelf ready to be picked up, so it’s an active church. But those medieval wooden ones and the modern wonders tend to catch your attention.

As a boy, British writer and professor C.S. Lewis became enamored with “northernness” after he saw illustrator Arthur Rackham’s romantic paintings of Norse gods and goddesses and heard Wagner’s music, “Ride of the Valkyries,” also related to Norse myths. He was infatuated with the heroic tales of love and war in the cold North.

Lewis didn’t become a Christian until his early 30s, and 25 years later, in his book, “Surprised by Joy,” he said he had adored the elements of the Norse religion without actually believing them. He realized that the wonder and excitement of the pagan stories was similar to what the true God wants us to experience, but pointed in God’s direction. Lewis thought the Norse stories had prepared him for Christianity, which he labeled “the true myth.”

The Gol Stave Church in Oslo, Norway, built

around the year 1200, is one of about 30 such

churches surviving. (Photo by Kathy Haynes)

“Sometimes I can almost think that I was sent back to the false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to Himself,” he wrote.

I don’t think Lewis, who died in 1963, ever made it to Norway except in his imagination. Kathy and I were blessed to see the remnants of the old ways and evidence that the “new life” isn’t dead yet.