born in Eksjö, Sweden, the son of a lieutenant-colonel and
a homemaker. The peak of Sundén’s academic career came
late in life. He became a professor at the age of fifty-nine and
retired eight years later, a much-appreciated mentor and
friend to half a dozen postgraduates, some of whom became
professors in the psychology of religion. Sundén remained
active as a writer and speaker at symposia, enjoying great aca-
demic success during the last twenty-five years of his life. He
died at the age of eighty-five.
Sundén was educated in Stockholm, at Norrmalm
upper-secondary school and University College, obtaining
his master of philosophy degree in 1930. He continued his
studies at Uppsala, where he graduated from the Faculty of
Theology. His rare gift for languages—he spoke German,
French, and English fluently—made it easy for him to learn
Hebrew, ancient Greek, and Latin. After only two years of
study he received his master’s degree in theology in 1932.
The following year he was ordained a priest in the Swedish
Lutheran Church.
Sundén was given a personal chair in the psychology of
religion at the University of Uppsala by special parliamentary
decree in 1967, after having worked for years as a priest, a
teacher of religion in secondary schools, a psychologist in the
state police academy, a psychologist of religion at the Univer-
sity of Stockholm, and a docent in the history of religion,
including the psychology of religion, at Uppsala. He was a
brilliant speaker, in demand all over Sweden. His lecture
tours gave him profound knowledge of the questions that
concerned ordinary people. Far removed from scholastic ex-
ercises, he always had a deep empathy and respect for ordi-
nary popular piety. This approach and insight proved to be
decisive in his later research and academic career.
In his doctoral thesis on the philosopher Henri Bergson,
La théorie bergsonienne de la religion (1940), Sundén critically
reviewed the then-prevailing theories in relation to Bergson’s
two sources of morality and religion: one rooted in intelli-
gence that also results in science and its static, mechanistic
ideal, and the other based on intuition, finding expression
in the free creativity of art and philosophy and the mystical
experience of the saints. It was the latter that caught the eye
of the future psychologist of religion and occupied his
thoughts for the rest of his life—his last article was on Teresa
of Avila.
Sundén asked simple but profound questions. How is
it that people experience existence as religious? Why is it that
some people conceive of existence in terms of pure chance,
some speak of the interplay of contingencies, while still oth-
ers prefer to use the word fate? Then there are those who
perceive an intention in the experiential, contact with the
“other” or “another.” How is an experience of the world in
religious terms psychologically possible?
The answers to these questions are to be found in Sun-
dén’s main contribution to the psychology of religion, his
magnum opus Religionen och rollerna (Religion and roles,
1959). Here he elucidates his understanding of religious ex-
perience through role theory, which is based on the discovery
that all sacred texts contain descriptions of pious people who
have acted in relation to God or gods. The biblical tradition
provides people with behavior and role models of how Chris-
tians have been in dialogue with God and experienced his
presence. When reading the Psalms, people are inadvertently
absorbed into the mythic figure of David, thereby finding
themselves within a specific interactional system, the human
role in relation to the divine partner, God. The thinking is:
as God saved then, he will also do so now if people trust and
rely on him. No matter how hopeless the situation may seem,
the promises are eventually expected to be fulfilled.
Contrary to previous theories, Sundén argues that reli-
gious experience does not consist of specific feelings, nor is
it independent of cultural tradition. It does not emerge from
empty nothingness or from any inner mysterious psychic
layer. It is rather a matter of perception, the process whereby
sensory stimulation is translated into organized or meaning-
ful experience: the intuitive recognition of an existential
“truth.” Learning is a decisive factor, providing un système
aperceptif for the soul to be touched and moved by a person-
al living God. Religious experience is thus reproducible and
not the subjective phenomenon to which some scholars have
wanted to reduce it.
Sundén integrated the structural-analytic, the interac-
tionist, and the perceptual analytical models from the major
research traditions within the social sciences into a psycholo-
gy of religion, and he based this on his profound knowledge
of the history of religions and contemporary theories and
methods. His great knowledge of religious texts, and his em-
pathy for them, enabled him to fashion role theory into a
powerful hermeneutical tool, especially for the psychological
interpretation of autobiographies and other types of personal
documents, such as diaries, journals, and letters.
Sundén has rightly been regarded as the founder of the
psychology of religion in the Nordic countries. When his
magnum opus was translated into German as Die Religion
und die Rollen (1966), his ideas quickly found fertile soil in
Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium, as well as in the
United States in the late 1980s. For many years Sundén
chaired the International Association for the Psychology of
Religion. His role theory has had the same influence among
European psychologists of religion as Gordon Allport’s
religious-orientations theory had among American psy-
chologists.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hjalmar Sundén has written extensively on role theory, but the
most elucidating of all his presentations still remains the first
essay he ever wrote on the subject in his collection Sjutti-
otredje psalmen och andra essäer (Psalm seventy-three and
other essays; Stockholm, 1956). For those who cannot read
Swedish, his article “Saint Augustine and the Psalter in the
Light of Role-Psychology,” published in the Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion 26, no. 3 (1987): 366–412 (anSUNDÉN, HJALMAR 8851