Josef Bexell som själasörjare

Josef Bexell as soul-carer
Josef Bexell (1815–1897), Lutheran rector of Långaryd in the diocese of Växjö, was widely known as a soul-carer, both in public and in private. His sermons were not only heard in Church, but circulated and read in private, and questions from his private soul-care were answered in public preaching. The private soul-care was performed both in private encounters and in letters.
His method was a Pietist diagnostics of souls, inspired from Swedish clergymen such as Anders Nohrborg and Henric Schartau, but it may also be connected to academic theologians such as C.W. Skarstedt, inspired by the German J.A. Bengel. This method also permeates Bexell’s public sermons.
In his own development, Bexell was influenced from both the followers of the ascetic Pietist J.O. Hoof, from the milder piety of former missionary Cornelius Rahmn, and from the partly evangelical circle around Emilie Petersen at Herrestad, though he criticised radical Evangelicalism. Since he had no personal experience of pure Moravianism, he did not follow Henric Schartau and his pupils neither in criticism of Moravianism in special, nor in their distance to all Christian societies in general.
Besides his many conservative features, Bexell did in his individual diagnosis construct an alternative modernity. The point of soul-care dominates not only in his private and public soul-care, but also in his exegesis and in the social order of catechismal examinations in the homes.