Swedish Church Law 1686

Attempts by the state to create an ecclesiastical office with political authority failed due to the resistance of the bishops and clergy.

Since the predecessor law from 1571, children's schools for reading, writing and counting had already been an obligation in the cities, but this law resulted in the need for every village and rural community to organise basic schooling for their children, normally by paying a läromäster ('school master') or läromoster ('schoolmadam') to hold lessons in the local vicarage, and from this point forward, illiteracy was close to eradicated in Sweden.

Changes were made, for example, during the Age of Liberty, by Gustav III, through the 1809 Instrument of Government, the 1868 Church Council Regulation and the Dissenter Acts of 1860 and 1873.

In our Kingdom and the countries under it, all shall confess, solely and exclusively, the Christian doctrine and faith, which is founded on the Holy Word of God, the Prophetic and Apostolic Writings of the Old and New Testaments, and written in the three symbols of faith, Apostolic, Nicene and Athanasian, as well as in the unchanged Augsburg Confession of 1530, re-adopted in the Upsala Concilio, 1593, and declared in the whole, so-called, Libero Concordiae.

With the 1686 Church Law, the rest of the Book of Concord was added to the older formulation from the Uppsala Synod, and until 1992 the following confessional writings were valid in Sweden: