A lot of people think we’re behind the times at the seminary/Bible school where I work, and right now they’re right, at least technologically. Our computer network has been down since Monday. The timing couldn’t have been much worse for me. This is the week I’d planned to order textbooks for the fall, and I use the net extensively for that job. I can do most of it the old-fashioned way, I guess, with catalogs and phone calls, but I expect the network will be back up before I get far into that process, so I’m… delaying.
I’ve been looking at a book in the archive, a selection from the writings of the Norwegian lay evangelist Hans Nielsen Hauge. I’ve written about him before, and will probably write about him again. He was an important historical figure in a fairly unimportant country, so he’s not very famous except among Norwegian Lutherans. But he was a remarkable man, a true original and a Christian to his toes, and reading his story in his own words only reinforces that opinion in my mind.
[Short overview, for those of you who don’t want to read the Wikipedia entry: Hauge was a farmer’s son with a minimal education. In the 1790s he began traveling as a lay evangelist, urging people to repent, be converted, and live lives worthy of Christ. He also wrote books of edification, which he got printed and mostly gave away. His activities were illegal, and Hauge was arrested repeatedly, finally being sent to prison from 1804 to 1811. This broke his health and shortened his life. His movement, however, proved to be revolutionary. Under his teaching, the common people began to improve their education and to get involved in business, industry and politics.]
The first thing that impressed me was that he was an essentially cheerful man (remarkable in a Norwegian, but there it is). The stereotype of the Haugeans, built up over generations (and generally true), is of extremely dour people who frown on all pleasure and love to find opportunities for dressing their neighbors down. Hauge was definitely a Type A, obsessive about using every moment profitably (he even learned to knit so he could make stockings as he traveled on foot from place to place. I’ve seen a pair of his stockings in the Folk Museum in Oslo), but he was an optimistic Type A. When faced with a challenge, he assumed things would go well. When he met people, he assumed they would treat him well. He never feared the law, because he was convinced his good king would never oppose God’s work. He was a genuinely charming personality.
In a famous incident, during one of his early, temporary arrests, he was confined in a bailiff’s house. A girl was sent in. Hauge says she was sent to “mock him.” I have to assume the idea was seduction, to get evidence of hypocrisy against him. Most of the Haugeans I grew up with would have had a fit at that point. But Hauge didn’t lecture the girl. He spoke to her quietly, and in a few minutes she was weeping.
Then they sent in a crowd of people, led by the bailiff’s wife and a fiddler. The fiddler struck up a dance tune, and the rest of the people started dancing. The bailiff’s wife took Hauge’s hand and invited him to dance.
Hauge said, “I’ll join you if you’ll have the fiddler play this song—” and he began to sing an old hymn (he’s said to have had a beautiful voice). The dancing stopped immediately, and Hauge began to talk to the people. He doesn’t say that he converted any of them, but he says they began to take pity on him, and some said they wished they were like him.
I have found no incident in the story, so far, where Hauge “dresses anybody down.” He had a spirit of gentleness, always seeing Christ in people, even the crudest and most depraved. And it was that vision of Christ in others that made him bold to speak the gospel to them.
Joel Osteen