The Redemptive Story of Hans – From A Time of Pandemics, War with Russia and Hyper Inflation
This article will deal with a global pandemic, war with Russia, and a following situation of hyperinflation. You might think that I am either a prophet anno 2022 or a conspiracy theorist, but I´m neither one. I am talking about historic events that went down on the European continent and in my country of Norway more than 200 years ago.
So there you have it; I am a Norwegian. Let´s quickly jump back a millennium ago when we were vikings. We conquered Northern Europe and beyond with superior ships and an unhealthy dose of savagery. We discovered North America around the year 1000 AD and even ruled Russia.
Then our viking kings were brought to their knees by God as they accepted Christ. They gave up Odin and Thor and started worshipping the God of the Bible. We turned our pilaging ways towards building stronger communities. Necklaces with Mjølner (Thor´s hammer) were transformed into crosses. The art and craftsmanship from the magnificent viking longships and their carvings were repurposed and redeemed to build thousands of beautiful stave churches. The rune stones previously seen as holding magic powers were now being used to share the gospel. Some vikings even joined the crusades to Jerusalem.
Detail from a runestone carved by vikings between 1040 and 1050 – depicting the nativity scene of the Bible.
Then, in the 14th century, more than half our population was killed by the Black Death that came to Europe by way of Crimea. This plague left Norway in ruins, and subsequently, we entered a Scandinavian union that increasingly led Norway to become a nation under the rule of Denmark for several centuries. With the reformation, the church became the extended arm of the king of Denmark to rule cities and villages all over Norway, and the religious practices of the church became more and more secularized. Alcoholism was a huge societal problem, and very few people attended church services on a regular basis.
Let´s move forward to 1796. We were just past the French revolution (1789), and Napoleon was on the brink of pulling Europe, including Russia, into a war, while millions were dying from smallpox and famine. The continent was on the onset of hyperinflation, and on to the scene came a young peasant illegally preaching the word of God while not being an ordained priest. His name was Hans Nielsen Hauge, and by God´s grace, he brought God´s freedoms to the nation of Norway. His methods were preaching, writing, and the incorporation of businesses.
Even today, more than 200 years later, you can measure different spiritual demographics in Norway based on which regions he visited and not. And in every supermarket in Norway, you will still find products that have a direct lineage back to his entrepreneurial efforts.
It All Started Out in the Field in 1796
One spring day, at the age of 25, young Hans worked the fields of his father while singing the hymn "Jesus, I long for Thy blessed communion." When he came to the second verse, he sang:
"O take Thou captive each passion and win me,
Lead Thou and guide me my whole journey through!
All that I am and possess I surrender,
If Thou alone in my spirit mayst dwell."
This led to a complete surrender that captured the heart of young Hans, and this is how he later came to describe this experience:
"Then my mind became elevated to God in such a way that I lost my own sense of presence as well as what was going on with my soul, because I was outside of myself. I felt as if the world was nothing to regard, and I regretted not having served our great, good and almighty God more. My soul felt something supernatural, divine and blissful. It was a glory that no tongue can express. Nobody can take this away from me, because I know that from this moment on, my spirit was filled with everything that was good. Especially, I could sense a heartfelt and fiery love for God and my neighbor. My mind was renewed, I mourned all my sins and felt a powerful urge that other people would share in this grace with me. A strange desire grew in me to read the Bible and the teachings of Jesus. I could sense a new light of understanding it, and to bring together all the teachings of God´s men into this one goal: Christ has come as our saviour, and we should by his Spirit become born again, repent, and be sanctified more and more towards the character of God to serve the triune God alone and to embetter and prepare our eternal souls towards eternal glory. Then it appeared to me as if the world itself was lowered down into evil, and I was stricken with grief. I asked God to awaiten the punishment so that some could be redeemed. I really wanted to serve God, so I asked Him to tell me what to do. Then it resounded within me: You shall profess my name to the people, urge them to repent and to seek me while I am available, call me as long as I am near, touching their hearts, so that they can turn from darkness to light."
The conservative, Lutheran bishop, Andreas Aarflot, in his doctoral dissertation in 1970, described Hauge´s experience with God out in the field as a baptism in the Holy Spirit—putting Hauge´s experience alongside the pentecostals that would emerge on the world scene one hundred years later.
Although young Hans just had a few weeks of elementary school education, he was an avid reader. He had most of his theological influence directly from the Bible and from the writings of Martin Luther, and he was also greatly influenced by the piety movement out of Halle in Germany, by way of Pontoppidan and others in Denmark. Still, his self consciousness and strong convictions as to being called so specifically by God were a clear distinction between himself and his contemporaries.
What Was the Situation in Norway at the Time of Hauge?
The end of the 18th century was a hard time for Europe—gigantic volcanic eruptions, enormous climate changes, harvests gone wrong, famine, and disease. All these external factors were a trigger for the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars that took place during these years. Politically, the independence of the United States with its first president, George Washington, in the same year as the onset of the French revolution sent strong signals of change, as a significant percentage of Norway´s population emigrated to the US.
Hauge was a child of his time—born at the dawn of the age of enlightenment and at the very onset of the industrial revolution. And the enlightenment was a great equalizer where positional privileged power was challenged by merit based power.
What Did Hauge Do?
We can only summarize a few of Hauge´s many accomplishments in this article. His ministry was very holistic with a wide area of topics and angles.
He Wrote
Let´s start with his writings. He wrote and published 33 books or pamphlets, and he wrote at least 500 letters that were distributed among his followers. The books were printed in approximately 250,000 copies in his lifetime—in a population slightly below 900,000. Many people were taught to read through Hauge´s books. Even though he had no academic training, his writings were maybe his most effective tool, and he also employed people to travel the country, ensuring a wide distribution.
He Travelled
Hauge travelled by foot and by boat through most of the long country of Norway and even to parts of Denmark. On his own two feet, he walked more than 10,000 miles during his most active period from 1796 to 1804. And everywhere he went, he started businesses or mentored other entrepeneurs during the day and preached the gospel at night. Through his travels, he left behind small communities all over the country that continued to gather and share the gospel—forming a movement of prayer houses that lives to this day.
He Preached the Word of God
Preaching the Word of God and calling people to repentance and to accepting Christ as their Lord and Savior was always the foremost calling upon Hauge´s life. He preached, and he trained others to preach. In his active years from 1796 to 1804, he experienced a lot of persecution from the clergy, but in his later years from 1814 till his death in 1824, something had shifted, and he received a lot of clergy visitors to his home to offer them mentorship and counsel—including bishops and professors of theology. It is typically estimated that around 25% of the population of Norway became born again Christians due to the direct efforts of Hans Nielsen Hauge.
He Started Businesses
Hauge started around 30 businesses himself in as diverse industries as farming, fisheries, real estate, grain mills, sawmills, import/export, wholesale, papermills, printing houses, bookbinders, book publishers, newspapers, book sales, brick factories, weaveries, mining for metals, lodging, salt factories, potash factories, tanneries, shipyards, shipping, and banking. In addition to his own businesses, he helped birth around 120 others through encouragements, investments, or mentoring.
He Was Imprisoned
At the time, if you were not an ordained priest, it was illegal to preach the Word of God. Because of this, Hauge was imprisoned 11 times. Most of them were for a few days or up to a month, but in 1804, he was imprisoned for 10 years with no sentence. This broke his health, and his ministry could no longer include travelling after he got out in 1814.
He Broke Chains and Set People Free
Despite being imprisoned himself, and loosing a lot of his personal freedoms, his ministry can be summarized as someone who lived out Isaiah 58 regarding the merits of true fasting:
“to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke”
For the Norwegian people at the time, except for a few privileged working on behalf of the king in Denmark, there were many liberties that were not offered to people:
You could not move freely around the country. Hauge defied that.
A lot of people were illiterate. Hauge helped people learn to read, which was important for them to become more aware and to address their own situation.
You could not choose your own profession. It was mostly decided for you at birth. Hauge helped thousands to break away and choose their own destiny.
You were not free to share the gospel. Hauge defied that as well.
You were not free to trade. Hauge gained rights to trade and helped his movement through that privilege.
Women did not have even close to equal rights. Hauge instated women as preachers and as leaders in his movement one hundred years before they received the right to vote in Norway.
The country was not free to choose its own leaders. The Haugians took an active role in establishing the constitution and the independence of the country of Norway.
Haugian politicians always spoke against privileges and monopolies and always favored free enterprise and free trade with opportunities for everyone.
The Haugians – the Legacy of Hauge
During the course of the 19th century, the followers of Hauge, sometimes called the Haugians, became quite influential in establishing the Norwegian constitution and in shaping Norwegian parliament, as well as in starting businesses. The Haugian entrepreneurs weren´t aware of modern terms like ESG, stakeholder perspectives, impact investments, multiple bottom lines, etc., but they were building off of Hauge´s perspective articulated like this in one of his many books:
“In our businesses we try to shine our light upon the world so that they may see that we are God´s children in all necessary deeds.”
From this statement, it became clear that putting bread on the table and providing jobs were necessary deeds for a Christian. Provision and human flourishing were integral parts of the Haugians´ calling, and working hard became an important foundational value. Being saved was something that embraced all of life. And since Christ died for everyone, this also became a great equalizer for Hauge. Everyone was valuable, and everyone ought to contribute to the best of their abilities. The Haugians employed people with physical and mental disabilities and gave everyone living wages. Hundreds upon hundreds of businesses were started. Several still exist today.
In modern times, more and more new companies are reviving the Haugian tradition. Some of them are affiliated with the Christian Economic Forum, and some have even incorporated these foundational Haugian corporate values into their bylaws (source: https://haugeparagrafen.no):
Surrendering to Christ
Loving our neighbor
Building society
Many have tried to learn from and systematize the ethics and practices of Hans Nielsen Hauge over the years. But it is this author´s belief that you can not achieve what Hauge did by copying his deeds or his patterns of behavior. You need to consider what caused the transformation in Hauge´s life, and in my opinion, the key is the full commitment and surrender to Christ in all areas of life that gave Hauge great success—albeit through many hardships and personal losses. It was the work of the Spirit in and through Hauge that made him serve and persevere in such an astonishing way. And the Spirit was allowed to work in and through Hauge the moment he put his self interest on the altar—that day in the field in 1796.
Yet again, the European continent experiences pandemics, war with Russia, and strong inflation. Again, our societal fabrics are shaken at their core, churches are being closed down, religious liberties are being challenged, and in the western world, fewer people are becoming born again Christians. What seemed solid a couple of decades ago, or even just a couple of years ago, has easily become fragile. But as we can read in Ecclesiastes, nothing is new under the sun. History will repeat itself because mankind will never fundamentally change. But we can take comfort in the fact that God never changes, and what He has done in the past, He can do again—if we are only willing to submit our lives to His perfect will. If God could do it once through Hans Nielsen Hauge, He can do it again through you and me. Will you surrender it all?
Article originally hosted and shared with permission by The Christian Economic Forum, a global network of leaders who join together to collaborate and introduce strategic ideas for the spread of God’s economic principles and the goodness of Jesus Christ. This article was from a collection of White Papers compiled for attendees of the CEF’s Global Event.