The Country Boy who Fathered a Nation, Part 2

Hauge's time as a travelling evangelist were busy and fulfilling. A magnetism of God's love seemed to draw people to him. He collected some of their testimonies and published them as tracts, to reach out to others. He made friends in many places and groups of followers formed. One particular characteristic among them was love.

It is something that God's children have among them by the Spirit, Hauge wrote. They know each other from the first moment of meeting. It shows in their spiritual talk, their gentle and humble character and moral, simple and faithful words. One of Christ's shepherds easily recognises his own, and they recognise him.

Some young 'Haugians' were entrusted with local leadership, preaching tours and the sale of books. These men had very different backgrounds and education, but all of them were stamped with Hauge's burning decisiveness for Christ.

Alongside this, Hauge encouraged representatives of the rural population into politics, launching what has been described as the first Norwegian democratic movement. This was enough to gain him enemies. Norway had strict laws regarding sectarian preaching and 'vagrancy'; both of these were now used against him.

In 1799, notices were read in churches warning against unauthorised preachers. Some Haugians were chased out of churches, beaten and imprisoned. Altogether, Hauge himself was arrested ten times. He once spent nine years in prison before his case was even heard! The sheriff of Hallingdal thought it would be fun to send a prostitute to Hauge's cell; he looked her in the eyes with compassion and she began to sob and confess her sins!

His final imprisonment lasted 10 years, 3 of them in total isolation, first in an underground cell reserved for drunks, and finally in a small cell that has now been reconstructed at Norway's Open Air Museum outside Oslo. He wrote to his friends:

If I had 100 lives, they would all be willing for chains. Prison does not last for ever. I wish you well on the road of salvation. It is my prayer, my longing, my burden of care and my joy to find you in life eternal.

However, Hauge was by now a national figure and his long imprisonment was becoming a scandal. What's more, the authorities still needed his business and industrial expertise. Once, they freed him for a time because they needed his advice on a marine desalination project! Finally, his sentence was commuted to a fine, which his friends paid. Hauge was free, broken in health but filled with God's vision. He was ready for the final stage of the adventure.

The Country Boy Who Fathered a Nation, Part 1

The name Hans Nielsen Hauge (pronounced Ho-ger) is largely unknown outside his native Norway. This is surprising, given the far-ranging social, economic, political and spiritual impact of his life.

It all began in 1796, when the 25-year-old farmer's son was ploughing a field. He suddenly felt an overwhelming experience of the real presence of God. He burned with love for Jesus and for mankind. 'My mind became so exalted that I can scarcely express what took place in my soul', he wrote later. 'I asked Him to reveal to me what I should do. The answer echoed in my heart: "You shall confess My name before the people; exhort them to repent and seek Me while I may be found and call upon Me while I am near; and touch their hearts that they may turn from darkness to light".'

He first shared the good news with his brothers and sisters, who were all converted. Then he set off as an itinerant evangelist. He developed a pattern of walking great distances every day, holding three or four meetings in villages and reaching large numbers of ordinary people. In the 8 years he was free to do this, it is estimated he covered 15,000 km. He often knitted as he walked; the gloves and socks were then given away to the poor who needed them. Many people came to saving faith in Jesus as a result and then they themselves went out to preach the gospel. A grass-roots revival began to spread among the rural communities.

Hauge was a humble and practical man, full of initiative. He saw the need to educate and equip the common people as well as save their souls. He had an amazing capacity for work, which, combined with his pioneering spirit, made him an entrepreneur to rank with the best.

For Hauge, running a business and preaching went hand in hand. He started a company in Bergen in 1801 to secure a sound economic base for his gospel activities. Thereafter, there was no stopping him! Over the next eight years, he founded fishing industries, brickyards, spinning mills, shipping yards, salt and mineral mines, paper mills and printing works. These created jobs for people who needed work and taught them how to make a living for themselves. He delegated the daily management to those he thought were the most capable, but he was the strategist who planned and motivated the whole enterprise. The profits were always used to invest in new activities.

Hauge became an inspiration to all who wanted to take Norway out of the 'middle ages' and into a new day. New agricultural and industrial methods were developed, and literacy rates rose. A new confidence led to greater economic freedom as Christians were challenged to rebuild society. Norway began to change.

Preacher Burns His Sermons And Catches Fire Himself!

Destitute of the fire of God, nothing else counts; possessing fire, nothing else matters.

Samuel Chadwick was born in the industrial north of England in 1860. His father worked long hours in the cotton mill and, when he was only eight, Samuel went to work there, too, as a means of supporting the family. Devout Methodists, they attended chapel three times on Sunday, and as a young boy, Chadwick gave his heart to Christ. Listening to God's word week by week, he often felt the inner call to serve Jesus. It seemed impossible, as he was poor and uneducated, but in faith he made preparations. After a twelve-hour factory shift he would rush home for five hours of prayer and study.

At the age of 21 he was appointed lay pastor of a chapel at Stacksteads, Lancashire. He found the congregation self-satisfied, but Chadwick threw himself into the work with great optimism. He had been trained to prepare well-researched and interesting sermons as the sure way to bring in the crowds. He recalled later: "This led unconsciously to a false aim in my work. I lived and laboured for my sermons, and was unfortunately more concerned about their excellence and reputation than the repentance of the people."

Soon, however, his sermons were exhausted and nothing had changed. Staring defeat in the face and sensing his lack of real power, an intense hunger was kindled within him for more of God. At this point he heard the testimony of someone who had been revitalised by an experience of the Holy Spirit. So, with a few friends he covenanted to pray and search the scriptures until God sent revival.

One evening he was praying over his next sermon, when a powerful sense of conviction settled on him. His pride, blindness and reliance on human methods paraded before his eyes as God humbled him to the dust. Well into the night he wrestled and repented, then he got out his pile of precious sermons and threw them on the fire!

The result was immediate – he was baptised with the Holy Spirit and with fire [Luke 3:16]. "I could not explain what had happened, but it was a bigger thing than I had ever known. There came into my soul a deep peace, a thrilling joy, and a new sense of power. My mind was quickened. I felt I had received a new faculty of understanding. Every power was vitalised. My body was quickened. There was a new sense of spring and vitality, a new power of endurance and a strong man's exhilaration in big things."

The tide turned. At his next service, seven people were converted ("one for each of my barren years"), and he called the whole congregation to a week of prayer. The following weekend most of the church was filled with the Holy Spirit and revival began to spread through the valleys. In the space of a few months, hundreds were converted to Jesus, among them some of the most notorious sinners in the area.

The pattern was repeated over the next few years as Chadwick moved to various places. 1890 saw him in Leeds, where the power of God was so strongly upon him that the chapel was full half an hour before the service began, and police had to control the crowds. Chadwick records: "We were always praying and fighting [the devil], singing and rejoicing, doing the impossible and planning still bigger things. The newspapers never left us alone, and people came from far and wide." Within a few years, the chapel had to be demolished and a substantial Mission Hall built.

Always a man of the people, Chadwick would spend his Saturdays mixing with local workers. Once, when his wife was away, he teasingly invited anyone who was lonely to come for Saturday tea. He expected about a dozen. Six hundred turned up! Yet God had already catered: one church member was a baker and had been awoken by the Lord with the order to bake for all he was worth!

Chadwick was a man of prayer and urged others to it too. "The one concern of the devil is to keep Christians from praying,” he wrote. “He fears nothing from prayerless studies, prayerless work and prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil, mocks at our wisdom - but trembles when we pray!"

The final phase of Chadwick's life was spent as Principal of Cliff College, a Methodist training school for preachers, and it was here that he wrote his famous book, The Way to Pentecost, which was being printed when he died in 1932. In it we read: "I owe everything to the gift of Pentecost. For fifty days the facts of the Gospel were complete, but no conversions were recorded. Pentecost registered three thousand souls. It is by fire that a holy passion is kindled in the soul whereby we live the life of God. The soul's safety is in its heat. Truth without enthusiasm, morality without emotion, ritual without soul, make for a Church without power."

Ancient Odes to Jesus, part 2

There is a Helper for me: the Lord... He became like me, that I might receive Him. I trembled not when I saw Him, for He was gracious to me. Like my nature He became, that I might understand him; and like my form, that I might not turn away from Him.
Ode 7:3-6

As we delve a little deeper into the earliest Christian hymnbook, the 'Odes of Solomon', it becomes clear that the writer was familiar with the biblical book of Psalms. It is nowhere exactly quoted, but in many places there are direct parallels. To give just one example, Psalm 84:10 reads: For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand elsewhere, and in Ode 4:5 we find: For one hour of Your faith is more excellent than all the days and all the years.

What is also clear is that the writer, almost certainly a Jewish Christian in Syria, was very familiar with the writings of the Apostle John. If, as is generally agreed, the Odes date from the very end of the 1st century, it is well possible that the writer was a disciple of John.

Some of the odes are meditative expansions of Johannine themes like light and dark. John 1:1-18 presents Jesus Christ as "the light of the world": In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it [v.3-4]. Ode 15:2 says: He is my Sun and His rays have lifted me up; His light has dismissed all darkness from my face.

The general tenor of the Odes is similar to John's gospel in its meditative, worshipful response to the truths of Jesus. See, for example, the odist's treatment of the incarnation [Odes 7,19], death [Ode 28], resurrection and ascension [Ode 42].

A fine example is Ode 27, which is only three verses long and which clearly grew out of worshipful contemplation of the Cross:

I extended my hands and hallowed my Lord,
For the stretching out of my hands is His sign,
And my stretching upward is the upright cross. Hallelujah.

To read the Odes of Solomon for yourself, follow this link. The Odes have of recent times been set to music - for more details, visit The Odes Project.

Ancient Odes to Jesus? part 1

I am putting on the love of the Lord...
I have been united to Him, because the lover has found the Beloved.
Because I love Him that is the Son, I shall become a son.
Indeed, whoever is joined to Him who is immortal, shall truly be immortal.

These striking words come from what has been hailed as the earliest Christian hymn book. Prior to 1909, nothing was known of the Odes of Solomon except one quotation by Lactantius (†320). Then a Syriac manuscript was found containing, among other writings, 40 odes. Subsequent finds have shown that there were originally 42, though because of the fragmentary nature of the papyri, Ode 2 and part of Ode 3 have not survived.

I remember from my youth the odes read by comedian Frankie Howerd in the TV series Up Pompeii ("titter ye not!"). I later discovered that an ode is simply a piece of lyrical poetry written for a particular occasion, which in Greek at least had a fixed form. Scholars quickly established, however, that the Odes of Solomon, are not from a Greek stable but a Jewish one. Dating evidence suggests late 1st - early 2nd century, at any event before the Bar-Kokhba Revolt of 132-135, when Christian Jews were evicted from synagogues.

These verses are not odes other than in a general sense, then, and there is nothing to link them to Solomon except by analogy of phrasing with the Song of Solomon in the Bible. For these Odes are clearly Christian (at one time scholars thought Gnostic, but the consensus today is that they are orthodox) and praise the person and attributes of Jesus Christ. Was the titular use of Solomon's name a way of safeguarding the documents in a highly volatile political time when radical Jews were highly suspicious of Jewish followers of Christ?

What makes the Odes particularly exciting is that they clearly emanate from a community of Jewish disciples of Jesus, almost certainly from Syria. Church history from earliest times has majored on Gentile Christianity to the extent that the average reader can forget that Jewish believers continued at all beyond the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. I hope, in a few further posts, to explore these matters more and give some more quotations from this amazing early Christian resource.

Christians and Hymns, part 7

One of the reasons why music did not take a central place in early Christian worship is that the central element of their meetings was the sharing of the bread and wine, the Communion or Eucharist, whether in the context of a church service or in the agapé, the 'love feast' in homes. Ignatius was made bishop of Antioch in AD 67, when many of the apostles were still alive and active, and he describes the Christian church as "a Eucharistic community" which realised its true nature when it celebrated Communion.

In turn, this emphasis might be due to the belief among first generation Christians that the sharing of the bread and wine was to be done "until Jesus returns", which they believed would be soon, perhaps in their lifetime. When this did not materialise, a Christian liturgy for worship began to develop, described for us by early apologists like Justin Martyr and Hippolytus. It involved greeting, reading from scripture, responsive (antiphonal) singing, baptisms, a sermon, prayers, the offertory, the communion and a blessing.

The first hymn with actual musical notation which we possess, the "Oxyrhynchus hymn", is from the 3rd century. At the same point, the Apostolic Tradition, attributed to the theologian Hippolytus, shows that the singing of psalms with Alleluia as the refrain was a feature of early Christian agape feasts.

It wasn't until around 375 that antiphonal singing of psalms became popular in the Christian East; in 386, Ambrose of Milan introduced this practice to the West. Around 410, St. Augustine described the responsive singing of a psalm at Mass. Sources are few and inconclusive regarding how Christian chant / song developed, but we do know that by 678, Western (Roman) chant was being taught at York. Distinctive regional traditions of Western plainchant arose during this period, notably in the British Isles (Celtic chant), Spain (Mozarabic), Gaul (Gallican), and Italy (Old Roman and Ambrosian).

We can safely say that by this stage, sung worship was an established part of Christian services, albeit without instruments. For the arrival of the earliest church organs we must wait until the mid-11th century.

Christians and Hymns, part 6

Eusebius of Caesarea was a 4th century bishop of Caesarea who wrote a history of early Christianity based on a number of sources, some of which no longer exist. He quotes Philo, a 1st century Jewish historian, who made mention of Christian all-night vigils and the hymns which they recite, and how while one man sings in regular rhythm, the others listen and join in the refrain.

The phrase "hymns which they recite" is particularly interesting. The pagan official Pliny, quoted in an earlier post in this blog, used the same phrase (Latin carmen dicere). Does it suggest that hymns were spoken rather than sung? Philo, quoted above, suggests that singing happened but still uses "recite". Historian Ralph Martin has studied this phrase in a number of historical contexts and you can find his article here.

We could usefully bring in Augustine of Hippo here, who in the 4th century described church singing in Alexandria as more like speaking than singing. Perhaps there was a specific reason for this. Pipe, harp and drum were intimately linked to the pagan cults, e.g. of Pan, with their sensuous worship and often shameless revelries. Christians, mindful of the apostolic direction that everything should be done decently and in order [1 Corinthians 14:40], avoided musical instruments. Jerome, also 4th century, wrote that a Christian maiden ought not even to know what a flute is, or what it is used for.

Liturgy (an order of service with fixed elements) came in early to Christian worship. there is evidence of a 'Jerusalem' liturgy, instituted by the Apostle James, and an 'Alexandrian' liturgy attributed to Paul's fellow-labourer John Mark. Singing was a key element, but in the stylised manner of Jewish psalmody and response singing. As John Chrysostom puts it:

David formerly sang in pslams, and we also sing today with him. He had a lyre with lifeless strings; the Church has a lyre with living strings. Our tongues are the strings of the lyre, with a different tone, certainly, but with a more seemly piety.