The Norwegian Emmaus Road to New York City

Coming to New York City in America was no easy passage in the 19^th Century. But sometimes God stamps your passport. Often, the believers and missionaries who came to New York were the product themselves of great religious reformations and revivals in their own countries. One such nation-shaking revival happened in Norway. It all started with a farmer in a poor area of Norway.

The original Norwegian settlers in Brooklyn were mostly poor and unacclimated to American culture. Consequently, they were very vulnerable to personal and social disasters. When a Norwegian shipping company went bankrupt or one of the ships sank, the crew and their families in Brooklyn were thrown into desperate straits. They had very little savings. Sicknesses and accidents also forced Norwegians into starvation in the city without the knowledge of English to ask for help from American charity and medical agencies. (See historical note on Norwegians in NYC.)

One resource that the Norwegians brought with them was a “go forth” mindset that looked to God to be with them on the journey as the resurrected Jesus was with two disciples on the Emmaus Road. Luke, a historically orientated follower of Jesus, recounted, “Now that same day, two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem… As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them.” (from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 24).

A farmer in Norway had a similar experience in the fields of rural Norway. Out of that experience, Hans Nielsen Hauge started one of the most significant spiritual and social changes that the country had gone through. Some say, out of this revival came modern Norway.

The immigrants to New York came with this story, gained encouragement, and became influential in promoting spiritual and social improvements among New Yorkers. For them, Easter was both a celebration of the two Emmaus Road experiences: the one in Israel; and the other in Norway.

Imagine rural Norway in the late 18^th Century.

Norwegian farmers used hymns while they plowed their fields. No radios or buds were pipping into the ear muzak for the soul. No, the tunes were sung along with the rhythmic gait of the horses.

On a clear day two weeks before Easter, on April 5th in 1796,  a melodious chant-like hymn “Jesus, O to taste sweet union with you,” rocked along with the sound of the plow biting the dirt. The plower, Hauge, moved through the second verse where it cries, “I will freely surrender if You alone dwell in my soul.” With the plaintive sound of that verse passing out of his mouth, Hauge was caught up, as it were, into a world outside of himself. The real presence of God, Heaven, a blinding illumination. He forgot himself and the plow as he entered into some indescribable glory. This heavenly experience became the foundation of the farmer’s life and rippled through Norway to Brooklyn several decades later.

“No one can take this away from me,” he later wrote, “because I know that from that moment my spirit was full of good things.”

The overflowing Spirit took Hauge out of the world and then set him back down with an inner-worldly mystical force, “a passionate and burning love for God and my neighbor. My mind was renewed…”

This mystical bliss threw Hauge into a reformation of Christian life in Norway and a crusade to change the world with an ethical life that was disciplined and entrepreneurial in all fields of endeavor. The evangelist and his followers preached and founded innovative businesses and organizations to reorder the world for a blessed life. The reformers’ rhetoric and successes seem to be a pure case of what Max Weber called “the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.”

Hauge quickly came into conflict with the established Protestant church. He recalled, “Then, I heard in my inner being, ‘You shall confess my name before the people, exhort them to repent and see me while I can be found…” He started by sharing with his family, several of whom received what Hauge called “a changed mind.”

He could hardly sleep and barely ate or drank. He read the Bible all day. Friends dropped by to talk with him, curious about his experiences. Hauge discovered that as he talked with them they were deeply moved in the spirit.

However, the rumor mill characterized Hauge as an uneducated farmer’s boy battling the world of his betters. It seemed foolish. Hauge caught the backdraft of these stories. He wrote, “I began to doubt” that people would listen. “Most of them scorned my words and mocked me.”

The dissonance between his joy and their extreme disapproval threw him into depression. “Then, I called out to God,” he remembered in one of his writings, “and cried so heavily that the tears just flooded out.” Frankly, he wanted to just curl up and die. During those moments, he experienced the divine presence again in his inner being.

“But then I heard very clearly in my inner being, ‘Do you really want to die and so benefit sin in the future…and know this, I have often used those considered insignificant in the world to spread my Kingdom. I have called shepherds, fishermen, and tax collectors ‘to follow my plow…Only be faithful to your call and continue in all patience.’”

From then on, Hauge never rested except when he was in prison. He walked practically the whole country, singing and preaching. In two months, a revival in southern rural Norway got underway. Then, in the summer of 1796, the evangelist wrote a pungent booklet, “A Meditation on the Folly of the World” attacking the state church leaders.

The booklet exploded him into the national scene because there was widespread dissatisfaction with the state church. It was heavy-handed against dissenters, particularly those of modest means, compromised with foreign influence (Norway only became independent in 1814), and coldly theoretical in its teachings.

A secularist impulse had also taken over the religious schools in the 18th Century so that Jesus was even seen as the opponent of reason. It was not unusual to hear purely secular sermons on how to live a reasonable, non-superstitious life along with contempt for “common people.” Peasants were also legally restricted from gathering or traveling.

In Hauge’s retort, he emphasized that “Scripture alone” should be the way of knowing God’s mind. The baptism of the Spirit would unlock the mind and heart to an awareness of Scripture’s relevance and the overwhelming love that it brings to the reader.

Toward the end of the book, Hauge wrote movingly of his struggles and his own salvation. Thousands of common people saw their lives mirrored in Hauge’s. The evangelist quickly produced other books, one after another, so that he was soon the most-read author in Norway.

In 1797, Hauge began his travels, holding open-air meetings, sometimes four times in a day. His preaching was a mixture of the theological and the practical. He spoke to the heart and then would give farming and business advice. He convinced ordinary people that they could live a religious life as farmers or workers.

All over the country, Hauge formed friendships based upon a feeling that he was giving them “an undeniable taste of Truth” in the heart. One testified, “I had never heard anyone speak as he did, and I marveled at this love and gentle spirit” (from Haugen’s On Religious Feelings and their worth, 1817).

Hauge was also a shrewd travel writer in his observations on the character and conditions of Norwegian peasants in different parts of the country. He noted in one of his writings that wherever he went, he “observed carefully the people’s frame of mind, their speech, mode of life, their clothing – briefly, their inner and outer disposition as far as I could comprehend it.”

These were years of food shortages and starvation in Norway. The evangelist saw these conditions in every part of the country. He provided a strategy of recovery that depended upon the overflow of God’s love into the care for the poor’s spiritual and material needs. Hauge tried various arrangements by which Christian fellowship could be mixed with economic actions.

One of his interests was the upgrading of medical attention to the health of the workers and peasants. Out of such concerns came the Norwegian nursing deaconess movement and the founding of hospitals like the Lutheran Hospital in Brooklyn (now called New York University Langone Hospital). Great things happened when the Emmaus Road Norwegians stepped ashore here in the city.

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Historical note on Norwegians in New York City from the 19^th Century to Today

At one time 200,000 Norwegian Americans lived in the city, mainly Brooklyn, and made their churches the center of their lives. Many Norwegian seamen and dock workers settled in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn. Indeed, up to 50% of the sailors on American vessels were Scandinavian (Anon 1891). Others concentrated in the Bay Ridge, Dyker Park, and Sunset Park areas. Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park was known as “Lankaus Blvd.”

The main early churches in Brooklyn were the Norwegian Seaman’s Church, founded in July 1878 on the corner of Van Brant and President Streets, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church at 94 Hale Avenue, and Trinity Lutheran Church in 1890 on 411 46^th Street.

Census Note on Norwegians in New York City Today

According to the American Community Survey (2014-2018), the center of gravity for Norwegians has changed to Manhattan, which has 8,457 people of Norwegian ancestry.

Brooklyn is still second in the number of people with Norwegian ancestry with 8,114. Sunset Park has only 541 residents of Norwegian ancestry while Bay Ridge/Dyker Heights had 1,548. Third, is Staten Island with 4,143 residents of Norwegian ancestry. Fourth, Queens has 3,102 residents of Norwegian ancestry.

The total number of NYC residents of Norwegian ancestry in 2018 was 24,554. The number of Norwegian ancestry residents is now slowly growing.

Painting Note on “The Haugeians, or Low Church Devotion” from the National Museum, Oslo, Norway:

Inspired by Hauge’s work, Adolph Tidemand depicted the preacher in a traditional open hearth dwelling (or røykstue), standing on a stool in the golden mean of the composition.

The word of God is symbolized by the book the preacher holds in front of his chest. He is speaking to a mixed congregation of the old and the young, women and men.

The smoke from the stove gives the daylight streaming in from the smoke hole in the roof an atmospheric effect. The light varies in intensity from one person to the next, showing the effect of the word on each individual – from remorse and anguish to reassured contemplation.

The warm flames of the stove seen in the background beneath the preacher correspond to his ardent dedication. The slanted roof and the positioning of the figures give the painting a pyramidal composition.

Further reading note on Hans Nielsen Hauge:

A.M. Arntzen. 2011. The Prophet of Norway. Hans Nielsen Hauge. Wipf and Stock.

Alv. J. Magnus. 1978. Revival and Society: An examination of the Haugean revival and its influence on Norwegian society in the 19th Century. Magister Thesis in Sociology at the University of Oslo.

Alison Heather Stibbe. 2007. Hans Nielsen Hauge and the Prophetic Imagination. Ph.D. dissertation. The University of London.

Steinar Thorvaldsen. 2010. A Prophet Behind the Plough. Eureka Digital 1-2010.