Comfort to Spare (X)

Adolph Tidemand, Haugianere

The people in Tidemand's painting are peasant followers of a lay preacher named Hans Nielson Hauge, who had a significant impact on the Norwegian Lutheran emigrants who came to America during the mid-19th century.

They are meeting in semi-darkness in a room with a high ceiling, not a church, probably a barn, the only light coming from above, what seems a single window in the ceiling and roof. It may be a barn because the followers of Hans Nielson Hauge most frequently met in secret because their meetings were officially banned, illegal, in fact, which means this is an illegal gathering of devout Christian men and women who are having their own form of worship outside of the rule and law of the state church of Norway. They are Lutheran reformers who have lost faith in the preaching and teaching of the ruling elites of the Norwegian state church.

And they are serious, deadly serious. To the right sit two women, one of whom has her head in her hands. No one looks happy. On the far left, a man whose standing may be a bit higher than the others, has before him a well-worn text of the Bible, his hands over it, fingers on the text, as if following it closely.

Adolph Tidemand was not Garrison Keillor. Haugianere was not created to poke fun of these people; there's not a whit of derision or condescension in this group portrait. Tidemand was sincere in his love for the little people of Norway. Here, men and women who are feel stout opposition to the State Church, immensely pious believers in the orthodox Christian faith they've inherited.

This kind of conventicle tradition was not unique to Norwegian Lutherans, nor was it new in the Netherlands in the early nineteenth cen­tury. For a few hundred years, small groups of intensely pious Christian people had provided a kind of worship of their own, a church-like setting in which Dutch lay preachers flourished and devel­oped.

But in the Netherlands just as it had in Norway, the conventicle took on new importance. Where before conventicles had existed alongside the organized church--sponsoring midweek prayer meetings, for example, or Bible stud­ies--now conventicles, especially in the northern areas of the Netherlands began to usurp the place of the organized church.

By 1830 the worship in most conventicles was fairly well-defined. Psalm singing, Scripture reading, and prayer dominated. In addition, the meetings featured regular readings from the confessions and the "old fathers" (John Calvin was first among the patriarchs). Less sturdy and rather unReformed or unCalvinistic views and practices occasionally crept in, stressing a pious spirituality that bordered, in some cases, on at times created an unhealthy fascination with as one’s own salvation.

The conventicles were an interesting phenomenon. Piety they had in spades. Among favored works were volumes of devotional literature already two hundred years old by the early nineteenth century, spiritual study material they weren't getting from the organized church, the State Church--deeply personal and introspective forays into their very souls, adventures in salvation.

The kind of faith that grew from these conventicles is more than a little difficult to describe. What came to characterize those who followed in this conventicle tradition was their fascination with devotional literature that went deep into the nature of spirituality, maybe even deeper than the Bible itself. At best, such meditations offered self-examination and spiritual renewal; at worst, they locked believers into a world so small that all they could make out was the intense drama of their own salvation.

The study of one’s own relationship to God—minute examination of one’s own sin and salvation—can create a kind of idolatry all its own, an intense preoccupation with matters particularly personal. In a way, believers taken too deeply with the state of their own souls have trouble seeing the forest for the trees.

For members of these conventicles, the emphasis on not only knowing but also experiencing our unworthiness before a righteous God raises real doubts that God will actually save them. Fervent and frequent wrestling with the conviction of sin can create an intensity that vastly overshadows the assurance of redemption.

My Grandpa Dirkse died long before I could know him or his history, but the stories that surround him in my mind--he was a very pious man--lead me to believe that he, and likely his family, had roots in the Dutch conventicle tradition. He took the state of his soul very seriously, even tearfully seriously.

That's the man the police met, in the middle of the night, in November, 1949, when they stopped at the house in downtown Oostburg to tell a mom and a dad that their daughter had just been killed in a freakish accident in deep lakeshore fog.

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More to come