Date of Award

2010

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

College

Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary

Program

Religion, Church History PhD

First Advisor

Jerry A. Moon

Second Advisor

P. Gerard Damsteegt

Third Advisor

Trevor O'Reggio

Abstract

This dissertation reconstructs chronologically the history of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Norway from the Haugian Pietist revival in the early 1800s to the establishment of the first Seventh-day Adventist Conference in Norway in 1887.

The present study has been based as far as possible on primary sources such as protocols, letters, legal documents, and articles in journals, magazines, and newspapers from the nineteenth century. A contextual-comparative approach was employed to evaluate the objectivity of a given source. Secondary sources have also been consulted for interpretation and as corroborating evidence, especially when no primary sources were available.

The study concludes that the Pietist revival ignited by the Norwegian Lutheran lay preacher, Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771-1824), represented the culmination of the sixteenth-century Reformation in Norway, and the forerunner of the Adventist movement in that country. Thus Adventism in Norway was a direct outgrowth of Norwegian Pietism. Adventism was essentially pietistic in its emphasis on the Bible only as the rule of faith, and its insistence that biblical doctrine must be not only believed, but practiced in the life. The best evidence suggests that the discovery of the seventh-day Sabbath by four families of southern Norway, who became the nucleus of Norwegian Adventism, did not result from any contact with other Sabbath keepers, but was derived directly from their own study of the Bible, and their faith in the Bible as the binding word of God as advocated by Hans Nielsen Hauge.

Subject Area

Pietism--Norway--History, Seventh-Day Adventists--Norway--History, Hauge, Hans Nielsen, 1771-1824

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/dissertations/144/

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