Bo Giertz

Bo Harald Giertz (31 August 1905 – 12 July 1998) was a Swedish Lutheran theologian, novelist and bishop of the Gothenburg Lutheran Diocese from 1949 to 1970.

By the time he became bishop, he was already quite well known in Sweden and elsewhere both as an author and as a priest.

He worked hard to promote western Swedish Pietism, an outlook that strongly resembled Neo-Lutheranism.

Mostly it was a piety that took Scripture seriously, though not in a fundamentalist, literalist sense, and that centered Christian life on sacraments and prayer.

Giertz's combination of pietist pastoral care with High Church Lutheran theology, which can also be noticed in his novels, gained for him a wide readership and made his novels as well as non-fiction books about Christian faith popular in Scandinavia.

Giertz wrote more than 600 works but is known in the English-speaking world mostly for his book The Hammer of God.

Giertz was born in Räpplinge on Öland, an island off the east coast of Sweden.

His father, Knut Harald Giertz, was a well-known doctor, the son of John Bernard and Augusta Giertz; for two years he taught surgery at Uppsala University.

His mother, Anna Ericsson, was a daughter of Lars Magnus Ericsson, the founder of the Ericsson telephone company.

During his childhood his mother was agnostic and his father an atheist.

Nevertheless, for the sake of tradition and custom, Giertz was baptized at 2 months of age shortly after his family moved to Uppsala.

Giertz stated that his father eventually became Christian after attending the Sunday services that were obligatory in order for the teen-aged Bo and his siblings to be eligible for confirmation; although Giertz was now formally enrolled in the church, he remained an atheist, read widely from his father's library of atheist literature and argued with the priest in favour of evolutionary biology.

His parents took his early education seriously.

Every summer his father would hire a governess from Germany or England, and they were to speak to the children only in German or English, respectively.

In 1917, despite the fact that World War I was still continuing, the 12-year-old Giertz was sent to a language camp in Germany.

For several years after his return he did summer work for his father, assisting at Knut Giertz's surgical clinic and documenting the proceedings in Latin for the clinic's logbook.

In 1924 Giertz graduated from the Norra Latin senior secondary school for boys in the Norrmalm district of Stockholm.

In the hope that Giertz would follow his father as a surgeon, Knut Giertz encouraged him to enrol in medicine at Uppsala University.

Perceiving a conflict between his atheism and his latent moral sense, and concerned at the immoral behavior he had observed among some of his atheist peers, he became involved with a Christian student association.

After attending some lectures by Natanael Beskow, a non-ordained pacifist preacher who led Förbundet för kristet samhällsliv ("the Swedish association for Christian social life"), Giertz became convinced of the existence of God and the historicity of Jesus.

Changing his plans and course of study at Uppsala, Giertz quit studying medicine and took up theology instead.

Though very unhappy about this, his father accepted Giertz's choice but declared that if he were to switch majors again he was not to expect further financial help.

During a semester abroad to study Etruscan archaeology in Italy with Axel Boëthius, an audience with Swedish Queen Consort Victoria left a deep impression upon him.

Born in Germany, the queen had moved to southern Italy, establishing a residence on the resort island of Capri, from where she would visit Sweden in the summers.

The queen had met Knut Giertz when she had taken ill during a royal tour in Umeå; on that occasion the elder Giertz had accompanied the queen on the train back to Stockholm.

They met again in 1927 as convalescents in Rome some time after Knut Giertz had himself developed a heart defect through having been infected by a patient he had been treating for streptococcus.

Having previously known of Bo Giertz through her connection with his father, the queen asked him during his audience if he desired to become a theology professor.

According to Giertz, when he told her he only really wanted to be a priest, she made him promise to be a "true priest."

Returning to his studies in Uppsala, Bo Giertz was mentored by New Testament exegetics professor Anton Fridrichsen; he later declared that all his books had been written in an endeavour to disseminate what Fridrichsen had taught him, ideas which he believed to be in marked contrast, for instance, to the efforts of German theologian Rudolf Bultmann to demythologize Christianity of accreted concepts of angels, demons, miracles, heaven and hell — all of which Bultmann considered as significant barriers to people's understanding and accepting the inner message of Jesus.

In those years from 1932 to 1935, during a time when Sweden was rapidly becoming more secular, he tried to visit every Swedish school to present Christian faith through lectures and debates.

He spent considerable time away from home and wrote numerous articles, becoming embroiled in church politics.

Ordained in 1934, he served for a year as a vacancy priest for two congregations.

As priest in Östra Husby parish, he was further influenced by the Pietism that had swept through that congregation 70 years earlier through the influence of revivalist author and preacher Carl Olof Rosenius.

It is not as surprising as it might seem that Rosenius's influence was still felt; he had been a looming presence, for instance, in the household of artist David Wallin as he grew up in the same parish a generation earlier.

Giertz, too, fell under his posthumous sway, to the extent that the Latin phrase Verbum crucis Dei virtus ("The message of the cross is the power of God", 1 Cor. 18) came to embody his work; it was later to be the motto he adopted as bishop.

During this time Giertz began to take seriously Schartauanism, a form of Pietism that had developed in western Sweden — teachings which had been greatly influenced by the works of Henric Schartau — and became inspired by Bokenäs vicar Gösta Nelson.

By now he had come to feel that he was falling short of God's moral dictates; whereas he had previously thought forgiveness of sins grounded in faith alone to have been a "hopelessly naïve" position, he now came to embrace this doctrine of the western Pietists and to take solace in it.

Bultmann had visited Uppsala shortly after Fridrichsen and Giertz had returned from Palestine, a trip Bo's father had paid for, and which Giertz later described as part of the setting for his 1948 book Med egna ögon ("With My Own Eyes").

According to Giertz, Rudolf Bultmann treated Christianity as a philosophical system rather than a lived experience, and could not, therefore, appreciate Fridrichsen's explanation of how visiting Palestine and seeing people living and working much as they had during the earthly ministry of Jesus had deepened his understanding of scriptures and Christianity.

After completing seminary training, Giertz spent three years as a travelling consultant for the Lutheran church's high school student association.