His writings have served to keep alive the strong impression he made in person.

The clarity, cogency, and content of his lectures was impressive then. I met the late Swedish Bishop Bo Giertz only once, when he spoke to the Lutheran clergy of the metropolitan New York area fifty years ago. Pfatteicher, Associate Pastor, First Lutheran Church, Pittsburgh Adjunct Professor of Sacred Music, Duquesne University The spiritual intensity of Scandinavia portrayed in this book may remind one of Ingmar Bergman, but with more faith and an ultimately more satisfying piety.' Read this book to learn theology, to be reminded of the strength of the historical Church, to be led more deeply into prayer and devotion. Large theological doctrines are here given a local habitation in memorable individuals, each with distinctive strengths and limitations.

We discover with the curate Savronius, 'Strange, how like us the people of old were!' (96) and a devout rector reminds his curate and us, 'It is a great thing to be an inheritor' (225). It is a book of profound and moving biblical theology that remains strikingly relevant to the Church in the twenty-first century, a Church that is still careless of its rich inheritance and too often ignorant of its best traditions. This powerful historical and theological novel, set in one parish in Sweden in the years around 1810, 1870, and 1941, examines convincingly the continuing struggle against those persistent forces that would undermine and destroy the authentic faith of the Church. 'At last the splendid concluding chapter of Bishop Bo Giertz's Hammer of God is available for English readers, and the symbolic shape of the book is complete: three parts, each divided into three chapters.

The hammer of god giertz