page_title: Bo Giertz
section_title: Bishopric
hierarchical_section_title: Bo Giertz / Career / Bishopric
caption_attribution_description: English: Bishop Bo Giertz of Gothenburg. Svenska: Biskop Bo Giertz i Göteborg.
context_page_description: Bo Harald Giertz was a thrice-widowed 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.
context_section_description: It was unusual that one so young as Giertz (43) would be elected bishop. Until his election he had been just an assistant vicar of a small rural parish. Previous bishops had usually been head priests of large parishes or university theologians.
  During his time as bishop (1949–1970) he did not write many major works. As custom dictated, he wrote a Herdabrev (pastoral letter) that outlined his theological program. This “letter” was really a book-length text, in which he outlined the inheritance of the Church of Sweden from three different eras — the first being the early church or New Testament times, the second being the Reformation, and a third on 19th-century revival. In a chapter of this work with the English title “Liturgy and Spiritual Awakening”, he makes a case for the necessity of ancient liturgy in the life of the church. The work shows the importance Giertz put upon the word of God in scripture, sacraments and prayer.
  As bishop, Giertz's service for Lutheranism in Sweden included working with unions, touring the parishes for which he was responsible, and ordaining other priests and bishops. Abroad, he represented the Church of Sweden as second vice-president of the Lutheran World Federation. But Giertz was undoubtedly best known for his controversial stridency against the ordination of women. In 1958 the Church of Sweden voted to begin ordaining women; in strong disagreement with the modern consensus, Giertz responded immediately by organizing the group Kyrklig samling kring bibeln och bekännelsen ("Church coalition for the Bible and confession") and writing numerous articles defending his views in journals and newspapers.
caption: Bishop Bo Giertz of Gothenburg, 1965.
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