15 Facts About Bo Giertz

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

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

Bo Giertz was born in Rapplinge on Oland, an island off the east coast of Sweden.

Bo Giertz's mother, Anna Ericsson, was a daughter of Lars Magnus Ericsson, the founder of the Ericsson telephone company.

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

Bo 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 Bo 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.

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

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

Bultmann had visited Uppsala shortly after Fridrichsen and Bo Giertz had returned from Palestine, a trip Bo's father had paid for, and which Bo Giertz later described as part of the setting for his 1948 book Med egna ogon.

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

Bo Giertz was a pioneer on advocating regular celebration of Sunday Mass, something that was not usual in the Church of Sweden.

Bo Giertz exhorted ministers to follow his own practice of regular prayer according to the Divine office.

Bo Giertz supported the military campaign, sending money and materials and, after the Moscow Peace Treaty had ceded one-eleventh of Finland's territory to the Soviet Union, receiving Finnish refugees.

The work shows the importance Bo Giertz put upon the word of God in scripture, sacraments and prayer.

In 1958 the Church of Sweden voted to begin ordaining women; in strong disagreement with the modern consensus, Bo Giertz responded immediately by organizing the group Kyrklig samling kring bibeln och bekannelsen and writing numerous articles defending his views in journals and newspapers.