The Hammer of God

I just finished an extraordinary novel by Bo Giertz, a Swedish Lutheran pastor from the mid-twentieth century. The book is called The Hammer of God and is actually a collection of three novellas, all somewhat related to the other. Each short story is about young pastors recently entered into parish ministry and the challenges, revelations, temptations, and victories they experience. The first is set in 1820, the second in 1880, and the third in 1940-1. The pattern is fairly easy to discern, right around 60 years in between each story.

This is straight up theological fiction, much in the manner of Marilynne Robinson and her incredible Gilead novels (there is a third on the way!). It is difficult in these books to draw a line between story and theology, and it is clear that one was not intended.

The three stories are parallel in a number of ways. As I have said, each focuses on a young pastor freshly out of seminary in their first ministry assignment, and the challenges they face as they learn what it is to shepherd God's people. Each is something of a religious liberal, spouting the "new ideas" of their time. Each receives an awakening through witnessing the death of a traditional believer, or a conversation with an elder, or through reading the Word of God seriously for the first time. After the awakening each emphasizes strict obedience to Christ and is dismissive of their elder pastors as libertines (for having a bit of brandy at night, or some such minor infraction) and basically make the new believer error of imagining themselves to have discovered Christianity. Thus they fall into self-righteousness. They are then guided by these elder pastors into the grace of Jesus as superior to the works-based Christianity they preach. 

As I started the third novella earlier this week I was a little frustrated. Not this again, I thought. Liberal pastor, awakening, struggle with legalism, finding grace with the aid of a wiser older pastor. But then it occurred to me that Giertz's point in writing three such stories from contextually different vantage points is to emphasize the eternal nature of this battle and this progression for young, university-educated ministers. When new converts become really excited about Christianity they often become very legalistic. They judge everyone who has a drink or watches an R-rated movie (two pastimes I prefer to combine), and they mistake their ignorant zeal for true faith. What needs to happen is almost a second conversion. Away from works to the great grace of Jesus Christ. And from there you live righteously to glorify your savior, not to satisfy your own sense of religious duty. 

What is more, in a culture that deifies youth and youthful pursuits and zeal, it is these seasoned pastors who have often experienced the same cycle in their own faith who guide these young ministers into true, grace-based faith in Jesus. What young people need is not necessarily more zeal, but much, much more wisdom. And wisdom only comes with gray hairs. Giertz, a young man himself when he wrote this book, keeps this in view.

Though it is never explicitly mentioned, the title of the book comes from the prophet Jeremiah: "Is not my word like fire," declares the Lord, "and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?" (23.29). And indeed each pastor chronicled in this book must confront the Word of God, both what it says about salvation and how they will choose to read it. The last story focuses on a young pastor who had believed that Scripture must be read historically. What he meant by this was for himself unclear and it caused certain of his parishioners to chuck any doctrine they found unpalatable on the premise that it was merely historically arbitrary and no longer required of believers (sound familiar?). He is rebuked in this belief at a church service for "readers," congregants who read the Bible and take its commands seriously, after the man he has invited to speak, a new convert, talks about how everyone must be guided by the light of conscience rather than God's Word. After he speaks and they sing a hymn, an older pastor from a neighboring parish gets up to speak and these are his words. I found them wholly beautiful, and they make a fitting epitaph for my review of this book:

"The stone foundation of the human heart and the Rock of Atonement on Golgotha are the two mountains on which a man's destiny is determined. If he remains on the stone foundation of his natural state, he is lost. Only one way leads from the stony foundation to the Rock of Atonement, a firm stone bridge built once and for all. It is the Word. Just as only the divine word can convict man of sin and lay bare the soul to its rocky base, so nothing but the Word can reveal the truth about the Redeemer. The external Word is as inescapably necessary for the gospel as it is for the law. No one who is awakened in earnest would ever be able to believe in the forgiveness of his sins, if God had not built a bridge leading to the Rock of Atonement. The supports on which it rests are baptism, the Lord's Supper, and absolution; the arches are wrought by the Holy Word with its message of redemption. On that bridge a sinner can pass from the stony ground that condemns to the Rock of Salvation. But should a single one of the arches be allowed to fall, then is man condemned to remain eternally under the law's condemnation, either as a despairing sinner or as a self-righteous Pharisee."