At the recommendation of my former literature professor, Gene Veith, I picked up the 1941 novel The Hammer of God, by Swedish Lutheran bishop, Bo Giertz. Gallons of ink have been spilled about the purported Calvinism of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick or Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, but where might one go to find a novel that could be recognizably characterized as Lutheran? After all, the Lutheran heartlands of Germany and Scandinavia have become increasingly secularized over time, and American Lutheranism has had far less influence on the cultural zeitgeist than the broadly Reformed tradition. According to Bottum, the slow eclipse of Protestantism in the West has correlated with increasing disinterest in the novel as a subject of serious cultural significance.īottum’s insights, in turn, led me to contemplate a question I’d never really considered before. Early last year, just before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down cities and countries across the globe, I read Joseph Bottum’s book The Decline of the Novel, which contrasts the “chanson fiction” of the medieval Catholic imagination-which stressed the integrity of social roles, the accomplishment of duties, and the performance of civic scripts-with the “roman fiction” of later Protestantism, which emphasized the personal journey of the individual narrator.
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