Few hymns have crossed as many borders as “How Great Thou Art.” Behind it stands a Swedish lay preacher who, one summer afternoon, watched a storm give way to calm over a bay and could not keep to himself what he felt before God’s creation.
Carl Gustav Boberg was born on August 16, 1859, in Mönsterås, in southern Sweden, the son of a carpenter. As a young man he worked as a sailor and was touched by the spiritual awakening movements sweeping the country at the time.
He studied at the Swedish Mission Covenant school in Kristinehamn and, between 1882 and 1889, preached for the Mönsterås Mission Association. He supported himself, however, as a teacher of handicrafts, a common trade among lay preachers who received no fixed salary from the churches.
In 1885, on his way home from a service near Kronobäck, he was caught in a sudden storm over Mönsterås Bay. When the sky cleared and the bells of a nearby church rang out in the distance, he wrote the poem “O Store Gud” that very night, published in the local newspaper in March 1886.
The text, a kind of paraphrase of Psalm 8 on the greatness of God in creation, gradually took on a Swedish folk melody and began to circulate in local hymnals. From 1889, Boberg became editor of the magazine Sanningsvittnet, where he published most of his more than sixty poems and hymns.
From 1912 to 1931, he held a seat in the Upper House of the Swedish Parliament, also serving from 1921 as a state auditor. During this public phase, aligned with a conservative party, he opposed women’s right to vote, even arguing that the wide-brimmed hats worn by female parliamentarians would block the view during sessions. History records this trait without erasing the value of the rest of his work.
The Swedish poem was translated into German in 1907 by the Baptist nobleman Manfred von Glehn, and into Russian in 1912. Decades later, the English missionary Stuart Hine produced the version that traveled the world under the title “How Great Thou Art.”
Boberg died on January 7, 1940, in Kalmar, never imagining that the poem written in a single night would become one of the most beloved hymns in Christian history, still sung today by all who likewise bow before the greatness of God.
