Book Review: The Incredible Power of Grace

Title: The Incredible Power of Grace

Author: Roland R. Hegstad

Publisher; Review & Herald

Date: 2005

ISBN: 0-8280-1912-6

Length: 143 pages

Quote: “Strange, isn’t it, that the Bible so often stresses God’s tender forbearance rather than His wrath. It’s as if He wishes us to remember that the strength of the church does not reside in political power. The strength of the church resides in its avalanche of powerlessness.”

It’s hard for me to give this book a fair review. The church Hegstad meant may have been the entire Church Militant (all living Christians on Earth); the one he knew was the Seventh-Day Adventist church that sponsored the college I used to attend, where I was one year ahead of Hegstad’s daughter (who is mentioned in this book). That church is a powerful subculture with its own version of literate folks’ folklore, folk songs, foodways, healing traditions…and dialect. One of the rules of the culture was that books published by church-owned presses had to cover at least two dozen points of doctrine on which the church, at that time, agreed. In this book Hegstad, writing within and for the culture, relates his life to those points of doctrine. If you understand what he was trying to do, I think, the resulting book makes sense and is even rather well written.

At church the Hegstads were family friends. At school the daughter who was close to my age had few interests and no friends in common with me; one of those few common interests happened to be our major field of study, but curve grading motivated people with similar interests and talents to try to avoid being in the same classes. Since I'd moved off campus I barely saw the Hegstad girl. It's not relevant to the book review, but somebody Out There need to read it: When I went home at breaks Mother would always ask "And how are the Hegstads doing?" I had no idea how the Hegstads were doing. I felt pressured. I began to associate an unpleasant feeling with the mention of the Hegstads and thus to dislike the whole family, at home and at school--though I liked them in Florida. 

And then Roland Hegstad wrote another book. A controversial book. Cosmic Conflict presented the gospel story in cartoon form. It felt pleasant, in a way I'm not proud of now, to stand with those who said that the graphic version of any story could only be a parody of the real book.Cosmic Conflict did not sell well, nor did it become one of the books the church printing houses kept n the market. Hegstad also edited the news magazine Liberty, which I dismissed as a magazine for lawyers.

I became more interested in law around age forty, and more interested in graphic novels around age fifty, when young book buyers began asking for them. By the time I inherited this book from Mother, I felt no desire to avoid talking or thinking about the Hegstads. The Incredible Power of Grace sounds the way Roland Hegstad talked. As a result I think it's informative, entertaining, engaging, inspirational, and a fun read. 

You might think it’s scattered, narrowly denominational, or  confusing. \It’s not only a personal testimony, though it contains parts of one. It’s not a first book of Christian doctrine, written either to convert unbelievers or to edify new converts, either. To some extent it’s a typical Adventist’s testimony. Adventists are overwhelmingly upper-middle-class people. Many of them are very literate, very sophisticated, often world travellers, not infrequently polymaths with a half-dozen seemingly unrelated degrees and certifications, often multilingual and multicultural. The ones whose names are familiar outside their subculture have mostly been doctors , from the Kellogg brothers through Jethro Kloss to Ben Carson). Their personal stories really are stories about what they’ve read and learned as much as what they’ve seen and felt, so that a book full of research, Bible studies, news items, cultural references, and footnotes can indeed be an Adventist’s memoir…especially if that Adventist was the retired editor of a glossy, mass-distribution news magazine (Hegstad edited Liberty for most of his lifetime). But the shape of this book is not a memoir; it’s a Seventh-Day Adventist’s rather wide-ranging view of Christian doctrine, written, I think, mainly to edify new members of that denomination. It’s about the grace of God as that grace appears to Adventists, who see the specific doctrines of their church as aspects of God’s saving grace.

So this book begins with some unrelated short-short stories of how sad life is without faith, then proceeds through a coffee-snorting description of how the world would be different “if (you or) I were God,” into a serious consideration of God’s Judgment, God’s Incarnation, conversion, the Christian life as a matter of “making God look good,” what the Unpardonable Sin is and why, the Second Advent, the seventh-day Sabbath, and the brevity of life. For Adventists this is a very clear and logical way of saying either “Don’t you want to join our church now?” or “Aren’t you glad you did?” For non-Adventists…I don’t know. Read it, if you’re a complete non-Adventist, and tell me.

Since the book’s not on my display, and I see a lot of local book buyers demonstrating concern about the physical properties of a book, here’s what they want to know about The Incredible Power of Grace. It is a book that a geriatric patient could read after breaking both wrists. My copy was one of the half-dozen books my mother took into that situation. Hip-pocket size, lightweight, not terribly sturdy paperback binding, clear 11-point Bembo print. That's not classified as "Large Print" but the print looks large relative to the book.