Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof - Plough

Against the Wind
Eberhard was no super-hero. The breakup of the Sannerz community sapped
his strength and was sometimes more than he could bear. The fact that he showed
such self-control to the outward eye, that his rocklike certainty always won the
day, can only be explained by his faith. In ways difficult to understand he had been
prepared for the controversy. He was not simply caught unawares, unsusecting
and defenseless, in the face of accusations. Eberhard had seen beyond the crisis
even before it reached its peak. How was that possible? A plausible answer is that
he never took his eyes off the ultimate, far-reaching goal.
thE blumhardtS
One cannot seak of Eberhard’s perception of that final goal without noting the
influence the two Blumhardts exercised on his faith and thinking.
As a nineteenth-century pastor of Möttlingen in the Black Forest, Johann
Christoph Blumhardt experienced the might of demonic forces, but still more
powerfully the liberating strength of Jesus Christ. 13 “Jesus is victor” was his
watchword. A movement of repentance and renewal arose in his parish, one fruit of
which was healing of the sick. Blumhardt took Jesus’ words about the approaching
kingdom of God very seriously; the kingdom of God became the central theme of
his theology. He had not developed this theology sitting in his study. It was rooted
in his pastoral experiences in Möttlingen and later, when church authorities made
his work there impossible, in Bad Boll, on the edge of the Swabian Alps. His son
Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt followed in his footsteps and further developed
his father’s theology of the kingdom of God. 14
Both Blumhardts insisted that the kingdom of God must be effective here and
now, not just in the afterlife. In their opinion, to comfort people by pointing to
the hereafter narrowed and distorted the gosel. Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt
went so far as to refuse to accept the inevitability of sickness, premature death,
and unjust conditions. Because of his concern for the working class and its
estrangement from the church he joined the Social Democratic party and was
a member of the Württemberg parliament for several years. But parliamentary
rules and partisan bickering and intrigue remained foreign to him. As a citizen
and ambassador of the kingdom of God he felt committed to obey other laws and
another code of conduct. Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt died in 1919. But in Bad
Boll, the center of the two Blumhardts’ acivities, the witness of their lives and the
spirit they embodied remained tangible for many years.
118