Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof - Plough

Against the Wind
It was a great help to our little community that we saw the power to overcome
demons demonstrated not only by the Blumhardts, but still more by the Christians
of the first centuries. The dark appearances and terrible blasphemies, the turmoil
and raving madness, the grip of evil on tormented people, the attack against faith and
against the believers – all this can be broken only through the name of Jesus Christ,
through witnessing to his story from the virgin birth and his words and deeds, to
his crucifixion and resurrection; only through the power and authority of the Holy
Spirit. People are powerless here. Individual counseling is completely inadequate.
The church alone – no matter how small the gathering of dedicated believers who
represent it – is empowered and given authority to command these spirits…When
God’s victory took place among us…some of us came to an experience of faith in
God and a recognition of our human insignificance such as we had never known
before…We became more and more certain of the power of the kingdom of God. 20
Once more, Gemeinde had been at work – and this was not achieved or merited
by any one individual. It was God’s victory, not Eberhard’s. The community’s
struggle on behalf of Lotte Henze marks the only instance that Eberhard would
seak openly of “demonic possession.” Eberhard approached such events with
great caution; he found them far too serious for anything less. Most importantly,
Eberhard grased that such “preliminary skirmishes” were not isolated, remote
instances, but fit into a much larger context. A few years later this helped him and
the community recognize the demonic posturing behind the National Socialists’
torchlit parades while most other Germans were still roaring their Heil Hitlers!
SourCES
In 1924 Eberhard embarked on a tremendously ambitious publishing project,
implementing an idea he had nurtured for many years: source books (Quellen). He
described the concept as “a series drawn from the living testimony of Christian
witnesses across the centuries.” He pictured a one-hundred-volume series that
would give voice to Christian thinkers and writers of every hue, from the early
church fathers to present-day luminaries. No one would be excluded – regardless
of how contradictory or apparently irreconcilable they seemed: 21 the founder of
the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola, side by side with “heretics” like John Huss and John
Wycliffe. Pietists, mystics, reformers, and defenders of the faith. Each volume was
to mirror “Christ in his holistic church.” This concept inspired Eberhard to bind
the volumes in all the colors of the rainbow. The project exceeded by several times
the capacity of the Eberhard Arnold Publishing House. So Eberhard engaged the
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