Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof - Plough

Against the Wind
Berlin Hochweg Publishing House to undertake the production and business
elements. He himself assumed the role of general editor and at first tried to win
over Karl Barth as an advisor. Otto Herpel’s existing volume on Zinzendorf was
included in the series on the spot, and a new edition was published. So it came
about that Zinzendorf: On Faith and Life, source book VII, was finished before any
of the others.
For authors, Eberhard solicited competent theologians and highly secialized
scholars. The volumes on the early seventeenth-century mystic Jakob Böhme,
on Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard, on St. Francis of Assissi, and on others
appeared between 1925 and 1926. In December of 1926 Eberhard added Volume I
to the series, The Early Christians after the Death of the Apostles. 22 He had collected,
translated, and written the commentary on these early Christian writings
himself.
For the Sannerz community the source books project provided an assured
occupation for many years to come as well as a literally inexhaustible supply of
spiritual thought and inspiration. Everyone in the community was drawn in.
Galley proofs were read aloud during jam making or potato sorting. Eberhard
even had the community participate in selecting the passages to be included in
The Early Christians.
In point of fact the groundwork necessary to assemble and prepare texts for
consideration was a work demanding exceptional diligence. Eberhard and Else
von Hollander evaluated hundreds of apocryphal writings and collected dozens of
so-called “Lord’s sayings” (words attributed to Christ but not included in the four
Gosels). They tracked down obscure references from the writings of third- and
fourth-century church fathers. Ultimately the most challenging undertaking for
Eberhard was to put into understandable form the scholarly editions of apocryphal
writings – previously all but inaccessible to the lay reader. Eberhard preceded the
documents with a breathtaking summary of early Christianity between the years
70–180 a.d.
Even today this book has the power to transport the reader back to the time
of triumphal arches and colonnades, to the time of Christian persecution and
martyrdom – the time when the church was coming into being. A person with no
prior interest in the beginnings of Christianity will find in the pages of The Early
Christians a vivid portrayal of the immense power of the early Christians’faith and of
the movement that flourished as a result of this faith. Eberhard himself was affected
in this way: “For the editor, a clearly defined faith and way of life emerges from the
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