Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof - Plough

Against the Wind
two smaller children, he testified that “only wise men and saints are fit to be
educators”:
Our lips are unclean. Our dedication is not without reservations. Our truthfulness is
broken. Our love is not perfect. Our kindness is not free of ulterior motives. We are
not free from the self-will and possessions that oppose love…So it is the child who
leads us to the gosel. The task we have for the child shows us that we are too evil to
be able to educate one single child in this holy sense. We can educate children and
live with them only when we ourselves stand like children before God. 16
huttErian writingS
Back in January of 1926 Eberhard had received the address of Elias Walter, elder
of the Dariusleut among the Hutterites in North America. It was forwarded to
him by Robert Friedmann, a Viennese historian and secialist in Anabaptist
research. 17 This address enabled Eberhard to pick up the trail first set for him
in 1921 when Professor J. G. Evert had provided him with the names of certain
Hutterites in North America. Eberhard sent a long, typewritten letter across the
Atlantic. It was probably dispatched in the summer of 1926. Elias Walter took
nine months to respond. When his reply finally arrived, it covered all of two
small sheets of stationery. Everyone at the Rhön Bruderhof found this somewhat
disappointing. But, to their delight, a bundle of old Hutterian writings soon arrived
from Canada – and that was only a beginning. 18
For years Eberhard and Else had been hunting through university libraries and
archives – anywhere they thought there might be a chance of uncovering Hutterian
writings or other Anabaptist documents. The whole community had been drawn
into this journey of discovery. Once Eberhard noted: “We have finished copying the
Disputation at Worms, the 1637 version. Original, 1557.” The original 355-page
manuscript contained the court records concerning Peter Riedemann, one of Jakob
Hutter’s successors in the spiritual leadership of the Moravian Anabaptists. 19 Each
page was copied by hand with painstaking accuracy on the Rhön Bruderhof – page
after page after page. This laborious method was often the only way to secure the
contents of such extremely rare documents. Even the school children praciced
copying old manuscripts. It was only later that Eberhard realized that the
community was unconsciously following another old Hutterian tradition. The
“forefathers’ writings” had been – and still are – copied repeatedly in the Hutterite
communities. Testimonies to a rich and inspiring spiritual history came alive in
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