Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof - Plough

Against the Wind
Chapter thirteen
“Only in the spirit of unity will we encounter Christ in his
purity. It is in this spirit alone that we come to faith in
the almighty Creator-God of all worlds, suns, and earths;
the God who became our Father in Christ, who poured
his spirit upon his Gemeinde; the God to whom we
belong and whom we trust to provide us with everything
we need.
letter to the rhön bruderhof, no ember 26, 1930.
on thE trail of thE paSt
Perhaps Andreas Ehrenpreis’s pastoral letter “On Brotherly Community: The
Highest Command of Love” provided the final spur to acion. Perhaps it was “The
Hutterian Communities,” an article by Bertha W. Clark about life in the Hutterian
communities in America. Or perhaps it was the advice and insight from the
seventeenth-century Hutterites, and the descriptions of the ongoing vitality of
the communities still in existence in North America, all of which corresponded
completely with the Bruderhof ’s inner experiences.
Whatever the case, the proposition to get down to business came not from
Eberhard but from the ranks of the brotherhood: “What prevents us from uniting
with these Hutterian brothers?” This prompted Eberhard to compose a letter
to Elias Walter on August 22, 1928. In the name of the brotherhood Eberhard
declared “in perpetual and resolute certainty our firm and irrevocable will” to
unite with the Hutterian communities. 1 In addition the letter suggesed that
the American communities immediately send two “servants of the Word” (the
Hutterian term for a minister) to Germany to assume the spiritual leadership of
the Rhön Bruderhof.
It soon became clear that all this would not be quite so simple. Elias Walter
explained that the North American Hutterites lacked a united leadership. He
proposed that letters should first be sent to the ministers of a few other communities.
This was done immediately – but with no results. If any reply came, it only came in
the form of another communication from Elias Walter. In May of 1929 Eberhard
drafted a short “epistle,” written in true Hutterian style, to all the communities in
South Dakota, Manitoba, and Alberta. The crucial sentences were:
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