Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof - Plough

Against the Wind
Chapter fifteen
“The mystery of the kingdom of God is that it
encompasses both polarity and universality.
All questions come together into one central
question.”
a ChurCh or thE ChurCh?
Spoken to winifred bridgwater.
Hitler and the new state challenged the Bruderhof and faced it with questions.
At almost the same time, the community had to deal with a question of quite
a different characer. Leonhard Ragaz wrote a letter on February 22, 1933,
addressed to “Eberhard Arnold, Hans Boller, and their closest friends.” Ragaz
sounded genuinely disturbed. He asked point-blank, “Isn’t it the case that you
are not simply ‘a’ church, but ‘the’ church?…Do you believe that the Hutterian
brothers, taken as a whole today, constitute ‘the’ church?” – and, in the same breath,
he urged them to “holy sobriety” and strongly warned against “fanaticism.”
What had happened? On the face of it the question seemed to have been
provoked by the disintegration of the Werkhof, a Swiss Christian community
settlement. The Werkhof was by no means the first community experiment of
its type in Switzerland. Earlier a religious-socialist group had lived in community
near Lake Zurich. Ragaz had identified very closely with these settlements, all the
more so because, out of consideration for his wife, he had never taken the step of
joining their communal life.
The Werkhof had been founded in 1930 by three young married couples. Max
and Eva Lezzi knew the Rhön Bruderhof; they had stayed there for some time and
had gathered much valuable experience about community living. When another
young couple, the Kyburg pastor Hans Boller and his wife Else, made plans to join
the Werkhof in 1931, the Lezzis advised them to send time at the Bruderhof first.
The Bollers went to the Rhön and after a few weeks decided to remain there. This
meant that the Bruderhof had deprived Leonhard Ragaz of both a zealous disciple
and a friend – or at least that was how he felt about it. 1
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