Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof - Plough

Against the Wind
The point of Eberhard’s dissertation is obvious: he had usurped “pirated” –
Nietzsche’s language and thoughts and used them to express spiritual realities.
Then, Eberhard had gone on to refute Nietzsche in Nietzsche’s own idiom, using
Nietzsche’s own arguments.
For Eberhard, Jesus is the “Übermensch,” the “overman” for whom Nietzsche
had sought. Jesus is “the redeeming man of great and overcoming love, the creative
spirit, the noonday bell that calls for a great decision, the one who sets people’s
will free again, who brings the earth back to its true purpose and resores hope to
humanity.” 12
Eberhard believed that a life in discipleship of Jesus Christ affirms life in a
comprehensive sense – more all-encompassing and complete than Nietzsche had
ever dared to consider. For Eberhard, belief in Jesus meant affirmation of life, not
at all the yearning for death, as Nietzsche had asserted; affirmation of the body,
not self-chastisement or contempt of sexuality; and affirmation of nature and its
gifts, not false asceticism.
For Eberhard, the Gemeinde – the church-community of Jesus’ disciples – is the
“extraordinary, new aristocracy,” the “higher type of humanity” that Nietzsche had
invoked. 13 Eberhard identified the true Christians as Nietzsche’s “future masters
of the earth” because, according to Revelation 20:4–6 and 22:5, at the end of time
they will live and reign with Jesus.
Confronting niEtZSChE
In more ways than one, Friedrich Nietzsche and Eberhard Arnold share strikingly
similar characeristics. Both were precocious in the positive sense of the word.
Nietzsche was a professor at the age of twenty-four, before he had even completed
his studies. Eberhard, at eighteen, was already much sought after as an evangelist and
pastoral worker. Each in his own way lived decisively and constantly tried to make
clear distinctions and decisions. Their linguistic styles show how close their two
temperaments were. Both formulated their thoughts precisely and provocatively
and drove every argument to the heart of the matter. Both made frequent use of
superlatives: most decisive, totally, utterly, without reservation, superabundance,
most outstanding, gigantic. When an inconvenient idea arose, both pursued it to
its final consequences. (Nietzsche, however, lost all sense of proportion in doing
so.) Both dug deep for the truth. But the resemblance certainly goes no further.
Eberhard believed in a divine, all-embracing truth that people cannot attain on
their own, a truth that is revealed by God – by the God whom Nietzsche denied
46