Eric Voegelin The People of God - Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für ...

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period of predominantly agricultural society the perfect state
requires the distribution of land, from the Diggers of the
Puritan Revolution to the Russian peasants of 1917. In the 19 th
century we find in the works of Marx and Engels the ideal of
transforming the industrial worker into a bourgeois as far as
his education is concerned. The increase of industrial
productivity is supposed to reduce the working hours to a
degree where the worker has leisure to acquire a bourgeois
education. With the actual increase of productivity the
possibility of leisure for education became less fascinating
than the improvement of the standard of living and the
identification of leisure-time with play-time. The modern
technical comfort is reflected in the paradisic ideals of “All
God’s chilluns have a Ford”, and “All good Germans have a
People’s Car”. The time where the Saints wanted to sit around
in white gowns like angels is past. 14
g. Methods of Conviction
aa. The Muenster Kingdom – Display of Luxury. A
politically important aspect of the movements is brought out
by the revealing history of the New Jerusalem of the
Anabaptists under Jan van Leyden in Muenster (1534-1535).
The Muenster Kingdom was patterned on old Testament ideas.
Jan van Leyden was crowned like David as the King of the
New Zion, understood as the nucleus which should expand
into the rule over the world. Jan was an excellent political
psychologist, a young man of great personal graces (when he
died he was 25 years of age), who knew how to master the
people oratorically. He appealed to the people through the
display of luxury. He had two big golden crowns, a royal and
the imperial; was attired with a golden sword in a golden belt;
appeared in public with heralds and trumpets, riding on a
white horse, had a horse-guard and food-guard which
surrounded the throne at public functions; and organized a
14 Goering has a great liking for white uniforms.