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The Gospel of God's Reign THE GOSPEL OF GOD’S REIGN This is a preview. Get entire book here. Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (1842–1919). Bruderhof Historical Archive, Walden, NY, USA. This is a preview. Get entire book here. Blumhardt Series Christian T. Collins Winn and Charles E. Moore, editors This is a preview. Get entire book here. The Gospel of God’s Reign Living for the Kingdom of God Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt Originally Selected and Arranged by Eugen Jäckh Edited by Christian T. Collins Winn and Charles E. Moore Translated by Peter Rutherford Eileen Robertshaw, and Miriam Mathis PLOUGH PUBLISHING This is a preview. Get entire book here. Published by Plough Publishing House Walden, New York Robertsbridge, England Elsmore, Australia www.plough.com Copyright © 2016, 2014 Plough Publishing. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401. Softcover edition published by Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401 Print ISBN: 978-1-62032-351-9 Epub ISBN: 978-0-87486-797-8 Mobi ISBN: 978-0-87486-798-5 Pdf ISBN: 978-0-87486-799-2 This is a preview. Get entire book here. Dedicated to Eberhard Arnold (1883–1935) Humble witness to the coming future of God Matthew 7:21–23 This is a preview. Get entire book here. Contents Series Foreword, Christian T. Collins Winn and Charles E. Moore . xi Foreword, Nathan R. Kerr . xiii Acknowledgments, Christian T. Collins Winn and Charles E. Moore . xvii Introduction, Christian T. Collins Winn . xix 1 God’s Love . 1 2 The Reign of God . 14 3 The Living Christ . 29 4 Our Savior King . 51 5 God’s People . 58 6 The Way of the Cross . 76 7 Hope and Expectation . 96 Introduction to the 1922 German Edition, Eugen Jäckh . 119 Scripture Index . 127 This is a preview. Get entire book here. Series Foreword The Blumhardt Series seeks to make available for the first time in English the extensive oeuvre of Johann Christoph Blumhardt (1805–1880) and Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (1842–1919), two of the least well- known but influential figures of the latter-half of the nineteenth century. Their influence can be detected in a number of important developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Protestantism: the recovery of the eschatological dimension of Christianity and the kingdom of God; the re- covery of an emphasis on holistic notions of spirituality and salvation; in the rise of faith-healing and later Pentecostalism; the convergence of social- ism and the Christian faith; and the development of personalist models of pastoral counseling. Their collected works make available their vast body of work to schol- ars, pastors, and laypeople alike with the aim of giving the Blumhardts a full hearing in the English language for the first time. Given the extent of their influence during the theological and religious ferment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it is believed that these sources will be of great interest to scholars of that period across various disciplines. It is also true, however, that there is much spiritual and theological value in the witness of the Blumhardts. We hope that by making their wit- ness more widely known in the English-speaking world the church at large will benefit. The project outline is flexible, allowing for production of volumes that aim either in a scholarly direction or towards the thoughtful lay-reader. The emphasis will be to reproduce, with only slight modifications, the various German editions of the Blumhardts’ works that have appeared since the late nineteenth century. A modest scholarly apparatus will provide contextual xi This is a preview. Get entire book here. series foreword and theologically helpful comments and commentary through volume in- troductions, footnotes, and appendices. During their long ministries, the elder and younger Blumhardt found themselves called to serve as pastors, counselors, biblical interpreters, theologians, and even politicians. No matter the vocational context, how- ever, both understood themselves as witnesses to the kingdom of God that was both already present in the world, but also breaking into the current structures of the world. Together they represent one of the most powerful instances of the convergence of spirituality and social witness in the history of the Christian church. It is the Series Editors’ conviction that their witness continues to be relevant for the church and society today. We hope that the current series will give the Blumhardts a broader hearing in the English- speaking world. Christian T. Collins Winn and Charles E. Moore xii This is a preview. Get entire book here. Foreword by Nathan R. Kerr Though he is perhaps best known to the English-speaking world for the critical influence his life and thought had upon the practical formation of the Bruderhof movement, Blumhardt’s scholarly—that is, “academic”— renown has mostly turned on the influence his thought has had upon such theological luminaries as Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Emil Brunner. His uncanny awareness of the “paradox” of the gospel has ensured his place alongside Kierkegaard and Overbeck as one of the forerunners of the “dialectical” school that emerged in the wake of Barth’s second Epistle to the Romans, and that determined the course of so much of twentieth- century theology. Even today, Blumhardt has been heralded as the great- grandfather of a particular mode of “apocalyptic” thought that has emerged in contemporary theology. Such academic interpretations ensure for us that Blumhardt really does have something important to say as a theologian. But by prescribing in advance a particular method or theory for reading Blumhardt, such can equally serve to forestall any possibility that some wayward “lay” reader might stumble upon a book like this and find within it intimations to a way of living and working that cannot be so theorized. That Christoph Blumhardt lived and worked and wrote in such a way as to resist the kind of theoretical capture that reduces theology to a mere intellectual peddling of the gospel is too often not only forgotten but delib- erately ignored. The conveniences ofacademe do not allow for the appall- ing possibility that God might act in ways entirely unintelligible to human reason, much less that God might act so as to free us to live as silent, but active witnesses to that unintelligibility. And yet, if the gospel is a power that is to be experienced and lived, and not simply a message that is to be xiii This is a preview. Get entire book here. foreword conceptualized and understood, as Blumhardt insists, we must admit that God might not only act against our own reason and expectations, but that faith in this God itself eschews understanding. “God has to be experienced. And whoever experiences him becomes speechless.” Any gospel that does not test to destruction our own human theories or ideologies, as well as the so-called “religious” customs and institutions that perpetuate them in the name of “Christianity,” is not the gospel of God’s kingdom in which Jesus Christ alone reigns as Lord. In The Gospel of God’s Reign Blumhardt is not simply a pietistic thinker painfully groping his way toward various theological insights that came to be developed in the later “dialectical” theology and that are thoroughly the- orized in contemporary “apocalyptic” thought. No, Blumhardt is speaking out of the conviction that true faith is born of the boundless love of God, not simply of theology and its various points of doctrine. As Blumhardt put it: “This is the gospel, ‘You are loved.’” Furthermore, insofar as the love of God is not a thing, but a way lived out in the person of Jesus Christ, so faith itself is a living out of this love: “To believe in Jesus, means to love.” No theological system can evoke this faith from us. Instead, this faith is a living response to the love of God in Christ whose work is precisely to deliver us from all false masters and human spheres of domination, by freeing us to love in the way of the cross. Such faith comes to us only as God’s love in Christ brings about a new creation, which breaks into this world in such a way as to bring to naught the powers and principalities that hold us in bondage and decay. “When God’s love speaks, the world is made new. In Jesus Christ it will again be made new.” In Christ, everything about this sinful and dying world is judged and condemned, so that everything about this sinful and dying world might be forgiven and brought to new life. It is for this reason that faith in Jesus Christ is for Blumhardt faith in the resurrection. Only from within the event of the resurrection is it possible to proclaim that “Jesus is victor!” while also praying “Thy Kingdom Come!” Only from within the event of resurrection is it possible to acknowledge that human life is in contradiction—sinful and fallen under the conditions of this old age, yet free for the coming new creation. That is to say, only from within the event of the resurrection is it possible to speak at once dialectically and apoca- lyptically without submitting the gospel to either a dialectical method or an apocalyptic theory. xiv This is a preview. Get entire book here. foreword For in the end, what matters for Christoph Blumhardt is that the res- urrection of Jesus Christ is a reality here and now—that we experience its transforming power in the hope of Christ’s coming in glory, and then give ourselves to it by working and fighting to resist the ways in which the pow- ers of this world continue to imprison, oppress, and marginalize those very persons whom God’s love in Christ has set free.
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