(This book was my holiday reading. This review should have gone live on Sunday morning...and I was too busy celebrating New Year's Day to make sure that it did; my bad. Those who don't want to read it may click on the next title below to read a regular weekday post.]
Title: Thy Kingdom Come (A Blumhardt Reader)
Author: Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt
Editor: Vernard Eller
Date: 2011
Publisher: Plough
ISBN: not showing in e-book
Length: 258 pages
Quote: "God is now creating a new reality on earth."
Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt was, like his father Johann Christoph Blumhardt, a radical "Reformed" Protestant preacher in nineteenth century Germany. Though their influence on European Christian thought was acknowledged by authors who have been translated and published in the United States, they happened to live in a time and place that were not favorable to US publication, and remain obscure here. However, their writings were brought in by the Bruderhof group and are only beginning to be translated.
How important is it that Americans read these books? How important is it that anybody read any Christian book? Although they called out errors in their church and spoke and wrote of "Christendom" with great detachment, the Blumhardts did not want to start a "Blumhardtian" or "Bad Boll" sect; they wanted to stir up a deeper, more radical commitment among Protestants and Catholics alike. As an American with an interest in history, as I read this sampler of Blumhardt writings I recognize reactions to the same influences that shaped our home-grown denominations. Blumhardt was not apparently drawn in to the effort to trace Bible prophecies in history that shaped the Adventist movement, but he read about it. He was not overwhelmed by the charismatic movement, either, but he responded to it. He was not a Unitarian, but he sympathized with Universalism at times. He was attracted to the early socialist movement, too, though he later recognized its shortcomings and warned Christians not to put too much faith in political movements. Accordingly his thought should not seem especially novel to those of us who are already interested in radical Christianity. He will seem more like a long-lost friend, like someone who comes preaching in a foreign language that which, when translated, proves to be a message you memorized at school.
The Blumhardts' fame in Germany owed much to an episode the family hardly claimed to understand, and seemed to find somewhat embarrassing. A woman who seemed to suffer from a mental disorder that people identified with the stories of "demon possession" in the Bible came to Johann Christoph Blumhardt to request healing prayer. After being prayed for by the church at Bad Boll for some time, she seemed to find peace, and was able to do domestic work for the Blumhardt family. The church at Bad Boll did not officially encourage people to come in search of healing but, because the troubled woman's case was widely known, the church attracted people who wanted healing, and, because of their emphasis on kindness and generosity, some people did feel that they'd been healed. Bad, "baths, springs," suggests that benefits had been claimed for the local water for a long time. The Blumhardts took no credit for any healings. In Thy Kingdom Come Christians are warned to focus on our own prayer and practice, and let God heal those who are meant to be healed.
In this matter C.F. Blumhardt shows practical wisdom. Christians who pursue healing in an active way, as if it could be guaranteed, tend to get into difficulties when someone is not healed. There is a real "ministry of healing" in which Christians can and should be engaged today. My mother did some things that were described as miracles. I've done some things that were described as miracles. You can and should be doing some things that some people will want to describe as miracles. We now know how to explain most of these miracles in very simple and scientific terms. If stretching or massage relieves the pressure on a tiny involuntary muscle inside your ear, you can instantly recover lost hearing without other treatment. If your chronic illness was caused by an unbalanced diet, you can feel better tomorrow, feel cured in a few weeks, and run a marathon next summer. If you were in no real danger of dying, but panicked at the mere thought of having pneumonia in your twenties, you can sweat it out overnight as any healthy young person would. And if you didn't believe that these simple treatments could work the way they can work for many people, the way they work for you may well be a miracle, requiring some sort of direct intermediation from God. But not all afflictions of the body have simple cures. Some things may be curable in the future but are not curable today. The same treatment that cures nineteen cases may do little or nothing for the twentieth case of what appears to be the same thing, and though medical science has learned many new ways to account for that twentieth patient it may or may not have found a way to help him. The man for whom Anger Busting doesn't work may be dying of multiple myeloma, in which case the complete cure of any cardiovascular disease he had will not really help him.
Blumhardt's theology is never mystical. If he did get into debates on fine points of interpretation of what the Bible teaches about the afterlife, he didn't do it in the material translated in this book. He preached for the present moment. German Christians had been understanding "the Kingdom of God" to mean Himmelreich, the Heaven-Kingdom, for a thousand years. It was trendy for Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt's generation to claim not to believe that Himmelreich existed. Blumhardt doesn't argue much about that. He allows that the Bible does teach that some sort of Himmelreich exists, but that's not his concern. The Kingdom of God that concerns him is the one Jesus wanted to set up in the hearts of those who love God, here and now--the kingdom to which we owe our primary loyalty already. Making it real, implementing its laws, is what Christians are meant to be doing.
Blumhardt did not specifically call people to live in communal households, the Bruderhofs ("brotherhoods") as organized by Blumhardt's follower Eberhard Arnold. His words allowed room for that tradition to develop. European Catholics had used their monastic tradition to solve many social problems for a long time. People with certain kinds of brain damage found peace, healing, integration, and even career satisfaction doing simple work for the local monastery. The aged, the chronically ill, and sometimes orphans and unwanted children, might be cared for by the monks or nuns. In a Bruderhof-type household, a few healthy couples can provide similar family-type care for those of their community who need help. There can be no question that this is one of the ways Christians may be called to follow Christ's example. Protestant and secular communal living is better documented in American history, but a few experiments were being made in Europe at this period too.
Without making a positive commitment to the idea that all humans must be ultimately "saved" in Heaven, Blumhardt clearly wanted to believe that they might be. There must be no anger or condemnation, he told his flock. Everyone must be treated as if they were Christ. How this was to be practiced when the group knew someone to be a thief, a lazy "sponger," or even a self-appointed "servant of Satan" with a goal of causing confusion and apostasy in a religious group, the selections from his writings in Thy Kingdom Come do not say.
Many Protestant traditions denounce the whole idea of papacy in the strongest and harshest of terms; Blumhardt's ideals naturally led to a wistful hope that Protestant and Catholic Christians could be reconciled. Tradition may determine how much hope for this American Protestants are willing to entertain. For individual Protestants and Catholics working in the same missions it may seem not even to be reconciliation that takes place, so much as fellowship among friends who never quarrelled with each other at all. We might be cousins at the annual family gathering. "You took A's side and I took B's side, but why talk about their problems now?" For the Catholic Church as an institution I see less hope; but can Jesus lose more to a greedy, arrogant, corrupt hierarchy of perverted men than He loses to the blasphemy of religious wars or religious bigotry? (Have we alienated all of our readers in Ireland yet? I'm talking to you...but not only to you.)
Both Blumhardts published copious amounts of written material in German but, as Eller explains, only a small sampling mostly of C.F. Blumhardt's sermons and "table talks" has been translated into English. Eller did not trust his own skills to do primary translation, but to edit other people's translations. The result is fascinating and sometimes tantalizing. In this book I find several lines that might be understood as questionable doctrine, as whimsy, as throwaway lines, perhaps as metaphors or as references to then-popular ideas or phrases. German is an "awful language" to translate into English because it lends itself so easily to such bad English, but it has a vigorous, earthy quality that can also translate into wonderfully energetic English. I suspect Blumhardt had an energetic personality too. I'd like to ask what he meant...but he died in 1917.
For people still working through their feelings about the failure of socialist governments to deliver peace and prosperity and "social justice," I expect Blumhardt's life and work may be helpful. He was very much attracted to socialism as a movement that promised to support the growth of the Kingdom of God in this world, and inevitably disappointed by seeing how it worked in practice. He came to see, and write, that neither governments nor voluntary organizations really accomplish the sort of revolutionary change the Kingdom of God requires. It grows within the spiritual "hearts" of the faithful; it is not achieved by any program of laws, rules, or disciplines--not even programs for prayer and charity. It does still seek "social justice." It is easy to picture Blumhardt looking on the "progressives" of his day, as Jesus looked on the rich young ruler, and loving them.
These people, as well as the Bible scholars who would like to ask exactly what Blumhardt meant by this or that remark, are going to want more of his work (and his father's work) translated if they read this little collection. The Bruderhofs are going to sell a lot of books and raise a lot of money to support their missions. And I say the sooner the better.
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