CENTRE FOR BAPTIST HISTORY AND HERITAGE STUDIES

OCCASIONAL PAPERS VOLUME 10

Church community is a Regents

gift of the Holy Spirit

Park
College,
Oxford

The spirituality of the

Bruderhof community

Ian M. Randall

Regents Park College, Oxford

 Centre for Baptist History and Heritage Studies
Occasional Papers Volume 10

Church community is a
gift of the Holy Spirit

The spirituality of the Bruderhof community

 Centre for Baptist History and Heritage Studies
Occasional Papers Volume 10

Church community is a
gift of the Holy Spirit

The spirituality of the Bruderhof community

Ian M. Randall

Regents Park College, Oxford

Regents Park College is a Permanent Private Hall of The University of Oxford.

 Copyright Ian M. Randall 2014

First published 2014

Centre for Baptist History and Heritage,

Regents Park College,
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 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit:
The spirituality of the Bruderhof community

The Bruderhof (place of brothers) community traces its origins to the

work of Eberhard Arnold, his wife Emmy, and her sister Else von
Hollander in Germany in the early part of the twentieth century. The
core group which formed the first community in 1920, in Sannerz, a
village in the state of Hesse (north-east of Frankfurt), was shaped by a
vision of a communal life which - as Eberhard Arnold put it - drew
together reborn people who have accepted the life of the Sermon on
the Mount. These disciples of Jesus were to be people who work,
who radiate the spirit of Christ people who witness for Christ with
their entire being, and who give up everything to live simply and
solely for love and for productive work. The group wanted to testify
that we are a church of Christ, a Lords Supper fellowship.1 Almost
a century later the Bruderhof consists of over 2,600 men, women, and
children families and single people - living in twenty-three
intentional communities of differing sizes, most in Europe and North
America. In 2012 the Bruderhof produced a document, Foundations of
Our Faith and Calling, which (it explains) was the outcome of
discussion and study within the Bruderhof communities about the
basis of our life together. There was an extended exercise of drafting
and re-drafting of the text by Bruderhof members. This period of
reflection concluded in June 2012 when all Bruderhof members
world-wide adopted the text.2 It was then published. This study
examines the spirituality of the Bruderhof as expressed in its early
period and in its current communal life as delineated in Foundations.

1
Markus Baum, Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof (Rifton,
NY, and Robertsbridge: Plough Publishing House, 1998), p. 126.
2
Foundations of Our Faith and Calling (Rifton, NY, and Robertsbridge: Plough
Publishing House, 2012), p. vii. The sections of Foundations are: basis of our faith;
our calling; heritage; church order; church actions; and life in community. I am
grateful to the staff of the Bruderhof Historical Archive, who have assisted me in
the course of this study.
2 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

Studies of the Bruderhof

In the 1960s and 1970s there was considerable interest in emerging

intentional communities. Thomas Finger calls this the high point of
countercultural experiments.3 The Bruderhof was one community
that attracted attention. An important source that became available in
this period was Emmy Arnolds account of her story, which she had
gathered in bound volumes of notes. This was published in 1964.
Emmy Arnold was then in her seventies and did not want what she
knew of significant events and people connected especially with the
Bruderhofs beginnings to be forgotten. The book was published with
the title Torches Together,4 and then in 1999 an expanded version was
produced incorporating material from an unpublished diary of Emmy
Arnolds and from other personal papers. The revised title was A
Joyful Pilgrimage: My Life in Community. At the end of the book
Emmy Arnold quoted from principles Eberhard had set out in 1925
regarding Why We Live in Community. The final paragraph of the
statement by Eberhard Arnold has this crucial reflection: Efforts to
organize community in a human way can only result in ugly, lifeless
caricatures. Only when we are empty and open to the Living One to
the Spirit can he bring about the same life among us as he did
among the early Christians.5 This pointed clearly to spirituality being
at the heart of the story of the Bruderhof.
An example of someone who was drawn to the Bruderhof
community after a long search in the 1940s and 1950s for authentic
spirituality was Josef Ben-Eliezer. His story, published years later,
was fittingly entitled, My Search.6 He came from an Eastern European

3
Thomas Finger, Review Essay: Foundations of Our Faith and Calling,
Mennonite Quarterly Review, Vol. 87 (October 2013), p. 585.
4
Emmy Arnold, Torches Together (Rifton, NY: Plough Publishing House,
1964).
5
Emmy Arnold, A Joyful Pilgrimage: My Life in Community, (Rifton, NY:
Plough Publishing House, 1999), pp. 168-9; cf. Eberhard Arnold, Why We Live in
Community (Robertsbridge: Plough Publishing House, 1995), p. 13. An essay by
Eberhard Arnold on Why We Live in Community was published in Die Wegwarte,
October/November 1925 and May/June 1925. It was republished in 1995.
6
Josef Ben-Eliezer, My Search (Rifton, NY, and Robertsbridge: Plough
Publishing House, 2004).
Ian M. Randall 3

family living in Germany. The Nazi regime and the Second World
War brought great suffering to the family and Josef Ben-Eliezer
survived harrowing experiences in Siberia and elsewhere in the
Russian territories, finally arriving in Israel. His vision was to fight for
the cause of Israel in the aftermath of the holocaust, but he came to the
conclusion that he could not promote this cause in a way that harmed
others. Marxism attracted him but subsequently disappointed him.
Towards the end of the 1950s, while in Germany, Ben-Eliezer heard
of the Bruderhof and decided to visit them. Although he was not
inclined towards Christianity at that stage, he was still intent on
seeking answers that would address the problems of humanity and
also address his personal need, since he acknowledged that I hadnt
found what I was seeking after years and years. After a time living in
the Bruderhof, at one of the community meetings people began to
share openly with each other. In that moment, said Ben-Eliezer, I
felt the reality of the power of Christ who through the centuries has
wanted to gather a people into unity, into brotherhood.7 His life and
outlook were changed and the Bruderhof became his spiritual home,
with his wider mission being increasingly directed to issues of peace
and reconciliation.
Someone who attempted in the 1960s to interpret aspects of
Bruderhof spirituality from a sociological perspective was Benjamin
Zablocki, who was a long-term guest of the Woodcrest Bruderhof in
New York in the late 1960s.8 Zablockis work, published in 1971,
failed to take account, however, of the desire for change which Ben-
Eliezer had found so powerfully present in Bruderhof spirituality.
Zablocki interpreted the Bruderhof commitment to loving and serving
God and others as something self-directed rather than other-directed;
as the feeling that ones services are desperately needed.9 The strong
emphasis in Bruderhof spirituality on the living presence of the Holy
Spirit elicited the comment from Zablocki: The moral basis of the

7
Ben-Eliezer, My Search, p. 92.
8
Benjamin D. Zablocki, The Joyful Community: An Account of the Bruderhof: A
Communal Movement Now in Its Third Generation (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1971). At the time when he wrote the book Zablocki was a graduate student
at Johns Hopkins University, USA. He later became a Professor of Sociology
at Rutgers University.
9
Zablocki, Joyful Community, p. 29.
4 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

Bruderhof consists in whatever enables the community to contain the

Holy Spirit.10 But Zablockis idea of containing the Spirit is not
language used in the Bruderhof. Rather, Eberhard Arnold spoke in
July 1935 of this understanding: The revelation of the Holy Spirit
does not stop at any boundary... The Holy Spirit is a creative spirit.11
In similar vein, Foundations talks about the desire for community life
to be inspired and led by the Holy Spirit. The church as the body of
Christ is described as no organization, but a living organism.12
Although the title of Zablockis book was The Joyful Community, his
interest was in the Bruderhof as a sociological phenomenon rather
than a spiritual organism.
A fine doctoral thesis which included an examination of the early
Bruderhof period was produced in 1973 by Antje Vollmer. This made
use of significant primary material which illuminated the context in
which the Bruderhof began. Vollmer offered an analysis of the various
radical Christian movements active in Germany in the early twentieth
century, especially the Neuwerk (New Work) movement, with which
Eberhard Arnold was very involved in the early 1920s, together with
two friends, Otto Herpel, a pastor in Lissberg, and Georg Flemmig,
rector of a school in Schlchtern.13 It was at Sannerz, near
Schlchtern, that Arnold and a small group began, in 1920, to try to
embody the principles of community to which they were committed.
Although for Arnold there was new work to do, he saw himself as
standing in the line of those who had undertaken creative spiritual
initiatives before. Indeed Vollmer cites a significant letter Arnold
wrote in 1920 in which he drew attention to the area of Germany north
of Frankfurt, noting the movements of far-reaching significance that
had existed there specifically some near Bdingen, about twenty
miles from Frankfurt. Arnold spoke of the presence there of the
Cistercians in the thirteenth century, the later Inspirationists,
Baptizers, and all manner of sectarians, and the Moravian

10
Zablocki, Joyful Community, p. 57.
11
Eberhard Arnold, Gods Revolution (Rifton, NY, and Robertsbridge: Plough
Publishing House), p. 43.
12
Foundations, p. 29.
13
Antje Vollmer, The Neuwerk Movement, Doctoral Thesis (Berlin, 1973), pp.
59-70. I am using a translation into English by Kathleen Hasenberg and Lotte
Keiderling.
Ian M. Randall 5

movements very large settlement at Herrnhaag established in 1736 -

in what Arnold called that enthusiastic, life-affirming epoch of the
Moravian Church. For Arnold these varied movements exhibited the
spirituality he espoused, which combined revolutionary liberation
with religious depth of spirit.14
Another study of the Bruderhof undertaken in the 1970s was by
John McKelvie Whitworth. He looked at the Shakers, the Oneida
Community and the Bruderhof.15 Whitworth recognised the ongoing
importance of the teaching of Eberhard Arnold, although overstated
his case by asserting that Arnolds teachings remain the canon of the
Bruderhof.16 Eberhard Arnold himself directed people to many
different authors throughout church history. To take one example, in
his magnum opus, Innerland, which was ultimately published in its
final form just after his death, Arnold spoke of the medieval mystic
Meister Eckhart as one who in many ways knew the inner life as few
others have done.17 In an attempt to examine Bruderhof spirituality,
Whitworth, commenting on the Bruderhof claim that its community
life was an organism which was constantly evolving, looked at
external features and argued that over several decades there had been
no significant changes in Bruderhof communitarianism. However, his
case for Bruderhof rigidity was rather undermined by his subsequent
proposal that in the period when he wrote the communities seemed to
him to be attempting to ignore Eberhard Arnolds insistence on
evangelism.18 With his sociological interests, Whitworth did not focus
on the inner spiritual dynamics of the Bruderhof.
In 1996 Yaacov Oved produced what is the most comprehensive
account of the Bruderhof to date, The Witness of the Brothers.19 Oved,
as a member of Kibbutz Palmachim since 1949, a former Professor in

14
Eberhard Arnold to Hilde Hoppe in Marburg, 28 April, 1920, cited by
Vollmer, The Neuwerk Movement, p. 60.
15
John McKelvie Whitworth, Gods Blueprints. A Sociological Study of Three
Utopian Sects (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1975).
16
Whitworth, Gods Blueprints, p. 177.
17
Eberhard Arnold, Innerland: A Guide into the Heart of the Gospel (e-book,
Rifton, NY, and Robertsbridge: Plough Publishing House, 2011), p. 15.
18
Whitworth, Gods Blueprints, pp. 181-2, 191.
19
Yaacov Oved, The Witness of the Brothers: A History of the Bruderhof (New
Brunswick, USA, and London: Transaction Publishers, 1996).
6 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

Tel Aviv Universitys history department, and an authority on

communal movements, was well qualified to undertake detailed
research and write this substantial book. He pointed out the
significance of the continued existence of the Bruderhof over eight
decades: From among the many German communities of the twenties
[1920s], only the Bruderhof became a communal movement that has
survived to this day.20 Oved highlighted the way in which the
Bruderhof community was open and welcomed guests. Although it
had gone through very difficult and divisive times, it was not a
community that had closed in on itself. He quoted the Mennonite,
Harold Bender, who spoke of the strong missionary spirit in the
early Bruderhof and who noted that in the course of one year (1930)
the number of guests who came to the Bruderhof was 1,000 or more.21
This number was to grow rapidly. As well as dealing fully with
periods of community advance, Oved also gave sympathetic attention
to the painful experiences of former members of the community. In
the 1990s a non-partisan assessment was being made by Oved of
community upheavals and power struggles that had happened a
generation before. He spoke of the years 1959 to 1962 as years of
great crisis, a dark period in Bruderhof history,22 although arguably
the dark period was a consequence of problems that had built up
previously.
By the time Oved was writing, the experiences of the Bruderhof,
which included many internal spiritual challenges and struggles from
the 1930s through to the 1980s, were being told by members and
former members. The community had to leave Nazi Germany and it
re-established itself in England in 1936, in Wiltshire, where it grew
rapidly. But World War II broke out, and the British government told
Bruderhof members that German nationals had to be interned. Instead,
almost all emigrated, to Primavera (Spanish for spring), Paraguay. In
1961, in the midst of Oveds dark period, Primavera was dissolved.
Many members left or were put out of the movement. Those who
continued, now mainly in the USA, tried to find a way forward for the

20
Oved, Witness of the Brothers, p. 33.
21
Oved, Witness of the Brothers, p. 45, citing Harold Bender, The New
Hutterite Bruderhof in Germany, included in Brothers Unite (Rifton, NY: Plough
Publishing House, 1988), pp. 233-4.
22
Oved, Witness of the Brothers, p. 207.
Ian M. Randall 7

Bruderhof and in 1989 this story was told by Merrill Mow in Torches
Rekindled: The Bruderhofs Struggle for Renewal. The title drew from
Torches Together. There was a desire to acknowledge errors and
failures of recent decades.23 Former members of the Bruderhof also
wanted to tell their stories, and these were published by Carrier Pigeon
Press, which had been set up for that purpose. Memoirs included
Roger Allain, The Community that Failed (1992), and Elizabeth
Bohlken-Zumpe, a grand-daughter of Eberhard and Emmy Arnold,
Torches Extinguished (1993).24 Such stories formed the basis of a
hostile book on the Bruderhof published in 2000 by Julius H. Rubin.25
He was invited to visit Bruderhof communities, but declined. What he
wanted was to interview Bruderhof patients with spiritual affliction
and depression and interview their physicians.26 Given issues of
confidentiality, this request is strange: it clearly could not be met.27
Other studies began to be produced in the 1990s which looked at
specific aspects of the Bruderhof and at leading figures. Bob and
Shirley Wagoner wrote Community in Paraguay.28 Markus Baum
produced a definitive study of Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof in
the period up to Arnolds death in 1935. When the English language
23
Merrill Mow, Torches Rekindled (Rifton, NY: Plough Publishing House,
1989).
24
Roger Allain, The Community that Failed (San Francisco: Carrier Pigeon
Press, 1992); Elizabeth Bohlken-Zumpe, Torches Extinguished: Memories of a
Communal Bruderhof Childhood in Paraguay, Europe and the USA (San Francisco:
Carrier Pigeon Press, 1993). The Press was set up by KIT, which is for ex-members
of the Bruderhof. See also Nadine Moonje Pleil, Free from Bondage (1994);
Belinda Manley, Through Streets Broad and Narrow (1995); Miriam Arnold
Holmes, Cast out in the World (1997).
25
Julius H. Rubin, The Other Side of Joy: Religious Melancholy among the
Bruderhof (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Even before beginning his
research, Rubins interest was already in what he called religious melancholy. See
Julius H. Rubin, Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
26
Rubin, Other Side of Joy, p. viii.
27
Rubins hostile treatment has been influential in some quarters. See, for
example, Bonnie Price Loftons uncritical acceptance in On the Survival of
Mennonite Community in Modern-Day America: Lessons from History,
Communities, and Artists, Drew University DLitt (2012), p. 31.
28
Bob and Shirley Wagoner, Community in Paraguay (Rifton, N.Y., Lough
Publishing House, 1991).
8 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

version, Against the Wind, was published in 1998, Jim Wallis of the
Sojourners Community wrote in the Foreword about the Bruderhof
movement as a vibrant community of faith from which we at
Sojourners have received great insight and strength over the years.
He described how he had found in the Bruderhof a mutual respect, a
readiness to serve, and a joy in one another that has been born of
much faith and struggle.29 Wallis was pinpointing the importance of
Bruderhof spirituality. Faith and struggle were dominant themes in a
book published in 2004 by a community member, Peter Mommsen.
Entitled Homage to a Broken Man, it is a graphic account of the life of
Heinrich Arnold, one of the sons of Eberhard and Emmy, who for
twenty years up to his death in 1982 was pastor and elder of the
Bruderhof.30 A wider-ranging study by Michael Tyldesley of
Manchester Metropolitan University in the same period looked at the
Kibbutz, the Bruderhof and the Integrierte Gemeinde, three communal
movements that trace their origins (at least in part) to the German
Youth Movements of the early twentieth century.31 Finally, in 2009
and 2010, Emmy Barth, a senior archivist for the Bruderhof, made
very good use of the archives to produce important studies of the
community in Nazi Germany, until it was dissolved by the Nazis in
1937,32 and of the early period in Paraguay.33

29
Jim Wallis, Foreword to Baum, Against the Wind, p. vii.
30
Peter Mommsen, Homage to a Broken Man (Rifton, NY, and Robertsbridge:
Plough Publishing House, 2004). See also Richard Domer, Winifred Hildel and
John Hinde, May They all Be One: The Life of Heini Arnold (Rifton, NY: Plough
Publishing House, 1992).
31
Michael Tyldesley, No Heavenly Delusion? (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2003), p. 65.
32
Emmy Barth, An Embassy Besieged (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010).
Also Hans Meier, Hans Meier Tells His Story: the Dissolution of the Rhoen
Bruderhof in Retrospect (Rifton, N.Y.: Plough Publishing, 1979). Two Hutterites,
David Hofer and Michael Waldner, were visiting the Bruderhof in 1937 and helped
the community. Part of David Hofers diary was published in the Mennonite
Quarterly Review. Robert Friedmann, ed., trans., Hutterites Revisit European
Homesteads: Excerpts from the Travel Diary of David Hofer, MQR, Vol. 33
(October 1959), p. 306.
33
Emmy Barth, No Lasting Home: A Year in the Paraguayan Wilderness
(Rifton, NY, and Robertsbridge: Plough Publishing House, 2009).
Ian M. Randall 9

Given the work done on Bruderhof history, Foundations of our

Faith and Calling is not intended as a narrative of that history. It does
trace crucial steps, beginning with the formation of the community in
1920. Eberhard and Emmy Arnold, and Else von Hollander, as they
were confronted by mounting social injustice and the horrors of
World War I, turned to Jesus teachings, especially his Sermon on
the Mount. Through this, Foundations notes, they felt a call to
radical discipleship: to give up everything for Christ. The Sannerz
group began to live in community of goods after the example of the
first church in Jerusalem. Young people were attracted and numbers
grew to 150, but Foundations recounts how after Hitlers rise to power
members became a target of National Socialist oppression: they
refused to use the Heil Hitler greeting, serve in the German army, or
accept a government teacher in their school. In 1937 the secret police
closed the community at gunpoint. Foundations continues: With the
help of Mennonite, Quaker, and Catholic friends, all members were
eventually reunited in England, and by 1940 the refugee community
had doubled in size through an influx of English members.34 After
moving from England to Paraguay they had twenty years as pioneer
farmers in a harsh, unfamiliar climate, while also founding a hospital
that served thousands of local patients. Foundations concludes its
summary which does not attempt to deal with historical complexities
- with the founding in 1954 of the first American Bruderhof
community, in Rifton, New York, and the subsequent establishment of
communities in the USA, UK, Germany (one in the original
community house in Sannerz), Paraguay and Australia.35

Evangelical Spirituality: Christs transforming love

Eberhard Arnold, the main shaping force in the emergence of the

Bruderhof, was born on 16 July 1883 near Knigsberg. His mother,
Elisabeth Arnold, ne Voigt, was from a family of scholars, and his
father, Carl Franklin Arnold, was the son of Swiss and American
missionaries. Carl Arnold taught theology and philosophy and in 1888

34
Foundations, pp. 21-22. I am grateful to Peter Mommsen for supplying me
with material relating to British members, such as an unpublished autobiography
and unpublished manuscript by Maureen Burn, Truth Is Eternal.
35
Foundations, pp. 21-23.
10 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

was appointed Professor of Church History at Breslau University.36

Although Carl Arnold read to his family from the daily texts of the
Moravian Brethren, with their powerful evangelical spirituality,37
Eberhard did not have any personal encounter with spiritual
experiences that impressed him until he stayed - when almost sixteen
with his mothers cousin, Lisbeth, and her husband, Ernst Ferdinand
Klein. Several things about Ernst Klein were significant. He had been
a Lutheran pastor in a weavers village and had taken up the cause of
the workers in their struggles. This led to his removal by the Lutheran
Church to another parish. Eberhard was struck by this and also by his
uncles courageous, joyful Christianity. One memorable incident for
Eberhard was when Ernst Klein warmly welcomed a Salvation Army
member and called him brother. Klein was keen to hear about the
work of the Salvation Army among the poor in Berlin and Eberhard
listened with fascination. Most Lutheran ministers of the time were
dismissive of the Salvation Army and its spiritual commitments.38
After returning from his stay with his aunt and uncle, Eberhard
embarked on an intense spiritual search. He would later tell Emmy his
story: in October 1899, after a prolonged inner struggle, he visited a
young pastor, having heard him speak. When he asked the pastor
about the Holy Spirit, Emmy recorded, the pastor said, It is just this
Spirit that has led you here. So it happened that Eberhard
experienced conversion.39 This was a classic evangelical conversion
experience. Studies of evangelicalism in recent years have generally
aligned themselves with David Bebbingtons argument that
evangelicals are those who stress conversion, the Bible, the cross, and
activism.40 These came together in Eberhards experience. His
conversion involved reading the Bible - Johns gospel chapter 3, with
a focus on being born again (John 3:3). Jesus was now seen by him
as Gods Son, and as his Saviour and Redeemer (John 3:16). Arnold

36
Baum, Against the Wind, pp. 2-3.
37
I.M. Randall, Christ comes to the heart: Moravian influence on the shaping of
evangelical spirituality, Journal of European Baptist Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3 (2006),
pp. 5-23.
38
Baum, Against the Wind, p. 8.
39
Emmy Arnold, Joyful Pilgrimage, p. 2.
40
D.W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the
1730s to the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1995),pp. 2-17.
Ian M. Randall 11

continued to stress the Bible, writing of it in Innerland as the only

book that can satisfy the inner life and fill the heart.41 As evidence
of continued emphasis on the cross, he spoke of how the
proclamation of the cross becomes a divine power; coming from the
heart of God and he quoted the rule and method of the Moravian
leader, Count Zinzendorf, to make the glorious Lamb everything.42
Arnolds activism was highlighted when at age eighteen he began to
preach in Salvation Army circles. He described speaking some years
later at a powerfully blessed Salvation Army meeting: he had
seldom experienced anything like it.43 Christian spirituality can be
seen as concerned with the conjunction of theology, communion with
God and practical Christianity.44 Desire for this conjunction to be
achieved in an authentic way was at the heart of Eberhard Arnolds
commitment from 1899 onwards.
Foundations speaks of people experiencing Christs transforming
love.45 Following his own experience of this transformation, Arnold
began to make contact with students and others meeting in small
groups for worship, Bible study and fellowship. One Bible study
group which was established and to which Arnold gave energy soon
grew to fifty students. In 1901 Eberhard began to take an interest in
movements of renewal and change in church history, especially the
sixteenth-century Reformation. This was something his father
encouraged. The movement that most attracted Eberhard was radical:
Anabaptism. Although there were differences between different
Anabaptist groups, the common position for nearly all was re-baptism
- based on the rejection of the validity of infant baptism - and rejection
of a state church. As Arnold Snyder puts it, to be an Anabaptist was to
make a faith decision that directly confronted and challenged the
social, religious, and political status quo.46 Through his father,

41
Arnold, Innerland, p. 39.
42
Arnold, Innerland, p. 184.
43
Eberhard Arnold to Emmy von Hollander [hereafter, Eberhard and Emmy],
29-30 June 1907, Love Letters, (Plough Publishing House: Rifton, NY, and
Robertsbridge, 2007), pp. 100-1; Emmy Arnold, Joyful Pilgrimage, p. 3.
44
P. Sheldrake, Spirituality and History (London: SPCK, 1991), p. 52.
45
Foundations, p. 8.
46
C. A. Snyder, Anabaptist History and Theology: An Introduction (Kitchener,
Ontario: Pandora Press, 1995), p. 2.
12 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

Eberhard became aware of Johann Loserth, an Austrian Professor who

had researched a communitarian Anabaptist movement led by Jakob
Hutter. Eberhard read Loserths volumes on Anabaptism in the Tyrol,
in his fathers library, and he was attracted by Loserths description of
Anabaptists as good, faithful people with a pure way of life and love
of Jesus. Eberhard found here a movement that spoke to him about
how to follow Jesus. It also raised queries in his mind about the
Lutheran state church.47
In 1905 Eberhard Arnold began as a student at Breslau University,
studying theology. He immediately became part of the Student
Christian Movement (SCM) and attended an SCM conference in that
year at which the speakers included Karl Heim, later a professor of
Dogmatics at Mnster and Tbingen, and R.A. Torrey, an American
evangelist who undertook evangelistic campaigns similar to those of
D.L. Moody. Torrey spoke at the conference of the personal
experience of the Spirits power and of the experience of baptism by
the Spirit. Later Eberhard recommended Torreys work on fullness
of power.48 Eberhard had received an invitation from General
William Booth to serve in the Salvation Army, but he felt his spiritual
home was to be with the SCM and the YMCA. He was elected
chairman of the Halle branch of the SCM and in his inaugural address
to the branch he set out in powerful terms his vision, one that was not
his own construction but expressed the heart of evangelical
spirituality: We do not want to be or become an isolated sect, but
rather a missionizing power for all groups in our universities. We do
not want to set up a party or direction within Christianity, but rather to
unite Christians of every hue under the banner of JesusOnly Jesus!
That is the motto of our movement. We know we do not belong to
ourselves any longer, but that he has redeemed us to God by his
blood.49
Eberhard Arnolds reference to uniting Christians of every hue
under the banner of Jesus reflected the pan-denominational

47
Eberhard Arnold, Aus dem Worte Gottes, cited by Baum, Against the Wind, pp.
14-15.
48
Eberhard Arnold to Emmy von Hollander, 9 April 1907, in Bruderhof
Historical Archive [BHA], cited by Baum, Against the Wind, p. 19.
49
Text of address, Arnold to Emmy von Hollander, 1 July 1907, BHA, cited by
Baum, Against the Wind, p. 23.
Ian M. Randall 13

spirituality of the student body, the SCM, and also, more broadly, of
the Evangelical Alliance. From its origins in London in 1846 the
Evangelical Alliance wished to promote unity among Christians and
across national boundaries. A key figure in the international impetus
was a Swiss-American, Philip Schaff, a Professor at Union
Theological Seminary, New York. Schaffs ecumenical vision derived
from Lutheran and Reformed connections and he envisaged the
possible ultimate coming together of Catholic, Protestant and
Orthodox Churches.50 In the 1890s British Evangelical Alliance
representatives such as the leading Baptist, F.B. Meyer, attended
German Evangelical Alliance conferences at Bad Blankenburg, and in
1899 Meyer spoke of the remarkable Gemeinschaftsbewegung or
Fellowship meeting movement in Lutheranism, wondering if this
would revive or split the Church.51 For Eberhard Arnold, the
transdenominational Fellowship groups and the Alliance provided
spiritual nourishment. In 1907 Halle saw a powerful revival
movement. This had links with wider revival in Europe, drawing from
the (1904-05) Welsh Revival.52 In Halle there was a revival
Fellowship on the Alte Promenade (now Paracelsus-Strasse), meeting
in the reconstructed studio of a painter. Arnold seems to have co-
founded this Fellowship. Links with the Evangelical Alliance led to
Arnold publishing in their magazine and speaking at the Bad
Blankenburg conference in 1907.53 Arnold also held evangelistic
meetings in Halle, Berlin, Hamburg and Erfurt with the lawyer-
evangelist Ludwig von Gerdtell, founder of the European Evangelistic

50
Ian Randall and David Hilborn, One Body in Christ: The History and
Significance of the Evangelical Alliance (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2001), p. 138;
N.M. Railton, No North Sea: The Anglo-German Evangelical Network in the Middle
of the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 183-4.
51
Minutes of the Executive Council of the Evangelical Alliance, 11 July 1895;
Evangelical Alliance Quarterly, 2 October 1899, p. 20.
52
Emmy Arnold spoke of revivals in America, Norway, Sweden, Wales and
Finland. Emmy to Eberhard, 7 August and 9 August 1907. A key linking figure was
Eva von Tiele-Winckler of the Friedenshort (Refuge of Peace), who was working
among the poor. She and some friends visited Wales to experience the awakening.
53
Baum, Against the Wind, pp. 25-6. See Appendix 1.
14 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

Society, and Arnold contributed an article, Work among the

educated, to a series by von Gerdtell on world-view issues.54
The year 1907 was of even greater significance for Eberhard
because he met Emmy von Hollander. She was originally from Riga,
Latvia, from a distinguished family, and in 1905 was working as a
probationer nurse at the Halle Deaconess House. On 4 March 1907
Emmy and her sisters Else and Monika heard Eberhard Arnold
speaking at a meeting. He drew from Hebrews chapter 10: Since we
have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus... let us
draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith. Emmy described
how she felt the call to life-long discipleship.55 Soon Eberhard and
Emmy became engaged, and for periods of time exchanged almost
daily letters.56 The relationship of conversion to baptism became an
issue in their correspondence. In May 1907 Eberhard saw infant
baptism as willed by Jesus and God.57 A month later he commented:
The agitation over baptism... cannot be of the Holy Spirit.58
Eberhard and Emmy never approached the Bible simply as an
abstracted text, but as something to be read under the guidance of
the Holy Spirit.59 Serious study of the Bible and prayer led Eberhard
to a change of mind: on 4 September 1907 he told Emmy that he had
been convinced by God, with quiet and sober biblical certainty, that
baptism of believers alone is justified.60 Eberhard thought about
joining a Baptist Church, since their beliefs, more so than their way
of life, correspond so closely with my ideal. He wrote about being
deeply refreshed by reading All of Grace by the leading Baptist
pastor, C.H. Spurgeon. But Emmy pointed out that baptism was
demanded for every Baptist member. This, for Eberhard, made

54
Ludwig von Gerdtell, ed., Burning world-view issues for thinking modern
people, No. 4 (1907), cited by Vollmer, The Neuwerk Movement, p. 53.
55
Emmy Arnold, Joyful Pilgrimage, p. 10.
56
The letters they exchanged during their engagement were put together by
Emmy in nine volumes.
57
Eberhard to Emmy, 11 May 1907, Love Letters, p. 56.
58
Eberhard to Emmy, 29-30 June 1907, Love Letters, p. 102.
59
I am indebted to Professor John Briggs for this comment on Eberhard and
Emmy.
60
Baum, Against the Wind, pp. 33-5. Eberhard to Emmy, 6 September 1907,
Love Letters, pp. 132-3.
Ian M. Randall 15

Baptists sectarian.61 Baptist approaches to baptism and church

membership were in line with the practice of the Anabaptists, but
Arnold was more attracted by the perspective of von Gerdtell, who
argued that the baptism of a believer should not mean sectarian
separation.62
Eberhard Arnolds baptismal quest was part of his concern to
follow the teaching of Jesus. Speaking of baptism as something an
individual should choose for himself or herself, Arnold insisted that
the central issue was Jesus only! Jesus as God and Lord, whatever it
may cost.63 Arnold was also stressing the need to live out the
teaching Sermon on the Mount. In a letter to Emmy in 1907 he wrote
about the interest among evangelicals in the Second Coming of Christ
the idea of the rapture: Testify resolutely to Jesus will, he urged
Emmy, and added: My feeling is that Matthew 5:1316 is more
important for you than the rapture: You are the salt of the earth....64
Arnold was disqualified in 1908 from sitting his doctoral
examinations in theology because he had made known that he was not
willing to be a pastor in the Lutheran Church and was going to be
baptised as a believer. Else von Hollander had announced in 1907 her
wish to be baptised as a believer, which the family viewed as social
suicide.65 Else was baptised in August 1908 and in October Eberhard
- against the background of strong opposition from his family - was
baptised in Halle, in the White Elster River, by a Leipzig doctor,
Gotthelf Mller.66 Emmys baptism took place in December, in the
Blcher Fellowship in Berlin. She was baptised by Pastor Khler, a
leader of the Fellowship and of an Evangelical Alliance Bible
School.67 Eberhard completed a philosophy thesis, on Friedrich
61
Eberhard to Emmy, 16 Sept 1907, BHA, cited by Baum, Against the Wind, p.
38. See also Eberhard to Emmy, 14 November 1907, Love Letters, p. 166.
62
John Howard Yoder, Introduction, Eberhard Arnold, Gods Revolution:
Justice, Community, and the Coming Kingdom (Rifton, NY, and Robertsbridge:
Plough Publishing House, 1997), p. xx.
63
Baum, Against the Wind, p. 38.
64
Eberhard to Emmy, 1 May 1907, Love Letters, p. 49.
65
Emmy to Eberhard, 12 May 1907, Love Letters, p. 57.
66
Emmy to Eberhard, 19 October 1908, BHA, cited by Baum, Against the Wind,
p. 49.
67
Emmy Arnold, Aus unserem Leben (unpublished memoirs), BHA, cited by
Baum, Against the Wind, p. 51.
16 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

Nietzsche, in 1909, and graduated Summa cum laude. Soon

Eberhard and Emmy were married and set up home in Leipzig.68
The lives of the young couple were full, with many meetings being
addressed, people being cared for and considerable travelling
undertaken. However, in the midst of all this evangelical activism a
perspective was to open up which would add new dimensions to their
evangelical spirituality. There were Baptists and other evangelicals in
this period, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, an influential social
gospel advocate, who were looking to Anabaptist views for
inspiration in a quest for social justice.69 Rauschenbusch, whose
ministry was undertaken in America, had warm ties with the
European Christian socialist, Hermann Kutter, who was a Lutheran
pastor in Zrich.70 The British Baptist author, Richard Heath, who
translated works by Kutter into English under the title Social
Democracy, was also admired by Rauschenbusch. Heaths work
wedded an Anabaptist ideal of church as community to the goal of
creating a democratic socialist society.71 In 1910 Eberhard Arnold
read the book They Must! by Kutter,72 and Arnold was deeply
impressed by Kutters positive presentation of Christian socialism.
Another influence on Arnold was the social anarchist and pacifist,
Gustav Landauer. From 1913 to 1917, Arnold wrestled with his
feeling that purely personal Christianity was inadequate and that
Christs work must be expressed in tangible ways.73

68
Emmy Arnold, Joyful Pilgrimage, pp. 13-15.
69
Christopher Evans, The Kingdom is Always but Coming: A life of Walter
Rauschenbusch (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), p. 155.
70
Paul Minus, Walter Rauschenbusch, American Reformer (New York, NY:
Macmillan, 1988), p. 163.
71
Richard Heath, Anabaptism (London: Alexander and Shepheard, 1895), p.
193. See J.H.Y. Briggs, Richard Heath, 18311912: From Suburban Baptist to
Radical Discipleship by Way of Anabaptism, in J.H.Y. Briggs and A.R. Cross,
eds., Freedom and the Powers (Didcot: The Baptist Historical Society, 2014), pp.
69-84.
72
Theo Hobson, Reinventing Liberal Christianity (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans, 2013), p. 230.
73
Eberhard Arnold, Salt and Light: Living the Sermon on the Mount (Rifton,
NY, and Robertsbridge: Plough Publishing House, 1998), pp. xiv-xv. Foreword by
Jrgen Moltmann.
Ian M. Randall 17

Foundations has the same evangelical emphases as those to be

found in Eberhard Arnold. The first article in Foundations speaks of
the Bruderhof communitys life as founded on Jesus, the Christ and
son of God. We desire to love him, to follow him, to obey his
commandments, and to testify in word and deed to the coming of his
kingdom here on earth, and the second states: Our faith is grounded
in the Bible, the authoritative witness to the living Word of God.
Through the Holy Spirit, we seek to be guided in all things by the Old
and New Testaments.74 The biblicism of Foundations is seen in its
many biblical references. Foundations also expounds a robust
crucicentrism:

By taking suffering and death upon himself, he [Christ] atoned

for our sins and the sins of the whole world. His cross is the
only place we can be forgiven and find peace with God and one
another. The cross is the means of our personal salvation, but it
is also more: it has cosmic significance. Here Christ overcomes
all powers of evil and enmity, fulfills the justice of God, and
reconciles the whole universe to himself.75

Conversionism is also clearly evident. Full surrender to Christ is

seen as the basis of discipleship and means repentance and
conversion, of which baptism is the sign.76 Later Foundations speaks
of true repentance as a gift of God, which is recognizable by a
remorseful and contrite heart, a desire to confess ones sins, and a
changed life that shows fruits of a new spirit.77 Finally, active
mission is encouraged. The church community sends out brothers and
sisters to proclaim the gospel and in doing so our prayer is that the
original apostolic commission might become a reality today as it was
in New Testament times: for Christs messengers to be equipped with
74
Foundations, p. 1.
75
Foundations, p. 8. Finger, Review Essay, p. 589, suggests that this view of
the cross aligns itself with more radical, socially concerned theology. It is however,
no less evangelical because of that. See John Stott on the objective decisive victory
of the Lamb over all the powers of darkness which He won when He shed His blood
on the cross. John Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity,
1986), p. 251.
76
Foundations, p. 30.
77
Foundations, p. 51.
18 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

the full authority of the Spirit, going into all the world to invite people
to the great feast of the kingdom of God.78 The heart of evangelical
spirituality is personal relationship with Christ,79 and Foundations
talks unequivocally of the importance of a living relationship with
Christ. Without personal connection with Christ, Foundations
maintains, church community will wither away.80

Community of goods

In the spring of 1913, after Eberhard had held meetings in Halle, he

became seriously ill with tuberculosis and for the sake of his health he
and Emmy and their children at that time Emi-Margret and
Eberhard, later to be joined by Heinrich, Hans-Hermann and Monika -
moved to the Tyrol. This was an area where Anabaptist communities
had been present in the early sixteenth century, and the Arnolds gave
greater attention to Anabaptist figures such as Hans Denck, Balthasar
Hubmaier and Jakob Hutter.81 Many Anabaptists, including the
Mennonites (called after Menno Simons), encouraged mutual aid
within Christian communities, but it was the Hutterites (called after
Hutter) who implemented community of goods.82 Because of fierce
persecution of the Anabaptists in 1525-30, many of those in Swiss,
Tyrolean and south German areas fled to Moravia. Hutter, who arrived
in Moravia in 1529, led a group that formed a church. They found the
basis for their espousal of community of goods in many Old and New
Testament verses. The basic texts were in Acts, with the practices of
the church in Jerusalem. In the gospels, the parable of the rich man
and Lazarus addressed the issue of holding property in the context of
78
Foundations, p. 18.
79
I have developed this in I.M. Randall, What a Friend we have in Jesus
(London: DLT, 2005).
80
Foundations, p. 77.
81
Emmy, Joyful Pilgrimage, pp. 17-18.
82
For the early Hutterites see Hutterian Brethren, ed., The Chronicle of the
Hutterian Brethren, Volume I (Rifton, NY: Plough Publishing House, 1987); Hans
Fischer, Jakob Huter (Newton, Kan.: Mennonite Publication Office, 1956); Werner
Packull, Hutterite Beginnings: Communitarian Experiments during the
Reformation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and James M.
Stayer, The German Peasants' War and Anabaptist Community of Goods (Montreal:
McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991).
Ian M. Randall 19

human suffering.83 Hutterites saw themselves as part of a spiritual

tradition: they pointed to church fathers who praised giving away
possessions, and to denunciations of selfishness in Thomas Kempis
The Imitation of Christ.84 Hutters successors, especially Peter Walpot
and Peter Riedemann, created rules for community of goods and saw
community as normative for the church.85 In his Confession of Faith,
Riedemann argued that the one who is freed from created things can
grasp what is true and divine.86
Eberhard and Emmy Arnold were fascinated by the Anabaptist
stories. They were in the area not only from where Hutter originated
but also to which he returned in spring 1535. Having been betrayed by
a fellow-Anabaptist, he was executed in Innsbruck in February 1536.
Local archives had preserved court records relating to Hutter and other
Anabaptists, and these were studied by the Arnolds.87 At the time
they did not know that the Hutterites still existed as communities in
America. Although there have been suggestions that Eberhard Arnold
came to know about the American Hutterites in the mid-1920s through
the scholar Robert Friedmann, it has been established by Markus
Baum that Arnolds first awareness came in 1921, through a letter
from J.G. Evert, a Mennonite and a philology professor at Tabor
College, Kansas.88 Eberhard Arnold later made an extended visit to
the Hutterite communities in America, and the Bruderhof belonged to
the Hutterites from 1930 to 1955 and 1974 to 1995.89 Arnold never
lost the sense of having encountered something powerful in his
discovery of early Hutterite life. After his return from America in
1931 he stated: The difference between our Bruderhof and American

83
L. Verduin, The Reformers and Their Stepchildren (Grand Rapids: William B.
Eerdmans, 1964), p. 22.
84
Stayer, German Peasants War, p. 431; J.P. Klassen, The Economics of
Anabaptists (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1964), p. 84.
85
Stayer, German Peasants War, p. 144.
86
Peter Riedmann, Confession of Faith (Rifton, NY: Plough Publishing House,
1970), p. 90.
87
Baum, Against the Wind, p. 73.
88
Baum, Against the Wind, p. 134.
89
For a full account of the sometimes stormy relationship, see Rod Janzen, The
Hutterites and the Bruderhof: The Relationship between an Old Older Religious
Society and a Twentieth-Century Communal Group, MQR, Vol. 79 (October 2005),
pp. 505-44.
20 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

Hutterism consists largely of this: We seek to find our spiritual

nourishment and foundation in the first and the second Hutterian
periods... whereas in the American communities it is the later period
(seventeenth century) that serves that purpose... [we] want to become
Hutterian in the sense of those first sixty years, from 1528-1589.90
Eberhard Arnold became increasingly concerned to see how the
community life of the Early Church could be embodied. As he
travelled and lectured, what he said was received by many with
enthusiasm, although rejected by others. A significant youth
conference was held in Schlchtern, north-east of Frankfurt, at
Pentecost 1920. Schlchtern was where Georg Flemmig had been
seeking to pioneer an Early Church movement that had attracted
Eberhard, Emmy and Else. At the conference, Eberhard took up the
themes of The Mystery of the Early Church, and the spirit of
Pentecost.91 Following the conference, Eberhard and Emmy and some
young people walked to the nearby village of Sannerz, to make
enquires about a house and fields which might be suitable for a
community. After weeks of discussion a rental agreement for ten years
was signed. The working community life which the Arnolds had
envisaged took concrete form.92 Initially the core group was small:
Eberhard and Emmy, now with five children, Else, and a few others,
including Suse Hungar, a Salvation Army captain and teacher. There
were many visitors, however, and despite severe challenges, including
a serious division in 1922, the community gradually grew, supporting
itself by agriculture and publishing. In 1926, in what Eberhard called
a step of faith,93 a neglected farm in the Rhn, a few miles from
Sannerz, was purchased. It was the largest of several farms in the
Rhn, in the Fulda district of Hesse. Between 1926 and 1930 the
community grew from 30 to 70, with baptisms taking place. In a letter

90
Irmgard Keiderling to Else von Hollander, 15 May 1931, cited by Baum, p.
207; cf. Brothers Unite, p. 249.
91
Das Geheimnis der Urgemeinde, printed in Das Neue Werk, No. 2021, p.
160; cf. Baum, Against the Wind, p. 123
92
Baum, Against the Wind, p. 123. Emmy Arnold, Joyful Pilgrimage, pp. 36-40.
93
Eberhard read A.T. Piersons biography of George Mller in 1908 and wrote
to Emmy that never before had praying in faith become so real to him. He believed
God wanted him to live from faith alone. Eberhard to Emmy, 31 August 1908,
Love Letters, p. 232.
Ian M. Randall 21

in 1926 Arnold spoke of the community as a Bruderhof.94 By this

time Arnold had obtained from Friedmann the address of Elias Walter,
a Hutterite elder in North America, and he wrote him a long letter. In
the meantime the Rhn community was finding and copying
Anabaptist documents, for example a 355-page manuscript with court
records concerning Peter Riedemann.95
As well as opening up correspondence with Walter, Arnold
contacted two American Mennonite leaders and historians, John
Horsch and his son-in-law Harold Bender. In a letter in January 1928
he explained to Horsch that the spiritual roots of the Rhn Bruderhof
went back to many different sources, including revival movements in
Germany; the Baptists and the Salvation Army; Quakers, with their
peace witness; youth movements, with their love of nature, which
Arnold greatly valued; and workers movements. Arnold told Horsch
about a book he had written on the early Christians which illuminated
the spiritual life of our Bruderhof as lived in the modern world. He
also wanted to discuss with Horsch and others the task of mission and
evangelizing today, commenting that he had been unable to find
among Hutterite communities in America any mission comparable to
what happened so powerfully in Moravia through early Hutterites.96
At the end of 1928 Arnold was in correspondence with Elias Walter.
Arnold expressed the determination of the Rhn Bruderhof to join the
Hutterities. He also discussed baptism, affirming the view of Andreas
Ehrenpreis, a seventeenth-century Hutterite bishop, that the mode of
baptism immersion or pouring should not be a divisive issue.
Arnold had been speaking to a gathering of Baptist pastors and was
happy to tell Walter they accepted that community of goods was not
unbiblical or fanatical but was present in the early Jerusalem
church.97
By this time the Rhn community was making plans for Arnold to
visit the American Hutterite communities and unite the Rhn
Bruderhof with them. This was not straightforward. Elias Walter
explained that the American Hutterites were divided into three groups

94
Baum, Against the Wind, pp. 168-70.
95
Baum, Against the Wind, p. 180.
96
Eberhard Arnold to John Horsch, 9 January 1928, in Brothers Unite, p. 2.
97
Eberhard Arnold to Elias Walter, 6 November 1928, in Brothers Unite, pp. 6-
9.
22 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

- in South Dakota, Manitoba, and Alberta. Arnold wrote to them all.

He also wrote to Robert Friedmann, in June 1929, expressing his
enthusiasm for the way Hutterite communities put faith into action,
so that here and now in the practical, communal church life the
kingdom of God is shown as justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit
(Romans 14:17).98 In similar tones, Arnold wrote to John Horsch
about centuries-old tradition, which all too easily brings a gradual
loss of the first zeal of faith, love, and personal experience of Christ,
but in the case of the Hutterites Arnold believed that their prayer for
the Holy Spirit proves that the living breath of truth is not and cannot
be extinguished.99 The Rhn community re-affirmed in August 1929
by unanimous Brotherhood decision Arnolds visit to America.100
During this period Arnold travelled to Austria to discuss with
Professor Loserth editing and publishing old Hutterite works, and
gave lectures at Friedmanns Tolstoy Club in Vienna. Arnold also
travelled to Sabatisch (Sobotite) and Velk Levre (both in present-
day Slovakia), which were early Hutterite settlements. He met
descendants of the Anabaptists and saw old Hutterian sites. Among
his finds was a valuable Hutterian document of 1652 in the Moravian
Herrnhut archives.101
Although the main focus of the Rhn Bruderhof was unity with
Hutterite communities, two of Arnolds Mennonite contacts, John
Horsch and Harold Bender, gave significant encouragement to Arnold
before and during his American trip. Just before leaving for America,
Arnold wrote to Bender on 20 May 1930 to thank him for visiting the
Rhn community. Arnold expressed the gratitude of the community
that Bender had been given the power and insight to realize that, in
spite of our special way of expressing it, the only single thing of
importance for us is representing the true and real gospel. Arnold
added that the Rhn Bruderhof was not part of those movements that

98
Eberhard Arnold to Robert Friedmann, 6 June 1929, in Brothers Unite, p. 26.
99
Eberhard Arnold to John Horsch, 14 September to 9 October 1929, in Brothers
Unite, p. 43.
100
Report of a Meeting of the Brotherhood and Novices at the Rhn
Brotherhood, 11 August 1929 in Brothers Unite, p. 37. There was a hope that
another Bruderhof member might accompany Arnold, but that did not happen.
101
Eberhard Arnold to David Wipf, 31 December 1929, in Brothers Unite, pp.
46-8.
Ian M. Randall 23

believed in the goodness of man and formed community on that

basis.102 Here was a reiteration of evangelical spirituality. Bender
replied that he hoped those at the Rhn would be shining witnesses
of Gods love and strength. He had found this personally: That is
what you have become for me.103 Benders developing thinking about
the Anabaptist Vision was to prove crucial for Mennonite self-
identity. His ideas were published in Church History and in The
Mennonite Quarterly Review, launched in 1927.104 After Arnold
arrived in America he reported home - in June 1930 - that he had
attended a Mennonite meeting lasting many hours which had been
astonishingly lively, with English revivalist songs. Arnold had
been able to speak for an hour, emphasising our special themes -
Pentecost at Jerusalem, the gospel of Christ, and love and
community, in which everything belongs to God and to the church of
the Spirit.105
The journey to union with the Hutterites involved Arnold in
visiting all thirty-three Hutterite communities. He spoke to each about
unity and about funds for work in Germany. Arnold was questioned in
detail at each stage of his journey about his communal Anabaptist
credentials. Arnolds belief was that the Hutterites affirmed what was
important, the gospel of personal conversion through the reconciling
blood of Christ and also the gospel applied to social relationships,
putting into practice the Sermon on the Mount.106 At the same time he
found Hutterite communalism so totally supreme that it seemed (as
Arnold wrote in his diary) the salvation of the individual (also as
regards eternal life) is seen solely in terms in terms of obedient
yielding and surrender to the community.107 Arnold was concerned
about lack of unity among the Hutterian communities, about economic
disparity, and about Hutterite sermons drawing from seventeenth-
century Hutterite life, rather than the vibrant early years of the

102
Eberhard Arnold to Harold Bender, 20 May 1930, in Brothers Unite, p. 53.
103
Harold Bender to Eberhard Arnold, 26 May 1930, in Brothers Unite, p. 54
104
Gospel Herald, April 1994, p. 8.
105
Eberhard Arnold to the Bruderhof community, 18 June 1930, in Brothers
Unite, p. 64.
106
Eberhard Arnold to John Horsch, 14 September to 9 October 1929, in
Brothers Unite, p. 42.
107
Eberhard Arnold, Diary, 21 July 1930, in Brothers Unite, p. 91.
24 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

movement.108 The Hutterites, for their part, accepted Arnold on the

basis of his biblical knowledge, study of Hutterite history, and
commitment to community. Arnold was baptised and ordained in the
service of the Word of God with laying on of hands. 109 Arnold was
hesitant about having a further baptism as an adult. However, despite
his reservations, he followed the Hutterite requirements.110 There was
excitement at the Rhn Bruderhof about the formal connection they
now had with the Hutterite communities. Annemarie Wchter, a
young teacher who joined the community, gave her family an
idealistic account of the Hutterites: The inner life of their
communities is still as pure, living and original as it was at the time of
their formation.111
Union with the Hutterites was to break down, be re-established
and then cease again. Nonetheless, Foundations sees the early
Hutterite movement as a defining influence on the Bruderhof, coupled
with Johann Christoph Blumhardt (18051880) and his son Christoph
Friedrich (Lutheran pastors who stressed Jesus as victor), and also the
Youth Movements. Foundations outlines the Anabaptist movements
beginning, when Felix Manz, Conrad Grebel, and Georg Blaurock set
the Radical Reformation in motion by accepting believers baptism.
They championed freedom of conscience and a return to original
Christianity in obedience to Jesus words in the Gospels, rejecting
armed force, infant baptism, and the institutional churches.112
Foundations notes the Hutterite model of communal living, although
as Arnold Snyder observes, for Anabaptists more broadly for Swiss
Brethren (Manz, Grebel and Blaurock) and followers of Menno

108
Janzen, The Hutterites and the Bruderhof, p. 6.
109
Announcement, 20 March 1931, in Brothers Unite, p. 185.
110
Janzen, The Hutterites and the Bruderhof, endnote 27, citing Michael
Barnett, The Bruderhof (Society of Brothers) and the Hutterites in Historical
Context, doctoral dissertation (Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1995),
p. 103. See more below.
111
Anni: Letters and Writings of Annemarie Wchter (Rifton, NY, and
Robertsbridge: Plough Publishing House, 2010), p. 145. Letter from Annemarie of
28 February 1932 to Mama, Hilde and Reinhold. Annemarie later married Heinrich
Arnold.
112
Foundations, p. 25.
Ian M. Randall 25

Simons - sharing of goods was a sign of the Body of Christ.113

Foundations explains that Hutterites shared money and possessions,
work, housing, and a common daily life, and zealously spread the
gospel, with hundreds suffering martyrdom. Issues that separated the
Bruderhof from the Hutterites are not discussed in Foundations. What
is affirmed is that the Bruderhof seeks to live in the same spirit as the
original Hutterites during the time of their first love and active
mission, and treasures Hutterian spiritual writings - Hutter,
Riedemann, Ulrich Stadler, and Walpot.114 The continuing influence
of the Youth Movements is noted in Foundations. For Arnold it was
very important, as he put it in 1935, to be simple, genuine, to have
nothing to do with anything forced, unnatural or artificial, including
artificial piety. The community wanted to live close to creation and
nature. 115 The emphasis on simplicity and respect for creation is,
Foundations states, essential to our community today, and, linked
with this, Bruderhof meetings are simple in form. Outdoor meetings
take place, in which the beauty of nature lifts our hearts and reminds
us of the greatness of our creator.116
For the Bruderhof, as Foundations expresses it, any attempt to
force the practice of community produces only a disappointing
caricature. Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit. The
emphasis in Foundations is on Gods help. Without that we human
beings are selfish and divided, unfit for life together. The words of
Jesus are quoted, Apart from me you can do nothing. The starting
point here is unequivocal: We remain sinners utterly dependent on
grace.117 At the same time, there are examples to follow. Hutterite
tradition has offered particular inspiration, but ultimately Foundations
points back to the first church founded at Pentecost in Jerusalem.
Foundations argues that in this community the Spirit worked with
unique power, leading Christians to share all they had, to serve the
citys poor, and to proclaim the gospel boldly and that this first
church communitys life and teaching demonstrate what Gods will is

113
C. Arnold Snyder, Following in the Footsteps of Christ (London: Darton,
Longman and Todd, 2004), p. 145.
114
Foundations, pp. 25-26.
115
Arnold, Gods Revolution, p. 147.
116
Foundations, pp. 28, 65.
117
Foundations, pp. 7-8.
26 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

for humankind.118 Whereas it has not been common among

evangelicals to identify themselves with developments in Christian
history following the death of the apostles, Foundations affirms the
early churchs rule of faith and values the Didache and the writings
of church fathers such as Clement of Rome, Hermas, Ignatius, Justin,
Tertullian, and Origen.119 Not surprisingly, there is a focus in
Foundations on movements that were communal: the Desert Fathers,
the community around Augustine of Hippo, Celtic Christians,
Waldensians, the Beguines and Beghards, followers of Francis of
Assisi and Clare, Anabaptists and early Quakers, and the
Moravians.120 Bruderhof spirituality belongs to the communal and
monastic traditions.

The decisive outpouring of the Holy Spirit

In the shaping of early Bruderhof spirituality, an understanding of the

Holy Spirit was crucial. In one of Eberhards first letters to Emmy, in
April 1907, he spoke of revival he had heard about in Frederiksand,
near Oslo, Norway, in which many came to a complete surrender to
Jesus, and the Spirit descended with a power like that at Pentecost in
the story in Acts, so that people are speaking in tongues there even
today.121 This was a period of powerful spiritual movements in
Europe. The Welsh Revival was described by F.B. Meyer as days of
Pentecostal overflowing.122 A Methodist, T.B. Barratt, brought
Pentecostalism to Norway. Support for Barratt came from Lewi
Pethrus, a Swedish Baptist evangelist.123 In 1907 Emmy heard four

118
Foundations, p. 23.
119
Foundations, pp. 23-4.
120
Foundations, p. 24. Others individuals mentioned include John Wycliffe, Jan
Hus, Martin Luther, Bach, Handel, John Wesley, Charles Finney, Hudson Taylor,
Sadhu Sundar Singh, William and Catherine Booth, Fydor Dostoevsky, Dorothy
Day, Mother Teresa, Sophie and Hans Scholl, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther
King, Jr., and Oscar Romero.
121
Baum, Against the Wind, p. 42.
122
Frank Bartleman, How Pentecost came to Los Angeles: As it was in the
beginning (Los Angeles: the author, 1925), p. 11; The Christian, 26 March 1925, p.
5.
123
I.M. Randall, Days of Pentecostal Overflowing: Baptists and the shaping
of Pentecostalism, in D.W. Bebbington, ed., The Gospel in the World (Carlisle:
Ian M. Randall 27

Swedes who had came to Halle with the Pentecostal message. The
Swedes told a Baptist meeting that they had been urged by the Holy
Spirit to come to Halle even though they did not know there was such
a town. Emmy, in discussion with them, was concerned that the cross
of Christ was not central to their message.124 Although Eberhard and
Emmy did not identify with Pentecostalism, their desire was to follow
what they felt was Gods leading. On 27 April 1907 Emmy asked
Eberhard about a question in regard to the Holy Spirit which worries
me somewhat. I cant say that Ive experienced a moment when I
received the Holy Spirit, as for example [Charles] Finney or
Frulein von Nostiz can, to the degree that (like them) I could not
control myself for joy.125 Eberhard acknowledged that Finney, the
nineteenth-century evangelist, and von Nostiz, a leader in what
Eberhard called the powerful awakening in Halle, and many others,
received the Holy Spirit in a way that involved powerfully stirred
emotions and other outward signs. But, he considered, this must not
make us think that the Spirit is limited to such accompanying
phenomena No one can call Jesus Lord (and thus belong to him)
except through the Holy Spirit, as it says in 1 Corinthians 12:3.126
This conjoining of Christ and the Spirit was something to which
Eberhard Arnold would return again and again. At a conference of the
SCM at Pentecost 1919, held on the Frauenberg, near Marburg, he
spoke on the Sermon on the Mount. One report from a conference
member spoke of how Arnold took the Sermon and burned it into our
hearts with a passionate spirituality Here there was no
compromise To be a Christian means to live the life of Christ.127
Arnold had published some of his thinking a few months before, in an
article for the SCM. He argued against seeing the Sermon as a set of
moralistic instructions and instead proposed that the way to attain the
new life of the Sermon on the Mount was through experiences that
Paul spoke of as the liberation of the believer from old ways and
reception by believers of the life-giving spirit of Jesus. In

Paternoster Press, 2002), pp. 80-104; N. Bloch-Hoell, The Pentecostal Movement

(London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), pp. 66-72, 75-77.
124
Emmy to Eberhard, 9 August 1907, BHA.
125
Emmy to Eberhard, 27 April 1907, Love Letters, p. 39.
126
Eberhard to Emmy, 28 April 1907, Love Letters, p. 43.
127
Emmy Arnold, Joyful Pilgrimage, pp. 27-28.
28 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

fellowship with him [Jesus] we become the salt which overcomes the
decay of death.128 This vision was reflected in responses to the
conference. One SCM member spoke of the spirit of the Sermon on
the Mount, the spirit of Jesus himself taking hold of those present.
We felt in Arnolds words that Jesus was seeking for our souls,
seeking for us to belong to him completely, for us to love in earnest
and we strove for this with all our might.129
The language of souls might imply more concern with the Holy
Spirits work in inner spiritual life than with its outworking in human
relationships. However, Arnolds view of spirituality was
determinedly holistic. This is seen throughout his major work,
Innerland, to which he gave energy from World War I onwards.130 It
is true that early in Innerland he wrote that in the hard times in which
people were living, nothing but a thorough and deep-going revival of
our inner life, a great and full awakening to God and his all-
determining rulership, can bring the gospel to the whole world the
joyful news that Christ alone matters. However, the life which
mattered was outward as well as inward. He argued that for the gospel
to spread the life of a missionary church must be given: a life that is
in keeping with the kingdom of God from its core to the last detail of
its outer form. He saw this form not in institutional terms, but
typically for him, in pneumatological terms, as peace, unity, and
community and as love and joy in the Holy Spirit.131 Arnold
underlined the Spirits work creating unity, prayerfulness and
fellowship. Through the decisive outpouring of the Holy Spirit, all
believers became so much one heart and one soul that they proved the
uniting of all their powers, not only in the word of the apostles and in
prayer, but also in the breaking of bread and in community in full
community of goods too.132 He explicitly countered the separation of
soul and body: the Holy Spirit brings wholeness. He wrote: When we
speak of the life of the soul, we usually think only of the innermost
part of a believing spirit. But we have to remember that the soul
embraces the whole of life.... What the believer must do, therefore, is

128
Published April 1919, reproduced in Eberhard Arnold, Salt and Light, p. 52,
129
Baum, Against the Wind, pp. 101-2.
130
Arnold, Innerland, p. 4 (Preface).
131
Arnold, Innerland, p. 13.
132
Arnold, Innerland, p. 58.
Ian M. Randall 29

search his innermost being, because his life in Christ shall be hidden
in God. He can say, I live, yet now it is no longer I but Christ who
lives in me.133
Emmy Arnold noted the importance for the Bruderhof community,
as it developed and grew, of the celebration of Pentecost, or Whitsun.
She spoke of Whitsun as our feast. It was following the Whitsun
1920 conference that the community was formed in Sannerz. This
conference included a time on the top of a hill when a Whitsun fire
was lit and it seemed as if the blaze, symbolising the burning up of
the old and the coming of something new, was a means through
which God was speaking. There was folk dancing and singing of
songs. Dances were seen as spiritual experiences, as Eberhard Arnold
wrote in one of his poems:

Spirit-gripped, / Move as one.

Circle round, / Centre-bound!

An English Quaker who was present at the conference, recommended

from Quaker tradition a time of silence to listen to the Spirit.134 In
Innerland, Arnold drew out this emphasis on listening to the Spirit in
Hutterite tradition. He quoted Riedemann: Just as in speaking we
exhale and let our breath out with words so that a living breath of
wind blows from both the speaker and the spoken word and a voice
comes out and makes a sound, so the Holy Spirit comes from the
Father and the Son or from the truth and the word. Riedemann used
the picture of fire, heat, and light for the Trinity: if we lack one of
them, we lack them all; for just as little as heat and light can be taken
away from fire and yet leave it a fire, just so little and even less can
the Son and the Holy Spirit be taken away from the Father. Arnold
was fascinated by the idea of continually renewal witnessing to
relational reality in God.135
In one of his last addresses, shortly before his death, Arnold spoke
of the first Anabaptists as a community of heart and life based on the
Spirit and he contrasted this with the Reformed view of the church

133
Arnold, Innerland, p. 85.
134
Emmy Arnold, Joyful Pilgrimage, pp. 34-5, 5.
135
Arnold, Innerland, p. 311
30 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

as a state-constituted society based on law.136 The life of

contemporary Hutterite communities in America with which the
Bruderhof were now in fellowship, however, seemed to involve
numerous laws. Emmy Arnold wrote of Hutterite customs: head
covering for women; black and dark grey clothes for men, instead of
the bright colours of the German youth movement; or the rejection of
the musical instruments that added so much to folk singing.137
Although these Hutterite practices were accepted by the Bruderhof at
the time, Eberhard Arnold wrote: There is no other church of Jesus
Christ than the one completely free of human authority, built and
directed by the spirit of Christs sacrifice. She remains at one in the
Holy Spirit, the one foundation of truth, the very soul of readiness for
the cross.138 The imposition of human authority was at odds with
Arnolds own spirit. By stressing unity in the Spirit, Arnold did not
mean to promote uniformity. The opposite was the case. He wrote:
We have never found it disturbing when people have come to us
representing convictions that differ from ours... Each one will bring
from the storehouse of his earlier convictions those elements that are
true, and he will find these again. Arnold was not impressed by any
unity that was produced by forcing anyone to comply.139
It seems that the way in which Arnold understood the outpouring
of the Holy Spirit had more in common with dynamic forms of
evangelical spirituality than with the way Hutterite tradition had
developed. Thus Arnold spoke of the key to the Bible as Christ and
his Holy Spirit and added that anyone who relies on the letter of
Scripture stands before firmly locked gates.140 As Arnold put it in
May 1934 (speaking on we must hold to Jesus), Christ who truly
rose from the dead is the Risen One and is present in the church
through the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, in fulfilment of his
promise in Matthew 28.141 Tyldesley suggests that it should be noted

136
Eberhard Arnold, The Early Anabaptists (Rifton, NY, and Robertsbridge:
Plough Publishing House, 1970), p. 27.
137
Emmy Arnold, Joyful Pilgrimage, p. 113.
138
Arnold, Innerland, p. 33.
139
Arnold, Gods Revolution, pp. 38-9
140
Arnold, Innerland, p. 373.
141
Eberhard Arnold, Sermon preached on 13 May 1934, published in Plough
Quarterly (Summer 2014), p. 18 (see pages 10-19).
Ian M. Randall 31

that prior to the turn towards life in Christian community, Arnold had
been an Evangelical Christian.142 This implies that after his turn
towards life in Christian community Arnold was no longer an
evangelical Christian, but in July 1934 Arnold affirmed that it was
truly Christian to proclaim the good news of the pardoned sinner,
who is now able to lead a purified life. Arnold quoted Colossians
1:18 and added that the New Testament, indeed the whole Bible,
spoke of this experience. He expressed thankfulness for many
movements that had witnessed to Jesus as Saviour. Such waves of
inner revival keep recurring, and that is a great grace.143 To balance
this, however, while there was joy when people knew forgiveness of
sins in his [Jesus] death on the cross, as Arnold stated in November
1934, Christs love and the meaning of his death on the cross are not
fully understood if they are restricted to the individuals subjective
experience of salvation.144 In July 1935 Arnold linked this with the
Spirits presence in the so-called outward aspects of life just as much
as in the innermost concerns of faith.145
Perhaps the connection between Eberhard Arnolds evangelical
spirituality and his vision for a community living in the power of the
Holy Spirit was most fully expressed in a substantial letter Arnold
wrote to his sister, Hannah, in March 1925. Hannah was involved, as
Eberhard had been, in the Fellowship movement, and Eberhard
affirmed that building up the Fellowship and evangelizing have
always been an essential part of my life, the life given me by God. He
was adamant in his letter that it was a totally false report, if you have
been told that I ever expressed myself about the Fellowship or Revival
Movement or its Christianity in such a way as to reject it. Arnold
insisted that it is impossible to emphasize the forgiveness of sins too
strongly. What Arnold did oppose was when in spite of the
experience of forgiveness a person looks away from this great heart of
God and gets enmeshed in his own small heart, becoming completely
lost in his personal experience. He wrote later in the letter:

142
Tyldesley, No Heavenly Delusion?, p. 76.
143
Arnold, Gods Revolution, July 1934, p. 43.
144
Arnold, Gods Revolution, November 1934, p. 42.
145
Arnold, Gods Revolution, July 1935, p. 43.
32 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

We all love the third chapter of Johns Gospel, but we tend to

forget that personal rebirth is here placed in the supra-personal
context of the kingdom of God. The coming kingdom is the
determining element in the Bible. It is this kingdom of the
future that must overwhelm and completely fill us. The Holy
Spirit wants to come over us and fill us in order to lead us into
the future kingdom; the Spirit is to bring to life for us Jesus
words about the world of the future; the Spirit is to lead us
toward this, so that we become a living example, a parable, a
visible testimony of the coming kingdom.146

In Arnolds mind, the Bruderhof was one such visible testimony.

A paragraph in Foundations echoes Arnolds thinking about the
Holy Spirit who wants to come over us and fill us:

As described in Acts 2 and 4, the Holy Spirit descended on the

believers who had gathered after Jesus resurrection, and the
first communal church was born. Just as it was then, so it will
be today whenever the Spirit is poured out on a group of
people. They will be filled with love for Christ and for one
another, and their communion of love will lead them to share
their goods, talents, and lives, boldly testifying to the gospel.
This is our calling in church community.147

There is realism in Foundations about the Bruderhof as a movement

that will pass away, but also confidence that the stream of life to
which it belongs can never pass away. Remaining part of the stream
of Gods Spirit is seen as possible through an ever new encounter
with Christ.148 Because of the desire for daily life together to be
inspired and led by the Holy Spirit, attention is given to establishing
church order based on Scripture and the example of the early church
and shaped by the Anabaptist tradition and our own experience. This
is balanced by the conviction that no system of church order should
hold back the leading of the spirit of Christ, since he is the head of

146
Eberhard Arnold to Hannah Arnold, March 1925. This hitherto unpublished
letter is held in the Bruderhof archive, File BHA, EA 25/15. See Appendix 1.
147
Foundations, p. 7.
148
Foundations, p. 28.
Ian M. Randall 33

the church, and he supersedes all human authorities and traditions.149

There is also an emphasis on prayer, which Foundations describes as
the lifeblood of church community and which takes many forms
silent, communal, fasting and singing.150
As in the thinking of Eberhard Arnold, Foundations reflects on
unity and diversity in the Christian community. Quoting 1 Corinthians
12:4-7, there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are
varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of
working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in every one,
Foundations notes that some members of the fellowship receive the
gift to teach, some to counsel and encourage, some to proclaim the
gospel, some to praise God through music and art, some to care for the
needy, some to contribute in other practical ways. But the greatest gift,
offered to each of us, is the ability to love.151 In terms of decisions in
the community, Arnold looked for unanimity, which he saw as the
opposite of making a majority decision.152 Similarly, Foundations
speaks of decisions being the expression of a unanimity freely arrived
at through common discernment and prayers, which comes from
listening together to Gods Spirit. Thus decision-making by
democratic or congregational vote is rejected, and the rule of human
opinions, whether of the majority or the minority, is described as the
enemy of the rule of the Holy Spirit. However, Foundations
encourages members to speak their minds: Unanimity in the Spirit is
not conformity. It cannot be manufactured through consensus-
building, persuasion, or pressure. In our experience, the dissent of a
single voice has at times proved to be prophetic.153 A spirituality that
involved a sense of being empowered by the Spirit to engage in
prophetic witness had brought the Bruderhof into being.

Spirituality in the church: a sacrament, a living symbol

On 13 September 1907 Eberhard Arnold wrote to Emmy to say that he

was going to withdraw from the established church, since I consider

149
Foundations, p. 29
150
Foundations, p. 65.
151
Foundations, pp. 39-40
152
Arnold, Gods Revolution, Arnold in1929, p. 39.
153
Foundations, pp. 45-6.
34 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

it dishonest through and through and contrary to the spirit of the Bible;
and that his desire was to embrace as his ideal church communities
who use church discipline and celebrate the Lords Supper.154 As
well as indicating the strength of Arnolds biblical convictions, this
also shows that in the midst of his experience of revival he had a sense
of the importance of the church. Thus Tyldesley does not grasp the
essence of Arnold when he talks about a collision between the
individualism of the revival movement and the communal aspects of
the Youth Movement and suggests that Arnolds thinking moved
towards the youth movement.155 Rather, speaking to the Rhn
Bruderhof in November 1928 Arnold accorded the earliest Baptizers
the primary influence on the Bruderhof, and considered that the
Fellowship movements of the earlier twentieth century had lost
power, as did other movements, such as German Christian Students.
Arnold talked about the Youth and workers communal movements as
having some elements that were genuine, but this was mixed with
other elements and they grew weaker and weaker in their real
effectiveness.156 He was looking for renewal of spiritual experience.
The radical views about the established churches that Arnold
voiced in 1907 could still be heard in his later writings. In Innerland
he wrote about the pentecostal spring of Christian beginnings
contrasting sharply with the icy rigidity of our Christianity today. In
the Early Church, he argued, a fresher wind blew and purer water
flowed, a stronger power and a more fiery warmth ruled than today
among all those who call themselves Christians. Arnold believed it
was accepted that the community life of faith and love represented by
the early church is almost not to be found today.157 This seems to
indicate a low estimation of those seeking to witness to Christ in his
time. However, a few pages further on in Innerland Arnold struck a
more hopeful note: In the authority of the Holy Spirit, the whole
church is of one heart and one mind Her unfeigned love and
boundless faith long to put everything to the service of God. She
wants to summon all the nations of the world to partake in Gods

154
Eberhard to Emmy, 13 September 1907, Love Letters, p. 145.
155
Tyldesley, No Heavenly Delusion?, p. 80.
156
Eberhard Arnold, November 1928, in Brothers Unite, p. 11.
157
Arnold, Innerland, p. 315.
Ian M. Randall 35

kingdom.158 Exactly how the features of icy rigidity and unfeigned

love can be reconciled is not clear. The vision of the unity of the
whole church is then expounded in this remarkable statement: Like
Mary the virgin, the church is, through the Holy Spirit, the eternal
mother. Without her there are no children The church takes shape
only where the Holy Spirit has brought about a life and faith
completely at one with the whole glorified band of martyrs and
witnesses, with the apostolic mother church of all centuries.159 Here
is a high view of the church, one that coheres with a catholic
ecclesiology.
In similar vein, Arnold wrote to his sister Hannah in 1925 about
how in the Reformation period many were really in unity in the eyes
of God and in the eyes of faith - the Lutherans and the Zwinglians,
believing Catholics like Staupitz for example, the biblicist
Schwenkfeldian movement of the Holy Spirit, the communistic peace
churches of the Baptizers, and many other shadings of the
Reformation era. Arnolds vision was of the fulfilment of Jesus
plea - that they may all be one. By this unity, the world will
recognize that Jesus was sent by God.160 In practice, however, unity
was hard to achieve. In 1930 a couple who were later important in the
Bruderhof, Hans and Margrit Meier, joined with others to start a
communal settlement in Lngimoos: the Werkhof (Work Farm). But
by 1932, with the Werkhof deeply divided, some members looked to
the Bruderhof.161 The Werkhof was inspired by Leonard Ragaz, whose
communal-orientated thinking had been shaped by Hermann Kutter.
Shared admiration for Kutter meant Ragaz and Arnold corresponded
in the 1920s, but Ragaz felt his work was being criticised by Arnold.
Ragaz asked if the Bruderhof considered their community a church or

158
Arnold, Innerland, p. 322.
159
Arnold, Innerland, p. 332.
160
Eberhard Arnold to Hannah Arnold, March 1925: BHA, EA 25/15.
161
Hans Meier, As Long as there is Light [1995], is an unpublished
autobiography. See also Dejan Adam, The Practical, Visible Witness of
Discipleship: The Life and Convictions of Hans Meier (1902-1992), in K.G. Jones
and I.M. Randall, eds.,Counter-Cultural Communities: Baptistic Life in Twentieth-
Century Europe (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), pp. 285-335.
36 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

the church excluding other forms of the church.162 Arnolds reply

has become recognised as a classic statement and is echoed in
Foundations.163 He began: It is of decisive importance that we
remember the mission of the church as it is laid upon us in the
outpouring of the Holy Spirit.164 Arnold explained that as weak and
needy people the Bruderhof community was not the church, rather
the recipients of Gods love people unworthy and unfit for the
work of the Holy Spirit, for the building of the church, and for its
mission to the world. Then he stated: But if anyone asks, Does the
church of God come down to you? then we have to answer yes
The church is wherever the Holy Spirit is.165
The emphasis on the Spirit did not mean that Arnold neglected the
sacraments. On baptism, he wrote in June 1907 to Emmy that he could
no longer find compelling proof for infant baptism in the churchs
life. When reading scripture and praying he felt he had quenched the
light of understanding with regard to baptism even if without
wanting to.166 Writing again to Emmy later in June he wanted to
reach a calm, clearly reasoned conviction. If he was suddenly
baptised people would say, First the Salvation Army and now
baptism. Hes always going to extremes! Its because of his
temperament!167 By September 1907 he wished to be baptised as
soon as possible and leave the established church.168 Emmy replied: I
still dont have a definite position on baptism, though one thing I do
know is that I personally didnt get anything out of my being baptized
as a baby. I dont feel the slightest blessing in it. I came to God
through my conversion, not through baptism.169 Eberhard began to
baptise others from 1920 onwards. In his 1925 summary of Why We

162
Leonhard Ragaz to the Bruderhof, 22 February 1933, cited by Barth, An
Embassy Besieged, p. 40.
163
Foundations, p. 9
164
Eberhard Arnold: Modern Spiritual Masters Series (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Books, 2000), p. 133. Emmy Barth quotes Arnolds reply to Ragaz but has not
included this part of the quotation.
165
Eberhard Arnold: Modern Spiritual Masters, pp. 133-4.
166
Eberhard to Emmy, 16 June 1907, Love Letters, pp. 91-2.
167
Eberhard to Emmy, 29-30 June 1907, Love Letters, p. 103.
168
Eberhard to Emmy, 4 September 1907, Love Letters, p. 133.
169
Emmy to Eberhard, 25 June 1907, Love Letters, p. 94.
Ian M. Randall 37

Live in Community Arnold spoke of baptism by immersion as

signifying purification, death to an evil life, and resurrection.170 His
own baptism and his practice of baptism meant that Arnold found it
problematic when in 1930 he had to be baptised into the Hutterites. He
explained to them that he could not deny his earlier baptism by
immersion with its sense of incorporation into the body of Christ. He
found it (as he noted in his diary) quite hard to submit to the baptism
of pouring over, but he saw it as incorporation into the Hutterite
Brotherhood and he was helped by reading about some three-fold
baptisms in the early church.171
From September 1920 the Lords Supper (the term used) was
celebrated at Sannerz. Guests who testified to being disciples of Jesus
could take part in the Supper.172 In Why We Live in Community,
Arnold spoke of the Lords Supper or Meal of Remembrance as a
witness to Christs death and his second coming and an occasion when
we receive him in ourselves.173 The receiving added to
remembrance suggests an understanding of the Supper as a spiritual
experience. It was also a time for the community to reflect together. In
thinking about the Supper the Bruderhof drew from older traditions of
the church, such as the Didache, with its reference to the fruit of the
earth in bread and wine.174 In January 1933 Arnold spoke of the
Bruderhof practice at the Supper. The aim was to combine simplicity
with real joy in Gods gifts to us. There was no sense of one person
being in charge. The practice was similar to that in Anabaptist and
Baptist communities. Arnold wrote: According to the age-old custom
of simple folk, the loaf is passed around, and each person breaks off a
piece and passes it on to the next. There was a similar procedure with
the wine jug. For Arnold this passing around was important. There
could hardly be a more powerful expression of community.175 A few
months later Arnold stressed diversity in this unity: the more varied

170
Arnold, Why We Live in Community, pp. 16-17.
171
Eberhard Arnold, Diary entries from 1 December 1930, in Brothers Unite, pp.
181-2.
172
Baum, Against the Wind, p. 130.
173
Arnold, Why We Live in Community, pp. 16-17.
174
Arnold, Gods Revolution, May 1934, pp. 71-3.
175
Arnold, Gods Revolution, January 1933, pp. 73-4.
38 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

our different backgrounds are, the richer the fruits of this diversity will
be.176
The songs sung at Sannerz similarly conveyed this diversity.
Vollmer goes so far as to suggest that the songs which were collected
in the early Sannerz song-book manifest most clearly the spiritual
productivity of the circle. She notes that included in the songbook
were folk songs, hymns from the Reformation and the Anabaptists,
songs of the Moravian Brethren and the revival movements, songs of
the youth movement and the workers movement, and many poems by
Eberhard Arnold and Otto Salomon, who was from a Jewish family.
Salomon embraced Christianity and worked as a literary and artistic
director. He was at Sannerz for two years.177 Where folk songs that
were appreciated at Sannerz did not convey a Christian message,
Sannerz members felt free to make changes. The best known was the
addition of a fourth stanza to the well-known Kein schner Land
(Earth has no fairer countryside), by Eva Oehlke, an early Sannerz
member, to make it Christocentric:

Brothers, you know what makes us one:

For us shines bright another Sun.
In Him were living,
For Him were striving,
The Church at one!178

The singing developed at Sannerz drew from varied sources,

creatively incorporating old traditions and new expressions of
spirituality diversity in unity.
The sense of being united with the whole church throughout the
centuries and throughout the world in all its diversity is pervasive in
Foundations. In the first section the apostolic rule of faith in the
triune God as stated in the Apostles and Nicene Creeds is
affirmed.179 Thomas Finger suggests that it is hard to find in the rest
of Foundations anything specific from these creeds, except that they

176
Arnold, Gods Revolution, pp. 38-9
177
Vollmer, The Neuwerk Movement, p. 75; cf. p. 61, fn. 47, for Salomon, who
was to be involved in publishing and ecumenical work in Germany and Switzerland.
178
Vollmer, The Neuwerk Movement, p. 76.
179
Foundations, p. 1.
Ian M. Randall 39

are confessed at baptism.180 Although this is true, the emphasis on

continuity with tradition, in worship and witness, is evident. Thus
Foundations states: Our church community is only a small part of the
universal church. This universal church is the body of Christ, made up
of all who belong to him; it is his bride, set apart for him alone. It
cannot be identified with any human institution or group it includes
the apostles, prophets, martyrs, and believers from every age who are
with God as the cloud of witnesses from every nation, tribe, and
race.181 There is explicit continuity with monastic traditions, in vows
that members make of poverty - We pledge to give up all property
and to live simply, in complete freedom from possessions - chastity -
We pledge to uphold sexual purity and, if married, to stay faithful in
the bond of marriage between one man and one woman for life - and
obedience, to Christ and our brothers and sisters. These are
accompanied by promises by the new member, focused on loyalty to
Christ and the community. There is laying on of hands and prayer
that God will fill him or her anew with the Holy Spirit.182
Foundations speaks of life in church community as a sacrament, a
living symbol that illustrates Gods calling for humankind. There is a
desire to embrace variety, as the Spirit leads, while maintaining our
common faith in one baptism, one calling, one profession of vows,
and one Spirit of love who guides us in all things.183 In my visits to
the Darvell Bruderhof community in the south of England I have been
able to speak to a number of members of the community about their
spiritual lives. Those I have talked to are at different stages of life,
from twenties to sixties, and are involved in different roles in the
community. There was clear evidence of variety and affirmation of the
fact that people have different experiences. At the same time there was
a striking amount of common ground in relation to the guidance of
God in individual lives. The stories that were told spoke of personal
faith in Jesus, experience of Jesus that changed my life, prayer as a
life line, a journey to a deeper inner life, openness to the leading of
the Holy Spirit, seeking to be biblical and to read the Bible, feeling
free in the decision to be baptised, finding joy, knowing open

180
Finger, Review, p. 586.
181
Foundations, p. 9.
182
Foundations, pp. 34-5.
183
Foundations, p. 63.
40 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

sharing in the community and being led in a certain direction, unity

of heart and peace over issues, embracing the Great Commission to
spread the good news, being willing to go, working in this world,
not living for self but serving, and community as a wonderful gift
but not an end in itself.184 In the fellowship, says Foundations in a
section on the individual in community, we will find diverse
reflections of Gods image.185
Baptism and the Lords Supper are covered in a major section in
Foundations, Church Actions, which also includes laying on of
hands, church discipline and forgiveness, and marriage. Baptism is
offered to anyone who believes in the gospel of Jesus Christ and
whose repentance comes from the heart, bearing fruit in deeds.
There is a desire to be open to spiritual experience in baptism. The one
conducting the baptism will lay his hands on the newly baptized and
pray that Jesus will fill them with power from on high with the
Holy Spirit.186 The Lords Supper is seen as a meal of communion
with Christ, and reference is made to Jesus words, This is my
body... This is my blood, and: He who eats my flesh and drinks my
blood abides in me, and I in him. There are indications of a
sacramental understanding of the actions of a united body of believers
ruled by the Spirit. Thus Foundations continues: By partaking of the
bread and wine, we renew our covenant of baptism, giving ourselves
to Jesus in full surrender and declaring our readiness to suffer and die
for him. We believe that he himself will be present among us with his
power to heal the sick, forgive sins, and drive out evil.187 Perhaps this
echoes the influence on Arnold of the Blumhardts, who saw Jesus
bringing healing and deliverance.188 It is not entirely clear from
Foundations who is able to come to the Lords Table. Seeking to
follow the Early Church, the Bruderhof celebrate the Lords Supper
only with those who have received believers baptism, who affirm the

184
I am most grateful to those who spoke to me about their experiences.
185
Foundations, p. 76.
186
Foundations, p. 50.
187
Foundations, p. 53.
188
Baum, Against the Wind, pp. 146-8. On Johann Christoph Blumhardt, see
Friedrich Zuendel, The Awakening: One Mans Battle with Darkness (Rifton, NY,
and Robertsbridge: Plough Publishing House, 2000).
Ian M. Randall 41

same confession of faith, and with whom there is peace and unity.189
Finger takes this as a strict limitation to tiny groups,190 and if this
means the Supper is open only to Bruderhof members it is restrictive,
in view of the many believers who would affirm peace and unity
with the Bruderhof. If the confession of faith is the Apostles and
Nicene Creeds, this of course opens up much wider possibilities for
fellowship.
More attention is given to church discipline in Foundations than
seems to have been the case within the early Bruderhof. However,
church discipline is a recognition that the spiritual life of a community
is not without problems. After the death of Eberhard Arnold, as Emmy
recorded, the Bruderhof suffered from disloyalty and cowardice,
gossip, cliquish friendships, self-pity, excessive sympathy for some,
and insufficient compassion for others.191 In Foundations there is
reference to Christ entrusting the church with the gift of church
discipline, commissioning it to confront and overcome sin and to
declare forgiveness in his name to the repentant. This discipline is
linked with being a disciple and with training and correction.192 The
most common understanding of church discipline in the Anabaptist
tradition is of an action taken by the church, and this aspect is present
in Foundations, but the emphasis is on a different kind of church
discipline a gift granted only to those who desire and request it.
This is defined as a time of repentance, of silent reflection, and a
time when the church community shows its special love to those in
discipline, caring for their practical needs with special consideration
and keeping them constantly in its prayers. Foundations states
categorically that such discipline is not a punishment and has nothing
in common with shunning, expulsion, or any kind of coercion; to
abuse it for any such purpose is a sin. The intended outcome is deeper
spiritual experience: assurance of a cleansed heart and Gods
peace.193

189
Foundations, p. 53
190
Finger, Review, p. 589.
191
Emmy Arnold, Joyful Pilgrimage, p. 154.
192
Foundations, p. 55.
193
Foundations, pp. 57-8.
42 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

The Way of Peace

This peace, however, for the Bruderhof, is never simply an inward

peace, but a commitment to making a difference in a world which
lacks peace. In Foundations, under the heading The Way of Peace,
there is a picture of Christ calling his church to be the embassy of his
kingdom of peace, stationed in the present age as in a foreign
jurisdiction. This calling can include working together with others of
goodwill, whether or not they are confessing believers.194 It seems
that this concept of the embassy may have first been proposed in
March 1933 by Annemarie Wchter at a Good Friday Bruderhof
meeting. At this meeting the Lords Supper was celebrated, and there
was also discussion of the response of the community to the rise of the
Nazi movement. A year before, Annemarie had written to her parents
to try to explain the communitys commitment to social justice.195 At
the March 1933 community meeting she said that listening to a speech
Hitler had just delivered she felt as though we [in the Bruderhof]
were an embassy in another country, with a completely different
language and a completely different atmosphere. She called on the
community to give powerful testimony, to stand completely in the joy
and power of the Spirit.196 As Nazi power grew, the witness of the
Bruderhof marked them out and led to Gestapo raids, interrogation,
harassment, imprisonment of three members in Fulda prison, and the
ultimate dissolution of the Rhn community. As Baum notes, no
member ever lifted a hand in the German salute or became a storm
trooper.197
The Bruderhof movement became known for its outright
opposition to war. Foundations states that Bruderhof members will
not serve in the armed forces of any country, not even as non-
combatants.198 This was not Eberhard Arnolds position prior to the
First World War. In 1914, when war broke out in Europe, Arnold had
a book, Inward Life (which eventually became Innerland), prepared

194
Foundations, p. 11.
195
Anni, p. 135. Letter of 6 February 1932 from Annemarie to Mama, Hilde and
Reinhold.
196
Barth, An Embassy Besieged, p. 44.
197
Baum, Against the Wind, p. 221.
198
Foundations, p. 12.
Ian M. Randall 43

for press, but in view of the war he revised it, introducing patriotic
themes and changing the title to The War: A Call to Inwardness. The
way the cover was designed, and in part the contents, aligned it with
books being produced to support Germanys just and righteous
war.199 Arnold was willing to join a reserve unit in August 1914, but
his health was not strong enough for military service. In 1915 he
started work for the SCM, editing the magazine Die Furche (The
Furrow), and developing the Furche Publishing House. SCM leaders
were supportive of the war, but there is evidence in 1916 that Arnolds
own thinking was changing. In the margin of a song sheet, Hymn of
hate against England, Arnold wrote, Love?200 Before the end of
1917, Arnold began to revise his book. All nationalistic sections were
removed. He restructured his work as a journey into the inner land of
the unseen, to God and the Spirit and as a guide into the soul of the
Bible.201 In a speech he delivered in November 1917, Arnold called
for a rebirth in our hearts and an abandonment of the alien spirits of
hatred and violence, of lying, impure and greedy possessiveness.202
This renewed spiritual emphasis did not mean that Arnold drew
back from involvement in society. The opposite is the case. At a
conference in Tambach, in September 1919, Karl Barth spoke on the
task of the church as not being to try to bring in the kingdom by
human methods, since God alone was at work in the world. The task
of the Christian, as Barth stated it, was to pay careful heed to what
God is doing.203 Arnold offered a response. Although there were
aspects of Barths approach with which he agreed, Arnold considered
that the influence of what he called modern theology, by which he
meant Barthian thinking, had been disastrous. Arnold was glad that
there had been the stress - clearly seen in Barth - on God as totally
other than all our movements for personal salvation or social reform.
But this one-sided emphasis, Arnold argued, is bound to have the
effect of minimizing or even suppressing social responsibility.204 As
Nazi power increased, Hans Meier, on behalf of the Bruderhof, met

199
Baum, Against the Wind, pp. 80-1.
200
Baum, Against the Wind, pp. 85-90.
201
Baum, Against the Wind, p. 93.
202
Eberhard Arnold: Modern Spiritual Masters, p. 32.
203
Vollmer, The Neuwerk Movement, p. 21.
204
Arnold, Gods Revolution, p. 42.
44 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

the German Lutheran Pastor and key figure in the Confessing Church,
Martin Niemller.205 Niemller, Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others
met in Barmen in May 1934 and produced the famous Barmen
Declaration, condemning the cult of the Fhrer. Two years later it was
apparent at a World Mennonite Conference in Amsterdam that no
German Mennonite congregation was prepared to stand up against the
Nazis with regard to military service, but at a small meeting eighteen
Mennonite leaders, and Emmy Arnold and Hans Zumpe from the
Bruderhof, signed a declaration calling for opposition to the sin of
war and committing themselves to the proclamation of the gospel of
peace.206
The main ways in which Arnold pursued the vision of achieving
social change were through publishing, lecturing to a variety of groups
across Germany, and the education of children and young people. He
spoke of educational work as a work of worship.207 Arnold became
director for two years of the Neuwerk Publishing House and was able
to bring Quaker funding into his publishing project, specifically for
the magazine Das Neue Werk. Alongside this magazine, the
community in Sannerz became involved in the publication of Die
Wegwarte, the magazine of German Baptist Youth. Wider links across
Europe, as well as in Germany, were important. The Jewish
philosopher Martin Buber helped with Neuwerk conferences. Arnold
became involved in the international Fellowship of Reconciliation
(FOR), a body which drew together pacifists from different traditions.
Arnold was particularly supportive of the radical pacifism of Kees
Boeke, in Holland.208 In England Charles Raven, Regius Professor of
Divinity in Cambridge, was one of the FORs major spokesmen. He
delivered an apologia in 1934, published as Is War Obsolete? (1935).
Raven became chairman of the FOR, and in language that was in tune
with Arnold, urged Christians to seek to convince others that the

205
Barth, An Embassy Besieged, p. 124.
206
Barth, No Lasting Home, pp. xiv, xv, 195-8. The leading figure was a Dutch
Mennonite, Jacob ter Meulen, a friend of Eberhard Arnold. Hans Zumpe was
married to Emi-Margret Arnold.
207
Baum, Against the Wind, p. 177.
208
Vollmer, The Neuwerk Movement, pp. 66-70.
Ian M. Randall 45

power of the Spirit is stronger than the arms of the flesh and that in
these days warfare is as obsolete and as intolerable as slavery.209
In the mid-1920s Arnold tried to launch a massive publishing
project, which was only partly successful. What he had in mind, as he
put it, was a [multi-volume] series drawn from the living testimony of
Christian witnesses across the centuries. The title given to the series
was Quellen source books.210 Arnold wanted to show the witness of
the church through the centuries. Although his own sympathies were
with the Anabaptists, he was happy to envisage publishing the work of
Ignatius of Loyola, whose spirituality was of such significance.
Arnold tried unsuccessfully to recruit Karl Barth as an advisor for his
project. The first volume to appear was one on Zinzendorf. Volumes
appeared between 1925 and 1926 on the early seventeenth-century
mystical writer Jakob Bhme, on the Danish philosopher Sren
Kierkegaard, and on Francis of Assisi.211 Arnold found links between
different movements in the history of the church. He noted that
Francis of Assisi began each conversation or address he gave with
Peace be with you, and that this was true of many Anabaptists.
Arnold went on: So today too we must confront the unpeace of the
whole world with the words of true brotherhood. He wanted not only
proclamation of peace but also a demonstration of that peace in lived
experience.212
In December 1926, as part of his publishing project, Arnold
produced his book, The Early Christians after the Death of the
Apostles. This was an important work of scholarship, the result of the
collection and translation of many documents by Arnold and by Else
von Hollander. Arnold wrote a vivid commentary on these early
Christian writings. For him the Early Church was the example par
excellence of a counter-cultural community of peace. This peace was
not passivity or a spirit of resignation to the dominance of evil. On the
other hand, the early Christians did not seek to overcome evil through
human power. Their power lay in their dedication to the way of Christ.
Arnold wrote: To believers living in the time of the early church and

209
C.E. Raven, Is War Obsolete? (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935), p. 183
210
I am grateful to Margret Gneiting who showed me some first editions during a
visit I made to Sannerz.
211
Baum, Against the Wind, pp. 166-7.
212
Arnold, Innerland, pp. 246-7.
46 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

of the Apostle Paul, the cross was the one and only proclamation.
Christians knew only one way, that of being nailed to the Cross with
Christ. Only dying his death with him, they felt, could possibly lead to
resurrection and to the kingdom.213 Later he took up the theme of
martyrdom. What Arnold wrote in 1926 can be seen as prophetic:
The early Christians were revolutionaries of the Spirit... Their witness
meant they had to reckon with being sentenced to death by state and
society.... To give witness is the essence of martyrdom.214 A decade
later, a period of seventeen years of Bruderhof community witness in
Germany ended. Emmy Arnold spoke of the loss of everything we
had and added, one might well ask how it was possible for us to go
on. Her answer was: We had heard the call clearly, and there was no
choice but to follow it.215
It was in Innerland, in its final form, that Arnold set out most fully
what he meant by the way of peace. He argued that it was possible to
speak of the militant peace of Jesus Christ and contended that this
was unknown to humankind. What was found in the world was
either hate with its murderous preparation for war or else the
insincere and uncreative flabbiness of peace without struggle and
without unity.216 Nor did Arnold believe there was necessarily peace
when nations abstained from war. For him social justice was essential.
He wrote in typically trenchant terms: No peace and disarmament
without social justice! No prophet recognizes peace and disarmament
or the changing of deadly weapons into tools of civilization without
social renewal and reconciliation, giving back to the poor the use of
all tools and products.217 It was this message which Arnold believed
was missing in many presentations of the gospel. But the true church
witnessed not only to peace with God but also love to God and to
others. When we are gathered in the church, and Gods love fills our
hearts, he wrote, we cannot be tempted by any power that belongs to
force. As Jesus can never be thought of as a Roman soldier, so
members of his church can never belong to the artillery, air force, or

213
Eberhard Arnold, The Early Christians after the Death of the Apostles,
(Ashton Keynes: Plough Publishing House, 1939), p. 4.
214
Arnold, The Early Christians, pp. 16-17.
215
Emmy, Joyful Pilgrimage, pp. 167-8.
216
Arnold, Innerland, p. 202.
217
Arnold, Innerland, p. 210.
Ian M. Randall 47

police. Neither poison, bombs, pistols, or knives, neither the

executioners sword nor the gallows can be our weapon.218 Yet
courageous spiritual battle was essential. Arnold observed: Equipped
with the courage of the Holy Spirit, the church dares to do spiritual
battle with all powers that withstand her love. All resistance of the
present age is insignificant in her eyes. The Spirit, who guides and
instructs her, is himself the utmost encouragement... The members of
the church become his organs, for he pours the love of God into their
hearts.219
These themes are set out clearly in Foundations, which also adds
other elements. In the section headed Our Calling, and under The
Way of Peace, Foundations states: The way of peace demands
reverence for all life, above all each human life, since every person is
made in the image of God. Christs word and example, as affirmed by
the teaching of the early church, absolutely forbid us to take human
life for any reason, directly or indirectly, whether in war or self-
defense, through the death penalty, or by any other means, including
euthanasia or abortion. This takes in issues that Arnold did not
address, but which have more recently been much discussed.
Foundations writes in this way about war: As conscientious
objectors, we will not serve in the armed services of any country, not
even as noncombatants. Nor may we support war-making or the use of
deadly force by others through our consent or aid.220 The position of
the majority of the Anabaptists is clearly influential in the following
statement: We refuse to wield governmental power by serving in high
office or in any position such as judge or juror that is vested with
power over the life, liberty, or civil rights of another. Likewise in
obedience to Christs teaching, we cannot swear oaths or make any
pledge of allegiance. We love our country and our countrymen, but
equally we love all our fellow human beings regardless of their
nationality, ancestry, race, creed, culture, or social status. Our loyalty
is to the kingdom of God.221
Participation in government is an aspect of Bruderhof thinking on
which Thomas Finger has commented. Foundations states that

218
Arnold, Innerland, p. 227.
219
Arnold, Innerland, p. 323.
220
Foundations, p. 12.
221
Foundations, p. 12.
48 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

community members are not indifferent to the work of government.

Finger asks whether the task of government might be perceived as
creating and maintaining some degree of order and peace - not only
protecting it by the sword, but also promoting it through laws,
institutions, and services to benefit its people. If so, he asks, could
Christians work with and sometimes within governmental bodies?
This is not the perspective of Foundations. In practice, Bruderhof
members generally work in the community, many in producing
Community Playthings and Rifton Equipment industries, with others
in schools and in publishing. Foundations sees the state as
representing, at its best, a relative order of justice in the present sinful
world; but the church, as Gods embassy, represents an absolute order
of justice: the righteousness of the kingdom of God. The church must
witness to the state, serving as its conscience, helping it to distinguish
good from evil, and reminding it not to overstep the bounds of its
God-appointed authority.222 The communitys way of peace is not
seen as a pacifism of detachment or cowardice... Opposing war is
only the first step; we seek to build up a life that removes the occasion
for war by overcoming its root causes: injustice, hatred, and greed. We
want to use our lives to advance the peaceable kingdom foretold by
the prophets, which will transform not only individuals but also all
human society and the whole of nature.223 This is a world-affirming
spiritual vision.

Conclusion

The Bruderhof is a distinctive community with a distinctive

spirituality. The movement has been the subject of study, but in much
of the work that has been done the spirituality of the Bruderhof has
not been the focus. There has been something of a tendency to look at
the Bruderhof as a sociological phenomenon. Tyldesley comments
that a writer such as Zablocki views Bruderhof identity in sociological
terms and would see an account such as that by Merrill Mow, which
portrays the history in spiritual terms, as quite inadequate.224 The

222
Foundations, p. 13.
223
Foundations, p. 14.
224
Tyldesley, No Heavenly Delusion?, p. 71. He also notes that the feeling
would be mutual.
Ian M. Randall 49

Bruderhof itself has to live with a degree of tension about its identity.
On the one hand it sees itself as but a small part of what God the
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has done through the ages.
Eberhard Arnold was willing to draw from many sources and this is
true also of Foundations, which states: Right down to the present,
wherever people strive for truth, justice, brotherhood, and peace, God
is at work. We do not seek to imitate those who have gone before us;
rather, we wish for their example to inspire us to live more
wholeheartedly for Gods kingdom.225 On the other hand, the
Bruderhof has a very strong commitment to the very specific full
community of goods, a practice that has not characterised most of
those in the Anabaptist tradition. Thomas Merton described Arnolds
advocacy in the 1920s of community as a fine gospel statement of
community against the background of false community being spread
in his day.226
For Arnold, and for the contemporary Bruderhof, community itself
is not enough. What is crucial is that Christian communities should be
places where the Holy Spirit is at work. Thus Arnold wrote in
Innerland: Inspired by the Easter message and the Pentecostal flame
of the Holy Spirit, young people - the holy springtime - set out to
consecrate new land to the church of the risen one. 227 Here Arnold
wanted to stress, as he often did, the radical spiritual movements that
have characterised the history of the church. In similar vein, in 1928,
he spoke about how the early Christians were followed in the second
century by the radical movement, Montanism, and he wrote: The
principle of life is essential to a living church; Christianity has nothing
dead about it.228 Perhaps thinking of the parallels with the youth
movement, Arnold noted that again and again, bands of awakened
young people have set out. A hundred years after the first full
community in Jerusalem, a new outpouring of the spirit of fire created
the church again in Asia Minor.229 This move of the Spirit, in

225
Foundations, p. 21.
226
Thomas Merton, Building Community on Gods Love, in Arnold, Why We
Live in Community, p. 33.
227
Arnold, Innerland, p. 277.
228
Arnold, Meeting of the Bruderhof in November 1928, in Brothers Unite, pp.
11-12.
229
Arnold, Innerland, p. 277.
50 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit

Bruderhof spirituality, does not take place apart from the church
itself a sacrament, in the language of Foundations. Arnold wrote
about the church receiving gifts from God: The church receives the
power and authority to forgive sins through the power of his
liberation. Jesus himself imparted it to her.230 Linked with this was
the attitude to enemies. In July 1935 Arnold stated: Love for our
enemies has to be so real that it reaches their hearts. For that is what
love does.231 The Bruderhof has developed a strongly communal
spirituality. With the help of the Holy Spirit, community members
seek to live a biblically-orientated life of discipleship, following
Christ together.

Appendix 1

Reference Number: Bruderhof Historical Archive, EA 25/15

Letter from Eberhard Arnold to his sister Hannah Arnold232

Sannerz, March 1925

Your letter is a very great joy to me, a most deeply felt joy, for I see from it that you
are being and doing completely what God wants of you (as far as humanly possible),
and what God has now led you to. I am with you wholeheartedly in your work; this I
can be from the depths of my soul, for my long years of work building up the
Fellowship and evangelizing have always been an essential part of my life, the life
given me by God.
It is a misunderstanding, a totally false report, if you have been told that I ever
expressed myself about the Fellowship or Revival Movement or its Christianity in
such a way as to reject it. This has never been the case and never will be. I have
never separated myself from the brothers and never will separate myself from them.
I can, however, understand how this erroneous opinion came about in regard to a
leading that I know came to me from God. I have never expressed disapproval in the
sense that the forgiveness of sins was being too strongly placed in the foreground.
On the contrary, I am convinced that it is impossible to emphasize the forgiveness of
sins too strongly. Life itself, God himself with His whole heart, is to be found in the

230
Arnold, Innerland, p. 337.
231
Arnold, Gods Revolution, July 1935, p. 157.
232
English translation by Bruderhof Historical Archives staff.
Ian M. Randall 51
forgiveness of guilt--redemption from evil in the past as well as liberation from evil
in the present.
What I do oppose energetically is something altogether different: when in spite
of the experience of forgiveness of sins a person looks away from this great heart of
God and gets enmeshed in his own small heart, becoming completely lost in his
personal experience, his little personal self-life, and precisely in the religious sphere.
A new self-life, an egotistical striving for personal purity, goodness, and happiness
is then placed in the centre of religious experience; even work done for others is
then done with an eye to one's own happiness. I am certain that it is because of the
biblical prophets including John the Baptist and--far more than all prophets--Jesus
himself and his Holy Spirit that I am able to contradict this perversity.
Even so faithful a Fellowship Movement member as Fabianke calls it old and
tired, saying that new witnesses and new strength must be given to revive it
(Warte [a periodical], 1 March 1925, Supplement No.1). The cause of this tiredness
is just this false subjectivity of the self-life, in which people devote themselves to
their own little personal ego or that of their neighbour.
Basically this has always been recognized in the Fellowship Movement as well.
Efforts were made to overcome it through an understanding of the Bible; the biblical
prophecies of God's kingdom were studied a great deal. This is the way for all of us
to become freer of Fellowship Christianitys tendency to a narrow focus on self; but
as long as this understanding of the Bible remains merely intellectual, it has no
power. As theory or dogma alone it is meaningless. Only when its living strength
takes hold of our lives and transforms them to accord with God's kingdom does this
understanding of the Bible become power and testimony.
Do sometime immerse yourself in the prophets and, in this connection, in Jesus'
Sermon on the Mount. Just as it is impossible to emphasize the forgiveness of sins
too strongly, so also is it impossible to emphasize God's kingdom and the Sermon on
the Mount too strongly. In the all-encompassing words of the Sermon on the Mount,
the character of God's rule and the character of the citizens of his kingdom are
described very plainly--so plainly that we Christians of today are shown up as
disobedient and faithless, as people who draw back from the great illuminating light
of God's future.
In reality, however, Christ's church is appointed to conform to the character of
this coming future. Forgiveness means the kingdom. God and his kingdom must
become great in our lives so that we ourselves, including our private religious life,
become small. To confess the greatness of God in his justice and holiness, in his all-
inclusive love and mercy, to confess the greatness of God as Creator and Redeemer
of the world -- that is the task of the church of God.
We all love the third chapter of John's Gospel, but we tend to forget that
personal rebirth is here placed in the supra-personal context of the kingdom of God.
The coming kingdom is the determining element in the Bible. It is this kingdom of
the future that must overwhelm and completely fill us. The Holy Spirit wants to
come over us and fill us in order to lead us into the future kingdom; the Spirit is to
bring to life for us Jesus' words about the world of the future; the Spirit is to lead us
toward this, so that we become a living example, a parable, a visible testimony of
the coming kingdom.
52 Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit
You are right in saying that I, strongly moved by this kingdom of God and its
future reality, have had close contact with many persons who had not yet been
reborn in the biblical sense or were still very unclear in regard to this personal
renewal. However, I never wanted to hold more strongly to those who were still
outside God's kingdom than of those who are reborn and that stand at the service of
God's kingdom.
All the same, I do question a rebirth that has no connection with God's coming
kingdom; and I believe that God awakens many who open themselves to his coming
kingdom but are still unclear about their personal forgiveness and sanctification. The
evangelizing task devoted to people who truly hunger and are awakened by God
must show us the way to see and acknowledge hunger for justice, thirst for God's
love, and expectation of God's coming where they exist. We need to be given the
strength to testify to the new birth from the Holy Spirit to those who are in this
process of awakening, in the same way as Jesus spoke to Nicodemus, a man who
was gripped by the kingdom like those in today's Youth Movement and the
Religious Socialists. Equally however we must testify to Christians clearly and
definitely--beginning with their personal lives--about their great responsibility in
respect to the social justice of Gods kingdom, in respect to Jesus Christ's coming
kingdom of peace, and therefore in respect to the demands and promises of his
Sermon on the Mount, just as Jesus did in a particular way to the group of his closest
disciples.
You will understand then, Hannah, that I would be betraying my certainty
before God if I were to say that the leading and work of the last years was a false
way. I recognize that much of what I have done and put into effect in going this way
was wrong and erroneous, just as you will recognize as wrong and erroneous many
things on your way, that is, the way of purely personal Fellowship Christianity. All
that I want to leave behind and overcome, and I trust in the power of the Holy Spirit,
the power of the present Christ, that we may and can make a new start over and over
again so that we can be more pure and undivided in following Christ, can follow him
more devotedly and completely, and can represent God's coming kingdom. Yet for
this very reason I must confess more than ever to the apparently new ways I have
been led in the last years because I am convinced without any doubt that it is God
who has led me on these ways and that he has done this for the sake of the witness
of his kingdom and his Church.
It is obvious that there is a clear difference between the way of life of
Fellowship Christianity as it has been till now on the one hand, and on the other the
way of life community of work and community of goods, the religious-social
proclaiming of God's kingdom to which we have been led and appointed. But more
basic than this difference is the unity of the church between these different ways of
life. There are many members, but one Body. The sense in which I hope to be
regarded as a Fellowship Christian among other Fellowship Christians is the
following: Christ demands of all believers that we recognize, testify, and prove the
unity between all the forms of true discipleship and of the church in its biblical
sense. This is more than any alliance, including the Blankenburg Alliance:233 it is

233
German Evangelical Alliance, based in Bad Blankenburg, Germany.
Ian M. Randall 53
unity of the Body that is living in Christ, even if we do not recognize or
acknowledge it.
We can draw on historical examples in the church and point to the fact that
many were really in unity in the eyes of God and in the eyes of faith--the Lutherans
and the Zwinglians, believing Catholics like Staupitz for example, the biblicist
Schwenkfeldian movement of the Holy Spirit, the communistic peace churches of
the Baptizers, and many other shadings of the Reformation era. This real unity
existed in spite of the fact that, in their human blindness, they opposed and excluded
one another, discovered human failings in each other, and repeatedly found grounds
to accuse one another of heresy. There will soon be a similar historical situation in
our day. No Christian wants to be one of those who one day, when their eyes are
opened, will have to accuse themselves of denying the unity because of the
differences. Among us who are living today the fulfilment of Jesus plea must be
revealed -- that they may all be one. By this unity, the wide world shall recognize
that Jesus was sent by God.
This was the meaning of my request to you recently in Hamburgand this is
my request to you today: please help bring to expression this unity that exists in
Christ, even though people deny it.

[Signed: Eberhard Arnold]

Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit:
The spirituality of the Bruderhof community

This study examines the spirituality of the Bruderhof community. It gives particular attention
to Eberhard Arnold (1883-1935) and a small number of people around him, including his wife
Emmy and her sister von Hollander, who founded the first Bruderhof community in Sannerz,
Germany, in 1920. The argument made here is that the Bruderhof was formed as a consequence
of a concern for a number of aspects which were seen as related: authentic evangelical
spirituality, community of goods instead of private property, openness to the Holy Spirit, a simple
form of church life that sought to draw from the New Testament, and the way of peace. This
study explores these themes both in the early Bruderhof period and also in an important recent
Bruderhof publication, Foundations, and relates them to the Anabaptist tradition.

The story of the founding, development and Ian Randall delineates the distinctive spirituality
survival of the Bruderhof as a purposeful exercise of the Bruderhof with clarity and verve.
in radical Christian community-building, overcoming The Bruderhof emerges as a movement
both external opposition and internal division, is characterised by radical community values and
a story well worth telling, for it was no easy task. reliant on the power of the Holy Spirit. Dr
But here Ian Randall digs deeper to uncover the Randalls carefully constructed and deeply moving
spiritual power enabling all this to happen, tracing account is highly recommended.
the search for communities where the Holy Spirit Dr Peter Morden, Deputy Principal, Spurgeons College,
is at work. In this study, he rightly sets the rich London
spirituality of the movement alongside the limited
dimensions of earlier sociological accounts.
Professor John Briggs, Professor Emeritus, the University After working in human resources, Ian Randall
of Birmingham, and Research Professor, the International studied for Baptist ministry at Regents Park
Baptist Theological Study Centre, Amsterdam College, Oxford, in the 1980s. Over the course
of two decades he taught and supervised at
In 1940 my own parents spent several months Spurgeons College, London, and the International
visiting the Bruderhof with a view to joining. In Baptist Theological Seminary in Prague. Ian is
the end they found they could not do so. However, the author of several books and many articles on
respect for the Bruderhof and its impact remained Baptist, Anabaptist, evangelical and missional
with them for the rest of their lives. As one who was movements. He and his wife live in Cambridge
brought up with its memory, I find this exploration where Ian is a locum hospital chaplain and is
of Bruderhof spirituality deeply stirring and I can involved in spiritual direction.
think of no-one better qualified to understand both
the movement and the spiritual motives behind it
than Ian Randall.
Dr Nigel G. Wright, Principal Emeritus, Spurgeons
College, London

Front Cover Illustration:

ISBN 978-1-907600-22-7
Photograph of Eberhard Arnold
Courtesy of Bruderhof Historical Archives.

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