God’s Kingdom: the ‘Natural Supernatural’ of Johann and Christoph Blumhardt

Plough Publishing House has embarked on a bold and very welcome move – to publish, for the first time in English, the works of two remarkable men: Johann Christoph Blumhardt (1805-1880) and his son, Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (1842-1919).

“What do such wildly diverse movements as religious socialism, neo-orthodoxy, Pentecostalism, and such Christian thinkers like Karl Barth, Eberhard Arnold, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jacques Ellul and Jürgen Moltmann, have in common?”, writes one of the series’ editors. They all trace their Christian understanding of the world and God’s kingdom to Johann Christoph Blumhardt, a humble pastor in Germany who lived in the 19th century.”

Mention could also be made of revivalist South African preacher, Andrew Murray, who was profoundly moved on a visit to Möttlingen. This was the village in South-West Germany where Johann Christoph was the Lutheran pastor. He served unremarkably until 1842, when circumstances plunged him into the realm of ‘deliverance ministry’ and healing prayer. A young woman exhibiting the classic symptoms of demonisation, as shown in the Gospels, was released after an intensive season of prayer, spiritual battle and exorcism.

“Möttlingen was swept up in an unprecedented movement of repentance and renewal. Stolen property was returned, broken marriages restored, enemies reconciled, alcoholics freed, and more amazingly still, an entire village experienced what life could be like when God ruled.” People started arriving from miles around, drawn by the manifest power of God and the possible hope of freedom in their own lives. Such success was, in fact, embarrassing for Blumhardt, who was a solid and unflamboyant character and freely admitted that he was no expert in these matters.

Even so, “Blumhardt’s parsonage eventually could not accommodate the numbers of people streaming to it. He thus began to look for a place with more room and greater freedom. He moved his family to Bad Boll, a complex of large buildings which had been developed as a spa around a sulfur water spring. His biographer [in German] recounts in vivid detail one story after another of how through the small circle at Bad Boll, desperate individuals of all stripes— burdened with mental, emotional, physical and spiritual maladies—found healing and renewed faith.”

Blumhardt had the courage to work through the ideological issues (and plenty of opposition) and to conclude emphatically that the Kingdom of God was perennially able to break into everyday life, with whatever manifestation of the divine or miraculous that the Holy Spirit might choose.

Blumhardt was not a theologian and did not attempt a reasoned theology of his stance. He was a practical man, full of compassion, who was wise enough to realise that the damaged, the sick and the demonised need compassion and hope in their damaged souls every bit as much as healing or exorcism. His sermons pleaded, cared, pointed to a God who is love and who wants us to know it. Part of his legacy is his unshakable conviction of ‘realised eschatology’: the belief that the promises of scripture for the end times are meant for the Church now.

Blumhardt offers hope to Christians who long for the transcendental, for God’s power to be seen in today’s world. He was convinced that the Old Testament prophecy of Joel, quoted by Peter when the Holy Spirit was first outpoured (Acts 2:17) had only been partly fulfilled; that the generous and saving God in whom he believed had so much more for the Church to discover and to use for God’s glory and the blessing of multitudes.

From Bible College onwards, he had had dealings with missionaries, doctors and exorcists, who had first hand experience of the power of the risen Christ to free those enslaved by evil. So when the young woman in Möttlingen was delivered from evil after eighteen months of prayer and spiritual warfare, Blumhardt was convinced of two things: Jesus is victor and His kingdom has come on earth. His experiences of healings at the sanatorium of Bad Boll caused him to interpret this in-breaking of God’s kingdom in an individual way. Jesus was doing for precious people what He did as He walked the earth: making the blind see, opening the prison door and releasing the bound (see Luke 4:16-21).

As Johann Blumhardt lay dying in 1880, he spoke a blessing over his son Christoph (1842-1919): that he might conquer in the strength of Jesus, the victorious Christ.

Christoph, like his father, had trained as a pastor. He was, by all accounts, controversial. The novelist Hermann Hesse recalls him saying that “a Mohammedan with a real and honest heart is closer to God than many Christians.”

Christoph Blumhardt

Blumhardt grew increasingly disillusioned with the established church, so he returned to Bad Boll and assisted his father with the work there, until Johann’s death passed the mantle to him. He held healing crusades, which carried the same power his father had known.

But Christoph was on a different, more radical road. “A Christian must be born twice“, he wrote: “once from the human to the spiritual, and once from the spiritual to the human“. In other words, a spirituality or church commitment which had no interest in addressing the sufferings of people and the ills of society was a comfortable lie.

Christoph had a more developed notion of God’s kingdom. In later years he claimed that his father’s compassionate heart had swayed him in favour of the individual, whereas Christ the King has His kingdom rule – a rulership that includes all things, the universe, the earth, nations and structures. This kingdom was wider than the Church and not best expressed in a religious system which was a preserve of the middle-class, concerned only with power and influence.

Johann had begun with the ‘cosmic’ through the exorcism at Möttlingen (see previous post). His son saw the ‘cosmic’ aspect of the kingdom of God – that it was a Body hastening the return of Jesus Christ by shining as a light in darkness, a ‘city on a hill’ (Matthew 5:14). Johann had acted as if the Kingdom was part of the Church; for son Christoph, the Church is part of the Kingdom.

“We Christians think of a heavenly kingdom; I came to see that God intended an earthly kingdom, or rather, a heavenly kingdom on earth. God’s name was to be hallowed on earth, His kingship seen on earth, His will done on earth. The earth should announce eternity: God on earth.”

In a number of writings, Christoph Blumhardt presented his understanding of the kingdom of God and how it is forever breaking in to life on earth – for that was always God’s intention.

“The angels have God in heaven, I have not – I want to pray down here. I must have God here. The earth is the stage set for the kingdom of God, because the kingship of God is in direct relationship with this earth: the Saviour, down here. God’s intention is the here and now: Jesus challenging poverty, sin and misery on earth.”

Christoph Blumhardt at his desk

A post on the John Mark Ministries blog considers the significance of Blumhardt’s writings on the kingdom of God. ‘His ideas had seminal influence on Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and more recently on Jacques Ellul and Jürgen Moltmann – theological giants among whom he would most certainly feel a stranger. Despite this legacy, Blumhardt is relatively unknown. To begin with, Blumhardt’s life was a provocation. He also expressed his ideas in impressive and unconventional phrases. His message excited both shock and indignation, for it went against the currents of both the church and the world. He represented something quite different from what we generally understand by Christianity.

‘Blumhardt did not care about matters of religion and church, of worship services and dogma, not even of inner peace and personal redemption. For him, faith was a matter of the coming of God’s kingdom, of God’s victory over darkness and death here and now. The kingdom of God was the creative reign of Christ’s peace and justice on earth. His vision of God’s righteousness on earth was an unconditional and all-embracing one: God’s love reconciles the world, liberates suffering, heals economic and social need – in short, it renews the earth.’

Blumhardt believed that the prophets and Jesus wanted a new world: the rulership of God over all reality. He could not identify with most Christians’ longing for heaven and enduring this earthly life as a necessary precursor. In his view, heaven must come down to earth.

“Many people long and yearn for heaven; they stretch out toward heaven. I would like to tell them: Let your minds reach to the heights that we can already perceive on earth. Down here is where Jesus appeared, not above in the invisible world. Here on earth he wants to appear again and again. Here on earth we may find him.”

From Desert Sand to Peat Bogs: Mediaeval Monastic Links between Egypt and Ireland

A Coptic monastery at Wadi Natrun, Egypt

In 2006 in County Tipperary, Ireland, an ancient book was found preserved in a peat bog. Now known as the Faddan More Psalter, it contains manuscripts of the biblical Psalms and has been dated to c.800 AD. What is intriguing, however, is the fact that the cover is of a style not commonly found in Western Europe, being more typical of the Eastern Mediterranean, and in the binding were found pieces of papyrus, also from the Levant (or maybe Sicily).

It is not the only pointer to links between Celtic Christianity and the Coptic monasteries of Egypt. A tantalising reference in a 9^th century text mentions “seven monks of Egypt in Disert Uilaig” (on the West coast of Ireland). ‘Disert’ (desert) in various forms is found in place names in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. It was the term used by hermits and monks for their own settlements, originating in the actual wildernesses of Egypt and Palestine and then being accepted in the Latin churches as a generic term for a solitary place where a group of monks or anchorites established themselves.

Detail of the Faddan More Psalter, before conservation

Does this prove an Irish-Egyptian Christian link in the first millennium? Probably not, but there are further pointers. Before the Roman Empire, Celtic-speaking peoples were settled in much of West and Central Europe. Their trade routes spread further still, over the Alps into Italy and down the Danube to the Levant. Celtic warriors were valued as mercenaries. They fought with Hannibal against Rome, and in the 3^rd century BC they supported the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt. Many Celts intermarried with Egyptians and remained by the Nile; the Greek historian Polybios records that their mixed-race children were known as e pigovoi.

There was a known maritime trade route between the eastern Mediterranean and the British Isles since the Bronze Age, because tin from Cornwall was needed for the production of bronze for tools and weapons. Celts were also renowned craftsmen, and items of jewellery have been found in Egyptian tombs that are usually identified as Celtic (though some dispute this).

Early Christian writings are clear that John Cassian (360-435), the noted ascetic and theological writer, made a tour of the monasteries of Palestine and Egypt and brought that spirituality back to the South of Gaul. The monastery he founded at Marseille had a rule of life modelled on the Coptic, and its influence spread northwards. Not far away, on the island of Lérins (Lerinum), off Cannes, St Honoratus founded a monastery c.400 which followed the Egyptian rule until the introduction of the Benedictine rule in the 6th century. It is held by some that St Patrick of Ireland came to Lérins and learned Coptic spirituality and practice, but the detail may be apocryphal. Certainly Patrick quotes from Coptic sources in his Confessio.

In the mid-5^th century, the Church was torn by a disagreement over a point of doctrine about the nature of Christ. It is known today as Monophysitism. The monks of Palestine and Egypt were on one side of the debate, the power-holding bishops on the other. When the Council of Chalcedon in 451 ruled for the bishops’ position, many monks chose to flee from what they saw as error, and sought new places for their ‘deserts’. This diaspora may well have led some to the Celtic Christian lands.

Finally, Robert Ritner makes a convincing case for parallels between Irish and Coptic Christian art, sculpture and architecture. Egyptian motifs not known in the Roman Christian traditions of Western Europe are found in Ireland. Examples are:

1. the handbell used by mendicant monks, which a Coptic bishop received at his consecration, and which appears on the 8^th century Bishop’s Stone in Killadeas, County Fermanagh
2. preference for the T-shaped “Tau cross” rather than the Western shepherd’s crook for bishops (though the Latin churches did sometimes use the Tau cross)
3. the absence of a mitre on the head of bishops, but instead a crown with a jewel
4. the prevalence of Egyptian monastic pioneers, St Antony and Paul of Thebes on early medieval Irish high crosses [I am indebted to Gilbert Markus for pointing out to me that this could just as easily have sprung from Jerome’s Life of Paul, which popularised the life of Antony in the West]
5. angels in the Celtic illustrated masterpiece, the Book of Kells (c.800), holding strange sticks with circles on the end, which turn out to be flabella, processional fans used to cool important people in the heat of the eastern Mediterranean, and certainly not in Ireland! The imagery can only have been imported from the Coptic context.

 

[this revision incorporates additional material provided by several people who read the first version. I am indebted to them, especially Meredith Cutrer and Gilbert Markus.]

Teenagers Planting Churches: the “Hallelujah Lasses” of the Early Salvation Army

“Some of my best men are women“, said William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army.  The Army recognised spiritual gifting and cared nothing for gender. The Booths’ own fearsomely talented and God-loving daughters led the way. William himself was known to give over the platform to his teenage daughter Kate, who could often reach people’s hearts better than he could.

Similarly, if the Army was looking to plant a new church (in their jargon, ‘start a corps’), they frequently sent in a team of young, sometimes teen-aged women. And they did the job! Here is one example among many, taken from an English newspaper, the Northern Daily Express, of 4th March 1879, and concerns events in Gateshead.

The great question in most churches which are at all earnest in their work, is how to reach the masses. The journalist comments that the section of the community that lies outside the usual compass of religious life comprised most of the audience. More unusual still, the work which experienced ministers and the ordinary agencies of churches had failed in, has been attempted by a few young women. These were the “Hallelujah Lasses”, the stormtroopers of the early Salvation Army.

Some six or eight weeks ago, about half-a-dozen young women made a raid under the banner of a Gospel mission among the lowest classes in the town, and they have succeeded in the most remarkable manner… They have got such a hold upon the masses as to tame some of the worst of the characters. A thorough transformation has been effected in the lives of some of the most thoughtless, depraved and criminal.

These women, most in their twenties, hired music-halls for their meetings. Despite the sneers from all sides, within a short time these places were filled to overflowing for three hours, and hundreds are unable to gain admission.

A contemporary caricature of ‘Hallelujah Lasses’

What can have enabled these Salvation Army girls to achieve such breakthroughs? Much comes down to the ‘first love’ fire of a new movement in the flower of its vigour. But we must see in action here the twin elements of BLOOD and FIRE that were to become the Army’s motto. A total conviction of the power of Jesus’ redeeming blood to save even the worst, together with the freshness of the Holy Spirit’s filling (for which Salvationists spent whole nights of prayer) kept them pressing into territory where other feared to go, and expecting results.

And they were tenacious. As E S Turner points out:  ‘In the words of the War Cry, they ‘would arrest [a young man’s] attention and talk to him, one on one side, and another on the other, thus keeping up a continual fire and volley of advice. Many a poor fellow was thus extricated from the Devil’s clutches’ and taken to the hall ‘surrounded and saturated by such mighty influence as would drive the Devil out and “Let the Master in”’.’

They also used the power of personal testimony. The journalist tells of the roughest and most criminal of people glorifying God for their soul’s salvation. And the Army used the passion of youth: One youth, who is evidently not more than fourteen, is quite a phenomenon, and certainly has a marvellous utterance for one so young and inexperienced. On Saturday night, we were told, he spoke for twenty minutes, and carried the audience so fully away with him, that in the midst of his address three or four persons went up to the penitent form [benches placed at the front of the hall, where people could come and kneel, pray, repent and receive personal prayer].

The journalist concludes, perceptively, that what is needed in the work now is consolidation – some agency to carry the converts beyond the few simple truths they have got hold of, and to give them an interest in the work when the excitement of the change and the effort has passed away.

For further information about the Hallelujah Lasses, and the example of ‘Happy Eliza’, follow this link to The Victorian Web.

Overcoming Prejudice: the Labours of African Pentecostal Pioneer Elias Letwaba

A very rare photo (retouched). Acknowledgements to Roberts Liardon Official God’s Generals

The most fruitful African ethnic evangelist and church-planter in early Pentecostalism was Elias Letwaba (1870-1958). History has largely forgotten him, for two main reasons. First, his ministry was conducted out in the remote bush of the Transvaal, South Africa. Secondly, he was native African, from the Ndebele tribe. The Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM), to which he allied himself, was at first racially inclusive but increasingly embraced segregation, even holding separate baptism services for blacks and whites. In this article, historian Barry Morton writes: ‘records were typically kept on white Pentecostal leaders and their congregations, while the African membership was usually undocumented.’

From a young age, Letwaba was was sensitive to God and gifted with languages, eventually speaking seven. He also experienced supernatural gifts. Morton urges caution here, because a regrettable tendency developed in the African Pentecostal context to solicit funding through accounts of miracles, some of which may have been glamourised.  Even so, we read that Letwaba felt tinglings in his hands when he read Bible accounts of healing. One day he prayed over a lame girl in Jesus’ name – and only found out five years later that she had been healed.

He tried several churches, then in 1908 he travelled to Doorfontein to hear the American evangelist and healer John G Lake. The power of God was very obvious in the meeting, with people being healed and set free. Lake sensed something in Letwaba, invited him on to the stage and kissed him. This won Letwaba’s heart but caused division among the white believers, some of whom wanted him thrown out. The story goes that Lake declared: “If you throw him out, I will go too.” The two men became brothers from the heart; Lake invited him into his home, where Letwaba received his personal Pentecost, the ‘baptism in the Holy Spirit‘.

When Lake and his team left for Bloemfontein, they invited Letwaba to go with them. Under Lake’s training, Letwaba began an itinerant ministry, walking hundreds of miles between far-flung villages. He was often beaten, kicked and verbally abused, but when he prayed for the sick, many were healed. From time to time, Lake would come to Letwaba’s home in Potgietersrust and the two would minister to people together – always attended with remarkable divine happenings.

Typical round houses of the Transvaal

After Lake returned to America in 1913, people began to recognise that Letwaba had, in some special way, inherited his mantle in ‘power ministry’. On one occasion, during a heavy drought, he prayed for rain for one village, prophesying that it would happen that night (there were no weather forecasts in those days!). And the rain came.

Morton again: ‘Letwaba, although never nominally in charge, was the de facto leader of the AFM’s African membership for almost 50 years. His success as an evangelist, his renown as a man of God, and his indefatigable work rate meant that he enjoyed tremendous respect throughout the church.’ He was salaried by the AFM and attended its ministers’ conferences – the only African leader to be so treated.

Seeing the great need for training ethnic Christian workers in tribal areas, Letwaba founded the Patmos Bible School at Potgietersrust in 1924 (he even made the bricks on his own farm). An intake of twelve students could live in and study the Bible, as well as general studies and public speaking. Nearby, he opened a primary school for hundreds of children.

This article on the ‘Healing and Revival’ blog shows the extent of his labours: ‘Letwaba had the care of thirty-seven churches. On Sundays he would lead services at five or six locations and would start at 5:30 in the morning and continue until 9:00 at night. He also taught six hours a day at the Bible school. He continued the school until 1935 when he was 65 years old. His congregations were tribally mixed, and often his sermons had to be given through two or three interpreters.’

It has been roughly estimated that 10,000 people found healing as a result of his prayers. For all this, he remained a humble man, writing sermons pleading for personal holiness and humility, and leading by example in those areas. He was also inclusive, welcoming to his campaigns and churches people of all tribes. He died in 1959, aged 89, a father of the African church – yet regrettably unknown outside his beloved Transvaal.