Foreword
Introduction
Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (–) was an original. There is no one quite like him. He is not easy to characterize – theologically, politically, or otherwise. He was at home nowhere – he belonged neither to church circles nor to secular ones. He was an embarrassment to Christians and non-Christians alike. He seemed to challenge and disconcert everyone. And yet he possessed a strange confidence in God’s history; a confidence that inspired hope in many, and continues to do so even today. Blumhardt possessed no theories and certainly no “theology.” Without founding a school or wanting to attract disciples, he pointed in a direction that had a striking influence on those who came after him. He was behind two movements that accepted him as one of their forerunners without having any direct contact with them: Religious Socialism (in Switzerland and Germany) and Dialectical (“Crisis”) Theology. His ideas had seminal influence on Leonhard Ragaz, Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and more recently on Harvey Cox, Jacques Ellul, and Jürgen Moltmann – theological giants among whom he would most certainly feel a stranger. There are movements today like the rapidly growing Vineyard Church that seize Blumhardt and his father as two of their most cherished witnesses – forerunners of today’s outbreak of signs and wonders. In Blumhardt we have a demonstration of kingdom power combined with repentance, a power that has become commonplace among many charismatic and Pentecostal movements.Despite his legacy, Blumhardt is relatively unknown – especially in America. This is, for instance, his only book currently in print in English. True, efforts have been made in the past to make him better known. But without much effect. Unlike some of his contemporaries – Charles Finney or William Booth, for example Blumhardt is known only to a very few. In a piece written for The Christian Century in , Vernard Eller suggests that part of the reason for Blumhardt’s obscurity is that his message was neither literary nor scholarly enough to quote from. In his book Thy Kingdom Come: A Blumhardt Reader (Eerdmans, ), Eller attempted to rectify this. Unfortunately, the book never received much attention. But there is perhaps a more basic reason. 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. As Johannes Harder once wrote, “Anyone who wants to fit Blumhardt into the history of theology might place him into an appendix to Gottfried Arnold’s History of
Heresy.” It was Blumhardt’s conviction that the greatest of all dangers to human progress was “Christianity” – Sunday religion that separated material existence from the spiritual and that erected rituals and practices of
self-seeking, self-satisfying, other-worldly piousness instead of practical works of righteousness.
Blumhardt didn’t 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. 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. To many people, Blumhardt’s message sounded dangerously
worldly, even irreverent. In fact, the established church of his day retaliated by casting suspicion on him, and slandering and maligning him. His message touched a nerve that is still raw today. Blumhardt’s aim, however, was never to attack. What ruled his whole thinking was the kingdom of God – the creative reign of Christ’s peace and justice on earth. This kingdom is neither a formal constitution nor an ideal. It is a movement that belongs to the future but impinges upon the present. It is humankind’s truest history, and will be demonstrably victorious in the end. It confronts everything that has ever been thought, planned, or built; it opposes all institutions, monuments, and ideologies. It always seeks the different, the new, and encompasses the whole of life.
Such a broad view of God’s redemptive work pushes hard against the boundaries of traditional Christianity.
And this could well be the real reason why Blumhardt’s thought, though seminally forceful among an important few, has never had broad appeal. We will return to this theme of the kingdom. Before we do, however, we must understand how concrete, how living this reign of God was for Blumhardt. Blumhardt
was no visionary. His thought grew from his experience, not from theology. God’s kingdom was something
living for him, not an abstraction. It filled his being with the vividness of direct personal experience.
To appreciate this one must turn to Blumhardt’s father, Johann Christoph (–). Blumhardt’s father was the minister of Möttlingen, a small town at the edge of the Black Forest. His work followed the same course as that of any rural pastor until he came in touch with a girl by the name of Gottliebin Dittus. Gottliebin suffered from an illness perhaps similar to demonic possession as described in the New Testament. For months Father Blumhardt watched with distress the increasing suffering and torment of this young woman.
Feeling something dark at work in her, he finally took up the fight with the power of darkness. In the year in
which his son Christoph was born, in , he exclaimed: “We have seen enough of what the devil can do. Let us now see the power of the Lord Jesus.” The fight against the demonic stronghold commenced and
lasted two years. The dark power was finally broken and conquered, and the evil spirit driven out. Gottliebin
was completely healed of all bodily and spiritual misery. The fight ended in victory with the words from her lips, “Jesus is victor! Jesus is victor!” As a consequence of this victory a movement of repentance
swelled, taking hold of Blumhardt’s whole parish and extending to the neighboring towns and villages. From all sides people streamed to Father Blumhardt. The inbreaking of kingdom power transformed
the entire village of Möttlingen. There were healings, confessions, conversions. Marriages were saved, enemies reconciled. A strange new manifestation of God’s world took sway. From this time on, Father Blumhardt’s rallying cry was “Jesus is victor!” It was in this strangely moved world that his son Christoph grew up. For a number of reasons, opposition to Blumhardt’s father gradually increased, particularly from other ministers and the state church authorities. Local clergy complained about the flight of their parishioners to Blumhardt. Soon the parsonage could not accommodate the numbers of people who were beginning to
stream to him. He thus began to look for a place where there would be both more room and greater freedom. When Christoph was only ten, the family moved to Bad Boll, a complex of large buildings which had been developed as a spa around a sulfur water spring. This became a kind of retreat center, a place to which people could have recourse for periods of rest, meditation, study, and pastoral counsel – and a place where the father Blumhardt was free to operate according to God’s leading.
The father Blumhardt spent the rest of his life in Bad Boll, and his son spent most of his adult life there. Thousands came to his father to experience the healing and strengthening of Christ’s victory. This was Christoph’s experience and his foundation. It is no surprise that the amazing experiences of his father engraved themselves indelibly upon Christoph’s soul, compelling him forward along the same path.
In Bad Boll, the young Christoph found himself in the midst of a stream of people seeking help, coming
from all classes, nationalities, and countries, and in themidst of the work of his father’s constant, fervent
struggle for God’s kingdom. In time he felt called to the ministry himself, and after some years he was per mitted to support his father as an assistant. When his father called him to Bad Boll as his helper, however, he
only wanted to make himself useful around the house in the most menial ways; perhaps as a cook’s helper.
For some reason he lacked his father’s certainty. He had yet to personally take up the fight that his father had undertaken. But the death of Gottliebin Dittus, in , became a turning point for him and the entire household at Bad Boll. It drove everybody to a fresh experience of deep repentance, releasing in Christoph a renewed confidence in God’s call. His father’s last words, spoken on his deathbed in , commissioned Christoph to carry on: “I give you a blessing for victory.”
Download full versi disini
0 Komentar
Penulisan markup di komentar