A second-generation revlvalist who digested the hard-won lessons of spiritual warfare… and went on to do unprecedented things with unprecedented insight, quietly forming the faith and action of the twentieth century. Proposed date of commemoration: August 2.
Although Christoph grew up the son of the preacher of hope and healing Johann Christoph Blumhardt, he felt spiritually dry for much of his early life, even into young adulthood. Living at the center of an awakening had attuned him to spiritual realities, and the care to the point of exhaustion offered to the suffering turned his loving attention on the needy. But the bright confidence of his famous father did not break through to his own soul until the very linchpin of the awakening was taken from them.
Christoph was with Gottliebin Dittus on her deathbed. While her breaking free of the devil’s power had been the moment of truth for his father Johann Christoph, it was her death in Christ’s hands that changed everything for Christoph. But in both cases, the good news was the same: “Jesus is victor!” His victory was not a matter of the past—whether the distant past of prophets and apostles, or the more recent past of his own childhood and his father’s Möttlingen pastorate. Jesus is victor now, today, and into the future.
Johann Christoph saw with the joy the transformation in his son. On his own deathbed, his place his hand on Christoph’s head and spoke his final words: “I bless you for the victory.” Not the victory of career or success: the victory of Christ.
From then on Christoph took the mantle of Bad Boll, the institution founded by his parents to care for the sick and suffering. Like his father, he became a renowned preacher. But much more quickly than his father, Christoph became disenchanted not only with his renown, but with its effect. Thousands came to listen to him when he traveled through Germany and Switzerland, but he became increasingly convinced that the true message of Christ wasn’t coming through. In 1888 he quit his preaching tours.
What had changed? Johann Christoph saw the victory of Christ over the devil, but Christoph became acutely aware for the need for Christ’s victory over the Christian. He saw believers awarding credit to themselves for their miraculous healings; the pious wanting signs and wonders and improvements, not for the sake of God’s kingdom but for their own narrow benefit. Even prayer, worship, and Bible reading could be corrupted in an egotistical direction.
For Christoph, there was no mercy apart from truth, and truth meant the exposure of sin at the core even of the best of people. Sin was wanting salvation as personal escape. But in Christoph’s view, salvation was cosmic in scope, concerning the whole of God’s coming kingdom and not just an airlift for individuals. Like his father, he had such confidence in God’s triumphant love that he hoped for universal salvation. But salvation would never involve denial of the rottenness at the core of the human creature. His watchword became, “Die, so that Jesus might live!”
With this wider scope in mind, Christoph’s attention increasingly turned outside the confines of the church. In contrast to a perception of Christianity as simply playing for the winning team, Christoph insisted that all people belong to Christ, regardless of sin but also regardless of religion. He also insisted on perceiving the work of God to make all things new outside the walls of the church. At a time when, in his view, there was too much smug self-satisfaction with the mechanical grinding away of the institutional church, and a glance that only looked backward at God in history and never forward to God’s promised consummation of all things, Christoph studied the landscape for signs of the coming kingdom.
All this brought him into conflict with loyalists to his father’s ways. He retired from his role as pastor at Bad Boll, preaching his final sermon there on the first of January in 1894, though he continued to preach and write on spiritual themes through the rest of his life. Two months later he announced his refusal to pray any more for healing, tired of the “self-seeking” requests that deluged Bad Boll. As he sharply expressed it in a public letter announcing his intentions:
“In our attitude toward God, in our prayers and religious services there is a lie that exploits the mercy and grace of God in such a way that the Savior then becomes our servant. He is merely expected to restore again and again what we have spoiled. A selfish streak has crept into everything. This pains our hearts, and I decidedly wish to find a new attitude toward those who come to me in need and affliction. Many people write us letters now just as they used to, asking for our intercession. We should actually answer in each case: ‘Stop your begging before God and first search with us how we can do justice to God, recognizing our guilt and striving for God’s real justice and his kingdom on earth. Turn your whole self in the opposite direction and stop looking at yourselves and all your suffering. Look at the suffering of God, whose kingdom has been held back for so long because of the lying spirit in us all. Be confident; God will not let you be separated from him. You will be his true child, zealous for his honor.”
But that was nothing compared to the coming firestorm. In the summer of 1899 Christoph attended a workers’ protest against a proposed law that would make labor strikes a jailable offense. Christoph called the law an outrage against justice. In the fall he sttended a couple of German Social Democratic Party meetings where he described himself as a “socialist.” By November became one of the very first, if not the first, clergy to join the socialist party, desiring to engaged in this-worldly service for the working class. It also matched another development in his thinking: that bodiliness was as much a part of God’s concern as spirituality, and faithful Christianity therefore had to attend to physical needs as much as piety.
But to do so through affiliation with socialism was beyond the pale for the church at his time, not least of all because the party was considered by many within and without to represent atheism. The consistory of the regional church informed Christoph that he would have to relinquish his title and office of pastor, but he did so without regret, long since having given up regular pastoral duties and disenchanted with the church as institution anyway. In 1900 he was elected as representative to the parliament in his region of Württemberg, an office he held till 1906.
Christoph was in for further disenchantment, however. While he continued to believe that concern for the working poor was a faithful Christian response, he quickly discovered that political parties were no more in line with the living Spirit of God than the church. Policy and negotiation in the end struck him as further human efforts to seize the future for human purposes; the attentive, awaiting openness to the active work of the Spirit was equally lacking. By the end of his term he absented himself from the parliament to take extended trips to the Middle East, and when he returned he withdrew for good from politics, citing weak health and the needs of Bad Boll. While he continued to support conscientious Christian involvement in politics, he could no longer consider a political party as an agent or sign of the coming Kingdom.
And yet, Christoph’s most striking intervention still lay ahead of him. He was the only Protestant figure of any prominence who protested the “Spirit of August”: namely, the militaristic, nationalistic fervor that gripped Germany at the outbreak of World War I. Liberal and conservative alike, Pietist sectarian and mainstream institutional churchmen alike welcomed the war and its unifying effect on the German lands as the work of the Holy Spirit, destining their people for great things. Christoph alone defied the spirit of the times, calling out nationalist egoism for what it was. Christoph agreed that the war was a work of the Spirit: but in his reading, it was the Spirit’s exposure of sin through judgment. The rulers of this world were surely judged.
Like his father, Christoph did not live to see the decisive coming of the Kingdom or the transformation of all things by the Spirit as he so fervently hoped for. Expectation of radical change disappointed him as much as it drove him. Yet it also gave him the eyes to see the many ways in which people avoid real contact with the living God. They avoid God by avoiding all traffic with religion, faith, and piety; they also avoid God by being busily occupied with religion, faith, and piety. All of his preaching was directed toward the reality of God, the presence of God, the victory of God, against all forms of self-satisfaction, to awaken hope and confidence in the final consummation of the Kingdom according to Christ’s promise. His message was immensely influential on twentieth century theologians, above all Karl Barth.
Following two strokes in the preceding two years, Christoph died in his sleep on August 2, 1919. His epitaph reads: “Christ’s victory remains forever sure. The whole world will be his!”
For Further Reading
Simeon Zahl, Pneumatology and Theology of the Cross in the Preaching of Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt: The Holy Spirit between Wittenberg and Azusa Street (T&T Clark)
Plough Publishing House has a whole series of books with the writings of Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt as well as his father, Johann Christoph Blumhardt