A protracted battle with the devil gives way to a lifelong ministry of healing through Jesus, the Victor. Proposed date of commemoration: December 31.
In the spring of 1842 Pastor Johann Christoph Blumhardt was advised by his parishioners to investigate the strange goings-on at the home of the Dittus siblings. Orphaned and bereaved of several other siblings as well, four of them—Gottliebin, Anna Maria, Katharina, and Hansjörg—lived together in a tumbledown house under conditions of extreme poverty. But the poverty was not the primary target of concern. It was the noises, the strange lights, and above all the strange behavior of Gottliebin that called for further examination.
Gottliebin did not respond warmly to the pastor’s friendly overtures. He let her be, but neighbors complained again: Gottliebin fell down, she fell ill, the noises in the house were so loud as to keep them up at night. Johann Christoph dispatched the siblings to stay with a relative overnight while he and trusted members of the congregation searched the house. Therein they found strange objects, and thereby the fears of Johann Christoph were confirmed: dabbling in occult magic was a widespread spiritual disorder in his flock. Further inquiry revealed that Gottliebin’s early life had been filled with attempted initiations into such dark traffic at the behest of her elders.
Spiritualist studies were not unknown at the time. Reputable figures investigated reports of poltergeists, converse with the dead, and spirits of all kinds. Johann Christoph consulted with such experts of his acquaintance, but remained uneasy with their eager conclusions. Scripture forbade all forms of magic and attempts to communicate with the dead; the devil would deceive by any means necessary, including by lures of knowledge of the supposed beyond. Johann Christoph was resolute: he decided only to pray and place his trust in Jesus Christ.
But matters did not improve for Gottliebin. If anything, they worsened, and especially when Johann Christoph came near. She fainted, she shook, she foamed at the mouth in delirious fits; then she would come to and appear, for all intents and purposes, to be sane. Johann Christoph gradually became convinced that whatever was at work in her was, in fact, the devil. But still he refused to negotiate with the terrorist holding Gottliebin hostage. One night in late June, Gottliebin again fell into a trance. This time Johann Christoph grabbed her hand and shouted into her ear, “Place your hands together and pray, ‘Lord Jesus, help me!’ We have seen long enough what the devil can do; now we desire to see also what Jesus can do.” At once Gottliebin regained consciousness, joined the pastor in prayer, and settled down again.
From then on Johann Christoph’s strategy did not vary: he kept the patient company, prayed with her, and invited her to pray, too. His prayers were simple and spontaneous. He avoided anything that sounded ritualistic, much less magical: even the repetition of biblical verses like mantras was discarded after a short experiment. He made no attempt to gain power over the evil spirit, nor Gottliebin herself, but only invited her with gentle persistence to emerge from her possession. If the spirits tried to talk to Johann Christoph, he told them to keep silent; if they refused, he simply left.
And yet, still, Gottliebin continued to suffer attacks, and they increased in scale and severity. She pummeled herself, yanked out her own hair, choked and spat as if trying to purge from within, lost weight to a dangerous degree. She nearly hanged herself in despair. She hemorrhaged from her breasts, attributing the wounds to spirits. Almost a year after the pastor’s first visit, she began to vomit objects like sand, glass, nails, shoelaces, needles, and pins. Then they came out through her skin, leaving no wounds.
Johann Christoph, wary of both deception and self-deception, brought other witnesses; council members and his own wife Doris Köllner Blumhardt witnessed the same bizarre phenomenon. All believed in Gottliebin’s sincerity and subjection; she was not a charlatan. Nor was she a complicit agent in her own possession. All recognized that she was a victim of attack, needing not accusation but prayer and faithful waiting at her side. But this situation was nevertheless beyond all sense and reason. Every time a breakthrough seemed near, a fresh attack came over the young woman.
By Christmas of 1843, the struggle for Gottliebin had lasted for a year and three-quarters, and while it was certainly the worst, it was by no means the only stone weighing on Johann Christoph’s heart. Despite his impassioned preaching—renowned already during his vicarage in Iptingen and many years as a mission instructor and educator in Basel—his congregation limped along, spiritually dead. His lively and living hope for the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God, his enthusiastic support of world mission, his depiction of the work of the Holy Spirit as vivid in his day as in that of the apostles: none of it amounted to anything. He approached the many worship services of the Christmas holidays with his usual fervor but no expectation that a breakthrough was just around the corner.
On December 30 Gottliebin was not the only one in the throes of demonic assault. So were her sister Katharina and brother Hansjörg. As usual, Johann Christoph went to sit with them, to pray with and for them. Katharina was in such a state that she was trying to tear herself to pieces. And then, about two in the morning, Katharina let out a bellow loud enough to shake the house and doubled over backward. She shouted in a strange voice: “Jesus is victor! Jesus is victor!”
And so he was. The evil spirits were defeated.
With that cry of acclamation—and defeat—the demon was broken, as was the spell it held over the whole family. Nearly two years’ torture came to an end with Jesus’ victory. All the alarming manifestations ceased: noises, bleeding, objects, fits, convulsions, even more ordinary health problems.More than that, Gottliebin herself was changed for good and forever. From that moment onward she was calm and modest, sensible and responsible. In time Johann Christoph and Doris took her into their parsonage to care for their many children. Later Gottliebin became the village kindergarten teacher, a role she served with a spotless record. Her siblings also recovered fully.
That alone would have been remarkable enough. But Johann Christoph was convinced that more had happened than the release of the afflicted in the little Swabian village of Möttlingen. Jesus’ victory in them was Jesus’ victory on earth, for the whole church, for the coming Kingdom. Perhaps, Johann Christoph thought, the final battle was drawing near. The morning after the battle concluded, a Sunday, the pastor took this good news to the morning worship service with him, interpreting Mary’s Magnificat as a living word for that very day and that very people. God had looked with favor on His humble servant Gottliebin; He had done great things for her; from now on, all generations would call her blessed, too.
The congregation did not react to the news at first with any sign of joy or welcome. But the story spread, slowly and inexorably, and in due course Johann Christoph finally saw the signs of reviving spiritual life that he had waited and prayed for. First the confirmands came to him of their own accord with confessions of sin. Then infrequent attenders at church confessed; then the frequent ones. Those who fully unburdened themselves of their evils—and Johann Christoph, no fool or naïf, was nevertheless appalled at what had been happening under his watch—were transported with freedom and relief. They went on to preach the good news of repentance and forgiveness to their fellows. Prayer and Bible reading circles formed. Soon people were lining up at the parsonage for the pastor’s ear, and in a few months’ time the lines increased with floods of penitents coming from other villages to hear Johann Christoph preach and absolve them.
Johann Christoph, however, handed the credit back to Christ again and again. He exhorted patient prayer and hope for spiritual, not only physical, healing. He kept his sessions with seekers brief, and before long he couldn’t manage more than offering up the sufferer’s name, so long had his prayer list become. He recognized that not every petition for healing would be granted. He also recognized that answered prayers, indeed miracles, were ordinary, not extraordinary events, and need not become the object of any particular fascination.
So it continued for nearly a decade until Johann Christoph simply could not continue as he had. At the time being a pastor was also to be a civil servant, and the paperwork was oppressive. The ordinary business of congregational life inevitably came into competition with the deluge of need for healing. He and Doris began to seek for an alternative, a refuge for the sick, suffering, weary, and spiritually distraught that would give them the time and space to recover. In time the solution was found: an abandoned health resort in Bad Boll (“Boll Springs”), already furnished and immediately ready to welcome visitors in its 129 rooms.
In 1852 the family moved to the estate, along with the Dittus siblings. Gottliebin managed the household and its business on an equal footing with Doris Blumhardt. She soon married and had three sons, and her sisters and brothers took on employment at Bad Boll as well. Indeed, a large staff was required to keep the place going, with about seven hundred guests a year arriving. Johann Christoph gave daily sermons; Gottliebin and Doris gave daily nourishment. The visitors ranged from vacationers to the destitute, from the disbelieving to the merely curious. Johann Christoph counted on Gottliebin’s unusually acute spiritual insight—no doubt on account of what she had been through—to help him perceive the need of visitors to the resort. He relied equally on the ministry of his wife, as they had conceived of their partnership from the beginning to be turned outward to the world for the sake of the coming Kingdom. Altogether Bad Boll was maintained by the tireless efforts of the Blumhardts and Gottliebin, sometimes at great and exhausting cost to themselves. Yet for decades to come, Bad Boll was a sanctuary for the hurting and spiritually poor.
Gottliebin died in early 1872 in the arms of Johann Christoph and Doris’s son Christoph Blumhardt, a final “amen” on her lips in response to Christoph’s prayer for the Kingdom to come. Peaceful as her death was, it came as a blow to the Bad Boll community: the one in whom Jesus’ victory was so powerfully made manifest was no longer a living witness and visible sign of hope. Johann Christoph, convinced in his young adulthood that Christ would return on a specific date, then convinced that no date could be set to Christ’s return, still hoped to see the second coming in his own lifetime. Hope, expectation, and awaiting all defined his ministry throughout. As his own death drew near in 1880, he sorrowed that he would not live to see the longed-for event. And yet his core faith was not shaken: that the gospel is not only words but the living power of God to save. Jesus is victor: that is the one true thing, the thing that matters above else.
Johann Christoph Blumhardt and Gottliebin Dittus are commemorated together on December 31, the day in 1843 when the words “Jesus is victor!” declared the triumph of Christ over the evil powers that gripped Gottliebin and her siblings.
For Further Reading
Dieter Ising, Johann Christoph Blumhardt: Life and Work: A New Biography, trans. Monty Ledford (Eugene: Cascade, 2009)
Plough Publishing House has a whole series of books with writings by Johann Christoph Blumhardt as well as his son, Christoph Fredrich Blumhardt.