Pneumatology and Theology of the Cross in the Preaching of Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt: The Holy Spirit between Wittenberg and Azusa Street ( T&T Clark/Continuum, 2010)

‘Dr Zahl not only gives w

hat is likely to remain for som

e time the

authoritative interpretation of Christoph Blumhardt’s sem

inal theology, but he also engages deeply w

ith understandings of the H

oly Spirit in Luther and Pentecostalism. In addition he contributes

a lively, convincing and constructive proposal on discerning the H

oly Spirit in twenty-first century Christian life and thought.’

DAVID FORD, UNIVERSITY OF CAM

BRIDGE, UK

‘Can a bridge be found between classical Protestantism

and charism

atic Pentecostalism, the m

ost significant Christian m

ovement in recent decades? Sim

eon Zahl persuasively argues Christoph Blum

hardt’s charismatic theology of the cross

provides just such a bridge. An important book on a central

and unresolved problem.’

MIRO

SLAV VOLF, YALE UNIVERSITY, USA

SIMEO

N ZAH

L studied at Harvard U

niversity and the University

of Cambridge, w

here he received his doctorate. He is currently

an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of D

ivinity, University of

Cambridge, U

K.

��

ISBN 978-0-567-64591-3

T&T Clark Studies in System

atic T heology is a series of m

onographs in the field of Christian doctrine, with a

particular focus on constructive engagement w

ith the subject through historical analysis or contem

porary restatement.

T&T CLARK

STUD

IES IN SYSTEM

ATIC THEO

LOG

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SIMEO

N ZAH

L

Pneumatology and Theology of the Cross in the Preaching of Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt

ZAHL

Pneumatology and Theology

of the Cross in the Preaching of Christoph Friedrich Blum

hardtTh

e Holy Spirit betw

een Wittenberg and A

zusa Street��

T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology

Edited by

John Webster, King’s College, University of Aberdeen, UK

Ian A. McFarland, Candler School of Theology, Emory University, USA

Ivor Davidson, University of Otago, New Zealand

SZahl_FM_Rev.indd iSZahl_FM_Rev.indd i 4/6/2010 11:04:18 AM4/6/2010 11:04:18 AM

SZahl_FM_Rev.indd iiSZahl_FM_Rev.indd ii 4/6/2010 11:04:18 AM4/6/2010 11:04:18 AM

PNEUMATOLOGY AND THEOLOGY OF THE CROSS

IN THE PREACHING OF CHRISTOPH FRIEDRICH

BLUMHARDTThe Holy Spirit Between

Wittenberg and Azusa Street

Simeon Zahl

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Published by T&T Clark A Continuum imprintThe Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane11 York Road Suite 704, New YorkLondon SE1 7NX NY 10038

www.continuumbooks.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Copyright © Simeon Zahl, 2010

Simeon Zahl has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as the Author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 13 (Hardback): 978-0-567-64591-3ISBN: 0-567-64591-6

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, IndiaPrinted on acid-free paper in Great Britain by

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v

contents

Acknowledgments vii

1 Christoph Blumhardt and the Contemporary Pneumatological Impasse 1Introducing Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt 10Blumhardt in Context 13Methodological Considerations 23The Shape of the Study 29

2 “Die, So That Jesus May Live!”: Christoph Blumhardt’s Turn to Theology of the Cross, 1888–96 31Preliminary Remarks I: Blumhardt’s Critique of Academic Theology 34Preliminary Remarks II: Preaching as Theological Genre 35Christoph Blumhardt’s Theological Development to 1888 37The ‘Sterbet’ Wende, 1888 39The Content of the “Sterbet” Theology 40Conclusion: “Dying,” Theology of the Cross, and Empirical-Inductive Reasoning 57

3 Gedanken aus dem Reiche Gottes: Eschatology in Blumhardt’s Theology, 1888–96 61Blumhardt’s Eschatological Framework 62The Problem of Agency in Blumhardt’s Thought 76Underrealized Eschatology 82

4 Schwärmerei? The Category of “Experience” in Blumhardt’s Theology, 1888–96 85Preliminary Observations 87Punctiliar “Experience” of God in Pietist Traditions 88Blumhardtian “Erlebnis” According to the Typology 93Was Christoph Blumhardt a “Schwärmer”? 104Conclusion: Experience and the “Disappearance of Reality” 107

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CONTENTS

5 Blumhardt’s Life and Thought, 1897–1919 111Biographical Overview I: The Turn to Politics, 1897–1906 113Theology to 1903 117Biographical Overview II: Withdrawal from Politics and the Quiet Years, 1906–19 128Theology from 1903–14 130The First World War: Lonely Prophet in a Sea of “Enthusiasm” 137

6 Blumhardt’s Pneumatology: Contributions and Critical Refl ection 143An Overview of Blumhardt’s Pneumatology 144Interpreting the Theology of Christoph Blumhardt: Contribution and Refl ection 152Critical Refl ections on Blumhardt’s Thought 155

7 Blumhardt’s Pneumatology in Dialogue: Contemporary Pentecostal Theology and Martin Luther 158Blumhardt and Pentecostal Theology 159Blumhardt and the Pneumatology of Martin Luther 170

8 Beyond the Impasse: “Negative” Experience of the Holy Spirit in the Christian Life 184The Shape of “Negative” Experience 187The Limits of the Principle 188Advantages 190Implications for Preaching, Pastoral Care, and Scripture 191Conclusion 194

Bibliography 195Index 203

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without help and support from a great many sources. First and foremost, I am grateful to my doctoral supervisors, Ben Quash and David Ford, who gave me both the freedom to discover and pursue my interests, and the practical guidance needed to transform ideas and research into actual words on a page. I could not have proceeded with this research without the generosity of the Panacea Society and the electors of the Crosse Studentship at the Faculty of Divinity. Gerhard Sauter and Mike Higton, who served as the examiners of the origi-nal dissertation, provided both encouragement and very helpful construc-tive feedback. I will forever be grateful also for Professor Sauter and his wife’s gracious hospitality in hosting the examination in their home, and for Dr. Higton’s willingness to travel so far for it. Additional special thanks are due to James Carleton Paget for encouraging me to continue on to Ph.D. work, and for helping to make the transition possible.

Many people and groups provided helpful commentary, support, resources, and encouragement at various stages, both academically and personally, from the beginnings of the dissertation in my undergradu-ate thesis to the published version. They include: Nick Adams, Charles Anderson, Jamin Brophy-Warren, Tom Calhoun, the Cambridge 1405s, the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme and its staff, the Cathedral Church of the Advent, Joseph Clair, Wayne Coppins, Charitini Douvaldzi, Rolf Erler, Deborah Ford, Jason Fout, Nick Gibson, Tom Greggs, the Harvard College Research Program, Ben Hett, Jenny Hinson, Colton Houston, Dieter Ising, Jady Koch, Tom Kraft, Michael Leary, the Alisdair Charles MacPherson Fund, Mark Mattes, Pat McLeod, David McNutt, the Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies, Mockingbird Ministries, Jürgen Moltmann, Charles Moore, Heinz-Dieter Neef, George Newlands, Paul Nimmo, Peterhouse, Debra Prager, Ryan, Charlotte, and Zoë Reeves, Justin Reynolds, Russell Schlecht, Notger Slenczka, St Bene’t’s Church, Cameron Taylor, Kevin Taylor, John Christopher Thomas, Angela Tilby, Tyndale House, Giles Waller, Michael Ward, Christian Collins Winn, Bruce Winter, the Württembergische Landesbibliothek, and many others.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Particular thanks are also due to my two families: to Paul, Mary, John, David, Deirdre, and Cate Zahl, and to K.T., Vivianne, and Nicholas Poon. I am also most grateful to my son Thomas, who obligingly waited until I had submitted the dissertation version before deciding to be born, and who has brought such joy while I prepared it for publication.

Most of all, however, I would like to thank my wife, Bonnie Poon Zahl, who has been the most crucial supporter. These themes are Bonnie’s as much as they are mine. This book is dedicated to her.

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1

christoph blumhardt and the contemporary

pneumatological impasse

One of the salient questions for Protestant theology at the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century falls under the domain of pneumatology. In an age when the Pentecostal movement,1 in all its various stripes and colors, is rapidly becoming the dominant expression of global Christianity, what is the rela-tionship of this new, pneumatologically driven manifestation of the Christian message to classical Reformation conceptions of the Holy Spirit and its activ-ity? At fi rst glance, the obvious answer is that there is not much relationship at all: The foundational Reformation doctrine of justifi cation by faith, and the sola scriptura teaching developed alongside it and to safeguard it, as tra-ditionally understood, stand in opposition to a theology whose fundamental expression and motivating energy is “unmediated” spiritual experience of God in worship.2 Likewise, affectively charged Pentecostal theology is inher-ently dubious of what is seen as the cold rationalism and propositionalism of classical Protestant theology. It is the view of this study that the theol-ogy of Lutheran pastor and healer Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (1842–1919) is uniquely suited to exploring the apparent impasse between classical Protestant critiques of “enthusiasts” (Schwärmer) and the primary theologi-cal distinctive of charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity—the centrality

1 I follow Allan Anderson in using “Pentecostal movement” and “Pentecostalism” “in an all-embracing way to include the Charismatic movement and new Pentecostal or ‘neo-charismatic’ churches of many different descriptions” (Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 1). See the following for a theological defi nition of Pentecostal and charis-matic Christianity in distinction from classical Protestantism.

2 For a full discussion of the terms “mediated” and “unmediated” experience as they will be used in this study, see the following under the heading “Württemberg Pietism,” as well as the discussion in Chapter 4.

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of a certain conception of personal experience of the Spirit. Blumhardt was able to hold together a form of the experiential pneumatology associated with what is now called Pentecostalism with a version of classical Lutheran theologia crucis, with its attendant radicalized concern over the problem of Christian spiritual self-deception. The theological line in the sand between Pentecostal Christianity and the classical Reformation is drawn above all in the domain of pneumatology: It is a question of the locus, nature, and func-tion of the activity of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers. Appropriately, it is Christoph Blumhardt’s pneumatology that can provide both a mutual critique and a way forward through this central impasse between the old Protestant tradition and what is rapidly becoming the new.

*******

When in the 1520s Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt and other early mem-bers of what is known as the Radical Reformation claimed unmediated communication with God, Martin Luther argued in response that any claim to activity of the Spirit in the inner life of a believer that does not take place strictly through the external mediation of the Word of God (in preaching and the sacraments) is heresy, and must have not God, but sin and the devil as its true source. Since then, defenders of the classical Reformation tradition have usually kept the door fi rmly closed against any theology that smacked of Schwärmerei, and have done so in the name of their doctrine of scripture. The resort to sola scriptura over and against theology of direct personal experience of God in the Spirit was grounded in the concern, expressed at the very beginning by Luther, that the proclivity to self-deception intrinsic to all inheritors of original sin might be the explanation behind such experi-ences, not God: The diffi culty in knowing for certain that we are truly hear-ing the word of God in our inner thoughts and affections, and not a word we, or the devil, have subconsciously invented for ourselves. In Luther’s view, God has said all he needs to say to us in his Word, in scripture,3 and to ask for or claim more is the attempt of the old self to wriggle free of the painful, awesome clarity of the one true divine communication. Sola scrip-tura safeguards Christians against the tendency within ourselves, both con-scious and unconscious, to want to control God, and even to be gods unto ourselves. Foundational to the doctrine of justifi cation by faith is precisely this sort of radically “low” anthropology4: It is because of the power of

3 The relationship in Luther’s theology between the general category of the “Word” and its specifi c form in the text of scripture is discussed in Chapter 7.

4 Here and in what follows, the term “low anthropology” refers broadly to a view of human nature that acknowledges a relatively greater ongoing power of sin, egoism, and proclivity to self-deception in human beings, while “high anthropology” signifi es the reverse. The terms are most signifi cant for our purposes in relation to the anthropology of the Christian specifi cally: Blumhardt will be shown to develop a “low” view of the


THE CONTEMPORARY PNEUMATOLOGICAL IMPASSE

3

original sin, which lies behind the problem of self-deception, that salvation must take place by faith alone and not by works.

This Reformation move can be seen as an anticipation of the potential problems Ludwig Feuerbach, and his later kindred spirits Marx and Freud, exposed in Christianity. In Feuerbachian language, Luther believed that any kind of direct spiritual experience apart from the verbum externum, whether in terms of clear communication, or of a murkier, primarily emotional expe-rience, would merely be the projection of deep inner desires, if not of the devil himself—such a God would be our own personal idealization, and not the God of Jesus Christ. Sola scriptura was seen to describe God’s chosen antidote to this inherent human inclination.

Pentecostal Christianity, in its determinative distinctiveness from other Christian expressions, is grounded fi rst and foremost in personal and communal spiritual experience, including highly affectively charged con-version experiences, speaking in tongues, the interpretation of tongues, miraculous healing, prophecy, prophetic visions, dreams, “words of knowledge,” ecstatic experiences of intimacy and partnership with God, and divinely given insight into the true meanings of scriptural passages, all in the context of joyful communal worship. Central for most Pentecostals is the concept of “Spirit baptism”: a specifi c personal moment in which the Holy Spirit enters a person in a new and unprecedented way (whether at the same time as water baptism or after), unlocking the above revela-tory and ecstatic possibilities, with the object of sending the baptized forth to proclaim the good news and share their baptism with others, often with a concern over the imminence of the Eschaton. Although terms like “Pentecostalism” and “charismatic Christianity” are diffi cult to defi ne with much precision—the large variety of views on key issues like speak-ing in tongues and Spirit baptism, to name just the two most signifi cant ones, render all characterizations merely approximate—theologically it can nevertheless be said that the sine qua non for this form of Christianity, particularly in distinction to the major streams of classical Protestantism, is the central role played by unmediated personal and communal experi-ence of the Holy Spirit.

It must be noted that charismatic Christianity tends overwhelmingly to see the testimonies of the Spirit and of the written Word not to be in confl ict, but as a constructive and interwoven unity. As Steven Land puts it—in what

Christian, that is, relatively little optimism about the degree to which regeneration and sanctifi cation take place in the life of “believers,” in contrast to a relatively “high” expectation of demonstrable sanctifi cation among, for example, Pentecostals. The terms “optimistic” versus “pessimistic,” when modifying “anthropology,” will carry a similar range of meaning, generally signifying “optimism” about Christians’ capacity to do good and refrain from evil as opposed to “pessimism” about the same. Finally, also when modifying “anthropology,” the terms “positive” and “negative” will carry a simi-lar range of connotations.



4

is perhaps the best discussion of the movement’s theological distinctives by a Pentecostal scholar to date5—speaking of his assertion of “the Holy Spirit as a starting point for a distinctive Pentecostal approach to theology and spirituality”:

Does this . . . mean that Pentecostals place the Spirit above the Word and thus elevate experience from the category of source for theology to that of norm? The answer is “Yes” and “No.” Yes, the Spirit is prior to the written Word of God, but the Spirit inspires, preserves and illu-mines that Word within the communion of those who are formed corrected, nurtured and equipped by that Word. Yes, the Spirit does not exist only to illumine Scripture and apply the benefi ts of salvation to the believer. . . . The signs and power of the Spirit are not an optional addition for a church that would engage principalitites and powers and suffer unto death. However . . . the person and work of the Spirit is [also] in salvifi c continuity with the person and work of Christ, [although] it is not exhausted therein.6

Pentecostal and charismatic theology and practice seek to bring the Spirit and the Word together, as distinct but mutually necessary elements in God’s interaction and communication with his people. Land quotes approvingly and more pointedly from James Jones in clarifying the relationship between Spirit and Word: “The Bible has no signifi cance when ripped from the con-text of the experience of the Spirit. Refusing to subsume the Spirit under the Word frees the Spirit to do more than confi rm the text and shut up”; “The Spirit does not contradict the Scriptures but his job is more than just repeating what we can fi nd by reading there.”7 Land and Jones’ concern is not with taking the Word very seriously, which they are happy to do, but with “subsum[ing] the Spirit under the Word,” which they are not. Spirit and Word should rather be seen at least as equal and mutually necessary partners, and indeed the Spirit is in some sense “prior to the written Word of God.” The quotations from Jones make clear that the Spirit here is meant in the specifi c (but not exclusive) sense of communicating more than just what is stated in the written Word, without contradicting the scriptures—the Spirit communicates to believers something in addition to “what we can fi nd by reading there.” There is thus an epistemological and revelatory ele-ment, albeit within the confi nes of agreement with scripture, in the Spirit’s distinctive and additional action, as well as an affective one. The means by

5 Steven J. Land, Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom, vol. 1, Journal of Pentecostal Theology Supplement Series (Sheffi eld: Sheffi eld Academic Press, 1993).

6 Ibid., 39.7 James W. Jones, The Spirit and the World (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1975), 98–9.

Quoted in Land, Passion, 40.



5

which the additional communication takes place is unmediated personal experience of the Holy Spirit.

Regardless of whether Land and Jones are correct to reorder Spirit and Word in this way, there is no doubt that Luther rejected any such reordering. For Luther, Word must always come fi rst:

Now when God sends forth his holy gospel he deals with us in a two-fold manner, fi rst outwardly, then inwardly. Outwardly he deals with us through the oral word of the gospel and through material signs, that is, baptism and the sacrament of the altar. Inwardly he deals with us through the Holy Spirit, faith, and other gifts. But whatever their measure or order the outward factors should and must precede. The inward experience follows and is effected by the outward. God has determined to give the inward to no one except through the out-ward . . . Observe carefully, my brother, this order, for everything depends on it.8

For Luther the Spirit cannot precede the external Word, and neither can the two work together in a mutual way. The external Word always precedes the internal testimony of the Spirit; the latter cannot take place other than as a consequence of the former. Put differently, the question at hand is not whether, in Land’s terms, Pentecostals “elevate experience from the category of source for theology to that of norm,” but whether experience can be a source for theology at all. Luther’s unequivocal answer is that it cannot. To be a “source” in any sense would be to come fi rst in the ordering of the external and the internal. It should be clear, therefore, what Luther would have made of Pentecostal and charismatic expressions of Christian faith, despite the fact that the Word maintains a hugely important place within them: Schwärmerei!

In Luther’s day, the Schwärmer “problem” was a relatively minor one—such groups, assuming they did not soon self-destruct, as the Müntzerites did, never succeeded in attaining much more than a fringe status in com-parison to the dominant Lutheran and Reformed schools. In the past 100 years, however, the situation has changed drastically. Since the inaugura-tion of the Pentecostal movement at Azusa Street in Los Angeles in 1906, no Christian movement has spread or enlarged as rapidly as charismatic Christianity. As Allan Anderson puts it, even if one is skeptical about some of the more startling statistics that have been put forward, “in less than a hundred years, Pentecostal, Charismatic and associated movements have become the largest numerical force in world Christianity after the Roman

8 Martin Luther, Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments, 1525, trans. Conrad Bergendorff, and Bernhard Erling, Luther’s Works 40 (Philadel-phia: Muhlenberg Press, 1958), 146.



6

Catholic Church and represent a quarter of all Christians.”9 Pentecostal and charismatic expressions of Christianity have become a major force in global Christianity, and their growth shows no sign of abating. Should Protestants in the Reformation tradition simply sweep these hundreds of millions aside as modern Schwärmer, as the magisterial Reformers would undoubtedly have seen them?

If instead, as I believe, this unprecedented development needs to be taken very seriously by Christian theologians—even those with the strictest of classical Reformation loyalties—then the immediate theological question to be faced is precisely the one raised by Luther in his arguments against Karlstadt and others 500 years ago: How can the charismatic claims to unmediated experience of and communication from God in addition to the written Word be reconciled with the human proclivity toward self-deception that is fundamental to the doctrines of justifi cation by faith and sola scrip-tura? This pneumatological question cuts to the heart of the theological divide between Reformation theology and the Pentecostal and charismatic mode of Christian expression. For all the variety of theological views among Pentecostals and charismatics on issues like speaking in tongues, the nature of Spirit baptism, the details of the connection between the outpouring of the Spirit and the proximity of the Eschaton, and issues of church polity, this Reformation question must rightly be posed of any form of Christianity that falls under the wide charismatic umbrella. It reaches to the heart of such theologies: the problem of the reliability of unmediated spiritual experience of any kind.

Given the centrality of the issue of Christian self-deception in more classi-cally Protestant critiques of charismatic theology—critiques that date back to the 1520s—it is remarkable how little the full force of this problem has been tackled directly by Pentecostal theologians. Even where, as in Land, the Spirit–Word relationship is addressed with a view to defense against Lutheran and Reformed critiques, and the problem of “discerning the spir-its” is taken into account, the question behind the Reformation defense of the priority of the Word is largely overlooked. For Luther, as we have seen, the reason for the priority of the Word is not just a general high regard for the Bible as the sole source of God’s revelation; it is for him specifi cally the divinely ordained bulwark and objective authority against the very great danger of self-deception in the believer.

There is some discussion of the question of “discerning the spirits” within Pentecostal theology, including in Land, but the full theological weight of the Reformation concern has yet to be taken adequately into account. Despite Land’s discussion of the need for a “disciplined discernment” between the true Spirit and false, fanatical spirits, the proposed means by which such discernment is to take place presupposes the idea that the true Spirit is,

9 Anderson, Pentecostalism, 1.



7

essentially, straightforwardly recognizable to the community by its fruits, with some help from scripture. Certain “evidences” are the sign of the true Spirit, such as the absence of harshness, “humility and humble, submis-sive searching of the Scriptures,” and the “holy lives of witnesses.”10 Land believes that the Spirit-fi lled are capable of distinguishing the true Spirit from the false ones: “Those who . . . ‘walk in the light’ . . . recognize dark-ness”; “the chief protection against [delusion by false spirits] is the Christian character yielded to and sustained by God”; “The Spirit-fi lled community is the best safeguard against deception of the world, fl esh or devil.”11 Although scripture is included in Land’s discussion as a helpful and necessary aid to discernment, the fundamental defense against the self-deception problem in discernment of the Spirit is nothing further than the presence and evidence of the Spirit in the believer and the believing community! Theologically, as far as the Lutheran critique is concerned, this defense amounts to a well-meaning tautology. From a classical Protestant point of view, the depth of the problem of sin and self-deception is severely underestimated. The force of Luther’s problem with the Schwärmer is precisely that subjective testi-mony and judgment of the individual or community is that which cannot be trusted, and it is ultimately to such testimony that Land primarily appeals. Treatments of spiritual discernment such as Land’s fail to engage with the core of the classical Protestant critique of “enthusiastic” Christianity.

Part of the blame for this failure to recognize the core material reason for the prioritization of Word over Spirit may lie on the part of classical Protestantism. So long has sola scriptura been central to the Protestant tra-dition, it has acquired an axiomatic status, such that the specifi c reasons for which it was formulated in the fi rst place are not always remembered: to guard against what were seen as human claims to God’s theological author-ity, whether in the form of the priority of church tradition and magisterial structure in the Roman Catholic Church or in the claims to direct divine communication among many of the radical reformers. Luther saw Pope and Anabaptist as two sides of the same coin: In the Smalcald Articles, Müntzer and the papacy are lumped into the same category, for both “boast that the Spirit has come into them without the preaching of the Scriptures.” Enthusiasm (Schwärmerei), indeed, “is the source, power, and might of all the heresies, even that of the papacy and Mohammed.”12

Another reason Pentecostal theologians have not yet adequately addressed the self-deception problem may be located in what is seen as the self-au-thenticating nature of Pentecostal experience. When you have been fi lled with Spirit in a mighty physical, emotional, and life-altering way, as is

10 Land, Passion, 162.11 Ibid., 162–4.12 The Smalcald Articles (1537), The Book of Concord (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,

2000), III, 8:3–6, 9 (pp. 322–3).



8

characteristic of most charismatic conversions and “Spirit baptisms,” or when you have watched an exorcism, or seen the lame become whole again in front of your eyes, the question of the divine source of the experience might well appear laughably academic (“If you had experienced what I have experienced, you would realize how absurd your ‘self-deception’ questions sound”). That is to say, appeal can be made, rightly or wrongly, to the self-authenticating character of such experience. Of course, by defi nition such an appeal can be neither proved nor disproved.

Or one might point to the sheer scale of the movement’s growth. According to this argument, it is undeniable that something is happening here, which hundreds of millions have experienced, and which so often has lasting and positive effects on people’s lives. As Land puts it, Pentecostal Christianity very often provokes an empirically undeniable “intensity of response”; the “joy and exuberance, the depth of sorrow and longing, the courageous wit-ness of millions of such persons cannot simply be written off as hysteria, mass psychosis or cheap escapism.”13 It could be argued along these lines, then, that the sheer scale and empirical verifi ability of the effect of the Pentecostal movement undermines some of the force of the classical Protestant criticism of unmediated spiritual experience.

Finally, it must be noted that Pentecostal theology has only very recently begun to have signifi cant representation in the academy (particularly in the form of journals and academic publishers). As an academic discipline, it is still in its infancy. This means that there is so much work for Pentecostal and charismatic scholars to do in this early stage that they may simply not have addressed the Reformation self-deception question yet.

Regardless of why the self-deception problem, which is really a problem about the proper relationship between pneumatology and anthropology, has not yet been adequately addressed by Pentecostal and charismatic theolo-gians, a renewed engagement with it in light of the rise of the Pentecostal movement is long overdue. The question must be asked in both directions: Lutheran theology must think about whether it’s classically narrow concep-tion of the action of the Spirit—through the verbum externum alone—might need to be expanded or modifi ed in light of the phenomenon of Pentecostal Christianity, but in such a way as to avoid jettisoning the full radicality of the doctrine of justifi cation by faith and its attendant negative assessment of the extent of the power of the human will to overcome sin. Pentecostal theology, on the other hand, must ask whether its highly optimistic (by Reformation standards), almost a priori, valuation of individual and communal spiritual experience as a source for theology and Christian life is consistent with the doctrine of justifi cation by faith most Pentecostals claim to espouse, and with the proclivity for human self-deception—including among God’s own people—to which the scriptures testify.

13 Land, Passion, 45.



9

Given that the two traditions are operating from such different theologi-cal starting points, the question of method is of paramount importance in attempting to bring the two into renewed and constructive interaction. Both sides essentially a priori reject the other’s epistemological starting point. For Luther, the testimony of personal inner experience is not only unreliable but also often testifi es to precisely the opposite of what is in fact true coram deo. The domain of inner feeling and experience for him as it relates to God is inextricably connected to the category of the conscience. As Randall Zachman puts it, for Luther,

the revelation of God in the Word comes under the form of the cross, for the truth that God reveals contradicts what can be known about God on the basis of what we see and feel: God’s mercy is given to sin-ners, God’s strength is revealed in weakness. . . . Luther is most interested in the contradiction between the testimony of the Word and the testimony of the conscience with regard to the nature and will of God.14

Luther’s theology of assurance entails the rejection of the testimony of the conscience, including what it sees and feels, for what the conscience experiences is capable of revealing only the opposite of what is in fact the case.

For Pentecostal theology, on the other hand, experience is hugely signifi -cant, in terms of both the characteristic life of the church in worship, and the basic distinctive premise of any theology properly called Pentecostal. According to Land, although experience can be taken too far—“to do [Pentecostal] theology is not to make experience the norm”; nevertheless, such theology must “recognize the epistemological priority of the Holy Spirit in prayerful receptivity.”15 For Land, the essence of Pentecostal the-ology involves the integration (rather than the balance) of what he calls the rational and the affective, of Word and Spirit. Pentecostal experience is “a means of understanding that moves from experience to testimony to doctrine to theology and back again in an ongoing dynamic. . . . The affec-tive integration that comprises the Pentecostal affections is the experiential center of a distinctive theology that, in less than a century, has impacted every

14 Randall C. Zachman, The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 40. My emphasis. See Hans Michael Müller, Erfahrung und Glaube bei Luther (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrich, 1929), 5–8, and so on, for helpful qualifi cations on the relationship between “what we see and feel” and “the testimony of the Word” in Luther. See also Sebastian Degkwitz, Wort Gottes und Erfahurung: Luthers Erfahrungsbegriff und seine Rezeption im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998).

15 Land, Passion, 38.



10

continent and every Christian denomination.”16 Despite Land’s insistence here and above on integration between the rational and the affective rather than the domination of the former by the latter, Pentecostal theology’s dis-tinctive trait is clearly and deliberately identifi ed as an essentially uncriti-cal assimilation of affective spiritual experience into the foundation of the theological enterprise. For Luther, the testimony of inner experience is to be distrusted in theology; for Land, it is woven into (if not reducible to) theology’s epistemological starting point, and theology that does not take it strongly into account is not theology at all. The diffi culties involved in bringing these two ships passing in the night into meaningful theological interaction are manifold.

The method of approach put forward here is to discuss the issues at hand in light of the thought and praxis of a theologian and Christian leader whom, as it were, both sides could call their own—someone very much aware of both the weight of the problem of self-deception in the Lutheran sense and the potential for sheer self-authenticating reality and affective power in charismatic spiritual experience, someone who engaged in exten-sive theological refl ection about both issues, and someone who could and did critique both Lutheran and charismatic theology “from within.” Such an individual, I will argue, was Lutheran pastor and faith-healer Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt.17

Introducing Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt

Few signifi cant contributors to the development of modern theology have been as overlooked and underrepresented in subsequent scholarship, partic-ularly in the anglophone world, as Schwabian preacher Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt. Following in the footsteps of his father, Johann Christoph Blumhardt (1805–80), Christoph spent most of his adult life preaching a provocative and dynamic message about the Kingdom of God to all who would listen. From his native Württemberg, where he served as “house father” for the Christian retreat center founded by his father at Bad Boll in 1852, Christoph Blumhardt’s theology and preaching had a far-reach-ing infl uence on the generation of theologians who immediately succeeded him, and on Karl Barth in particular. Barth, Eduard Thurneysen, Hermann Kutter, and Leonhard Ragaz, all associated with the Swiss Religious Socialist movement in the years surrounding the First World War, saw Blumhardt’s message and his unprecedented step (for a clergyman) of joining the Social

16 Ibid., 46.17 It should be noted at the outset that the connection this study identifi es between Blum-

hardt’s thought and Lutheran and charismatic theologies, respectively, is primarily material-theological rather than genetic or historical.



11

Democratic Party in 1899 as playing a decisive role in their respective theo-logies and their involvement with Socialism. According to Barth’s biogra-pher, Eberhard Busch, Barth’s contact with the message of the Blumhardts was one of the three decisive factors in the development of his new theologi-cal starting point following his break with liberalism during the First World War.18 Later German theologians, such as Moltmann and Tillich, have also praised his theology and acknowledged its infl uence.19 Christoph Blumhardt was also the only well-known German preacher to resist the nationalistic “Spirit of August” in 1914, and to speak out openly against the First World War from the very beginning.

Despite the younger Blumhardt’s pioneering relationship with Socialism, his theological infl uence on Barth and others, and his unique, theologi-cally motivated immunity to the German war fever in 1914, scholars in the last few decades have tended to overlook him. For example, in the last fi fty years, just seven scholarly monographs on Christoph Blumhardt have appeared, including only two in English.20 One reason for this dearth of scholarly interest may be that Blumhardt was not a systematic theologian: Although trained in theology at Tübingen, Christoph always understood himself as a preacher and a pastor, not a theologian. As a result, his writings contain almost no systematic theological refl ection whatsoever. His highly original theological views must instead be gleaned from the many letters and sermons that have survived him.

Another reason he has been underrepresented may have to do with the heavily charismatic and eschatological—at times millenarian—nature of his

18 Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth and the Pietists: The Young Karl Barth’s Critique of Pie-tism and Its Response, trans. Daniel W. Bloesch (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 26. For the two main studies of the relationship between Barth and the Blumhardts, see Joachim Berger, Die Verwurzelung des theologischen Denkens Karl Barths in dem Kerygma der beiden Blumhardts vom Reiche Gottes (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Berlin, 1956); and Christian Collins Winn, “Jesus is Victor!” The Signifi -cance of the Blumhardts for the Theology of Karl Barth (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2009).

19 Moltmann has explained Blumhardt’s infl uence on his thought quite bluntly: “My ‘the-ology of hope’ has two roots: Christoph Blumhardt and Ernst Bloch” (Jürgen Moltmann, “The Hope for the Kingdom of God and Signs of Hope in the World: The Relevance of Blumhardt’s Theology Today,” Pneuma 26, no. 1 (2004), 4; see also Christian Collins Winn and Peter Heltzel, “‘Before Bloch There Was Blumhardt’: A Thesis on the Origins of the Theology of Hope,” Scottish Journal of Theology 62, no. 1 (2009): 26–39). Paul Tillich credited “the experience and insight of people like the Blumhardts” with opening up “a new understanding of the relation of church and society . . . in an unheard-of way in most of the European churches” (Paul Tillich, Per-spectives on 19th and 20th Century Protestant Theology (London: SCM Press, 1967), 236).

20 See Bibliography. Only three of these works focus exclusively on the younger Blum-hardt’s thought; the rest cover his father as well.



12

theology. Like his father, Blumhardt was well known not just as a preacher but also as a faith-healer and an exorcist. Even Barth, in later years, found this aspect of the Blumhardts’ ministry a bit embarrassing.21

Additionally, Christoph Blumhardt has been ignored in the anglophone theological world for a purely practical reason: The vast majority of his writings, as well as most of the secondary literature, have not been translated from the original German. Two brief sermon collections exist in English, as well as an equally brief “reader” and a few collections of devotional writings,22 but these translated works have all been edited and published primarily with a lay audience in mind. Indeed, most do not give dates or sources for the sermons and devotional snippets they include. It is, therefore, as yet impossible to undertake serious academic study of the theology of Christoph Blumhardt, or of that of his father Johann Christoph,23 without extensive access to the German-language materials.24 In practice, probably the main academic source in English for the theology of the Blumhardts remains the various incidental treatments by Karl Barth in his Church Dogmatics and elsewhere.25

21 While full of praise for the Blumhardts on a theological level, Barth hints that one “exorcism,” in particular, could be explained perhaps more accurately “in terms of mythology or medicine.” See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV: The Doctrine of Rec-onciliation, Part 3.1, trans. G. W. Bromiley (London: T & T Clark International, 2004), 171.

22 Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt, Action in Waiting (Farmington, PA: Plough Publishing House, 1998); Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt, Christoph Blumhardt and His Message (Rifton, NY: Plough Publishing, 1963); Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt, and Johann Christoph Blumhardt, Thy Kingdom Come: A Blumhardt Reader (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980); Johann Christoph Blumhardt and Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt, Thoughts About Children (Rifton, NY: Plough Publishing, 1980); Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt, Lift Thine Eyes: Evening Prayers for Every Day of the Year (Rifton, NY: Plough Publishing, 1998); Johann Christoph Blumhardt and Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt, Now Is Eternity: Comfort and Wisdom for Diffi cult Hours (Rifton, NY: Plough Publishing, 2000).

23 Both Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt and his father, Johann Christoph Blumhardt, were known to their friends and contemporaries as “Christoph.” When it is necessary to distinguish between the two Blumhardts, I will follow convention in Blumhardt studies and refer to the younger as “Christoph” and the elder as “Johann Christoph.”

24 Fortunately, there are several translation projects currently underway that aim to help rectify this problem.

25 See in particular Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II: The Doctrine of God, Part 1, trans. T. H. L. Parker et al. (London: T & T Clark International, 2004), 633–8; Barth, CD IV 3.1, 168–71; Karl Barth, “Blumhardt,” in Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Cen-tury: Its Background and History (London: SCM Press, 1972); Karl Barth, “Afterword,” in Action in Waiting (Rifton, NY: Plough Publishing Company, 1969), 217–22; and Karl Barth, “Past and Future: Friedrich Naumann and Christoph Blumhardt,” in The Beginnings of Dialectic Theology, Vol. 1, ed. James M. Robinson (Richmond, VA: John



13

One of the goals of this study, therefore, is to help restore the remarkable message of Christoph Blumhardt to its rightful signifi cance within the mod-ern theological tradition, including in anglophone theology. The ultimate aim will be to muster this theology’s valuable and untapped resources in the service of our contemporary pneumatological question.

Blumhardt in Context

Before we can begin our study of Blumhardt’s pneumatology proper, several further introductory matters require attention. First, it is important to place Blumhardt within his own Württemberg Pietist tradition and context, par-ticularly in relation to his strongest theological infl uence, his father Johann Christoph. The elder Blumhardt’s experiences of revival and exorcism in the 1840s served as the fundamental groundwork for and galvanizing factor behind both Blumhardts’ basic theological Anschauung. The continuities between the two Blumhardts will be addressed, but special emphasis must be placed on the theological discontinuities between the two. It is through an understanding of the younger Blumhardt’s disagreements with and devel-opments beyond his father that the decision to focus on Christoph’s theol-ogy and pneumatology will be justifi ed, though all the while acknowledging the decisive role played by Johann Christoph’s theology and experiences in his son and successor’s theological development. Next, we will address the question of method in this study, including the appropriateness of framing Christoph’s as a middle fi gure between Lutheran and Pentecostal theology, and the way the nature of Blumhardt’s theology and writings necessitates a certain combination or blending of historical and “systematic” or dogmatic analysis. The methodological considerations behind the decision to focus primarily, though not exclusively, on the 1888–96 period in Blumhardt’s life will also be elucidated. Finally, I will anticipate the structure and content of the book on a chapter-by-chapter basis.

Johann Christoph Blumhardt and the Revival in Möttlingen

Any discussion of Blumhardtian theology and its background must begin with the dramatic events that took place during Johann Christoph Blumhardt’s ministry in the Schwabian village of Möttlingen, on the outskirts of the Black Forest, in the early 1840s. The elder Blumhardt’s infl uential theologi-cal breakthrough took place not as the result of study, or of encounter with a paradigm-shifting theological work, or of a relationship with a colleague,

Knox Press, 1968). For a full account of Barth’s writings on the Blumhardts, see Collins Winn, Signifi cance.



14

but as a consequence of an experience of what he understood to be a super-natural event: the exorcising of a demonic presence from a young woman in his congregation.

Johann Christoph’s experience resulted in a series of theological convic-tions that were later extended, developed, and decisively reconceived by his son Christoph. They include a new confi dence in the living, contemporary power of God over the forces of evil and human frailty26; the belief that the revelation and actualization of this power serve both as a sign of the imminent eschatological fulfi llment of the Kingdom of God on earth, and as the key element for the church to appropriate in its mission of paving the way for that fulfi llment; the conviction that a mighty “new” outpouring of the Spirit by God is both necessary and near because the Spirit has been in some vital sense lacking or withheld from the contemporary church27; and a trust that God had once and would continue to confi rm this power over all obstacles, and guide the church on its eschatological path, by means of direct communication of his presence, authority, and will to his people by the Holy Spirit.28 Both Johann Christoph and Christoph Blumhardt believed these elements to have been communicated and ratifi ed by God in his libera-tion of the young villager from her bondage to spiritual forces.

The elder Blumhardt was raised in the tradition of Württemberg Pietism, received his theological and pastoral training at Tübingen, and spent seven years working as a teacher at the Basel Missions Institute, a Pietist strong-hold with close ties to Württemberg.29 Until he received the call to his fi rst pastorship at Möttlingen in 1838, Blumhardt was largely indistinguishable from many other mainstream Pietist ministers in the region, apart from having achieved signifi cant pastoral success during his curacy at Iptingen in bringing local separatists back into the village congregation. The turn-ing point in his theological development began in the Autumn of 1841, when he came in contact with a young woman in his congregation who

26 Friedrich Zündel, Johann Christoph Blumhardt: Zeuge der Siegesmacht Jesu über Krankheit und Dämonie (Gießen and Basel: Brunnen Verlag, 1962), 109–10.

27 Johann Christoph Blumhardt, Johann Christoph Blumhardt: Ein Brevier (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 126; Johann Christoph Blumhardt, Verkündigung, vol. II, Ausgewählte Schriften in Drei Bänden (Giessen: Brunnen Verlag, 1991), 36–7.

28 Johann Christoph Blumhardt, Blätter aus Bad Boll. Erster Band: Juli bis Dezember 1873, Januar bis Juni 1874, vol. II.1, Gesammelte Werke: Schriften, Verkündigung, Briefe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968), 1874, No. 15, 118–19; Blum-hardt, AS II, 81.

29 Two particularly good biographies of Johann Christoph Blumhardt are available: the popular account written by his friend, Zündel, Blumhardt, which has gone through over twenty printings; and Dieter Ising’s recent study, Dieter Ising, Johann Christoph Blumhardt, Life and Work: A New Biography, trans. Monty Ledford (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009). The overview here is based in signifi cant part on their accounts.



15

reported seeing visions of spirits in her room at night, and who was known from time to time to suffer strange fi ts. Initially skeptical, Blumhardt came over time to believe that this woman, by the name of Gottliebin Dittus, was possessed by demons. After two years of prayer and counseling with the woman and with the help of some of the local church leaders—during which time he and his colleagues reported the occurrence of all kinds of extraordinary events—a night came when Blumhardt concluded that the demons had been driven out of her at last. In the fi nal stages, the demon seemed to leave Gottliebin and enter her sister Katharina. As the fi nal spirit was leaving Katharina, it purportedly cried out, “Jesus ist Sieger!” [Jesus is Victor], before leaving for good.30 After this climactic evening, Gottliebin’s attacks soon subsided.

News of the “exorcism” spread quickly through the region, sparking a revival characterized in part by physical healings. Within weeks, thou-sands of pilgrims had come through Möttlingen, most of them looking to Pastor Blumhardt for prayer and healing. The revival was referred to as a “Bußbewegung” [repentance movement],31 on account of the fact that most conversions and healings that were reported followed upon some kind of confession of hidden sin to Blumhardt.32 A few years later, his new fame as a preacher, healer, and exorcist began to prove too great a strain on the resources of the village, and the church authorities became involved through the complaints of neighboring pastors that large numbers of their fl ock would make the trip to Möttlingen each Sunday instead of to their local church. In response, Blumhardt bought an old bath house complex in Bad Boll, and moved there with his family. The idea was to create a retreat center where those who sought him out could come with their spiritual and physical troubles, without disturbing the pastoral equilibrium of the Württemberg state church. He remained in Bad Boll, preaching and minis-tering to the many who came seeking his help, until his death in 1880. A few years before his death, Johann Christoph passed the ministry and leadership of the Boll house on to his son, Christoph.

30 For the full account, see the report Johann Christoph Blumhardt later submitted to church authorities: Johann Christoph Blumhardt, Blumhardts Kampf: Die Krankheits- und Heilungsgeschichte der Gottliebin Dittus in Möttlingen (St. Goar: Reichl Verlag, 2003), translated into English as Blumhardt’s Battle: A Confl ict with Satan, trans. Frank S. Boshold (New York: Thomas E. Lowe, Ltd., 1970). See also Ising, Blumhardt, 162–88.

31 Zündel, Blumhardt, 135. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German are my own.

32 According to Dieter Ising, a “principle from the fi rst days of the awakening” was the premise that, “If someone truly desires to fi nd peace, confession in his own private chamber is often not enough. It is only when the confession has been made to another person—normally the pastor—that fundamental change occurs in soul and, often, in body also.” See Ising, Blumhardt, 194.



16

Why was this experience of exorcism and revival, encapsulated in his life-long motto “Jesus is Victor!,” so decisive for Blumhardt, both biographically and theologically—why does Friedrich Zündel call it “the turning point in his life”?33 Johann Christoph interpreted the dramatic fi nale to the episode as evidence that Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit, was still “alive” and at work in the world in a supernatural and also triumphant way, primarily as the agent of exorcisms and physical and spiritual healings. So profound was the effect of the Möttlingen experience on Blumhardt that he reoriented his theology around this revelation about Christ’s ongoing power in the world through the Holy Spirit. For Blumhardt, the words “Jesus is Victor!” signifi ed a new “ruling conviction . . . that Jesus Christ has the same power today to overcome the ills of men that he had both before and after his death in New Testament times”34—a power with which the Christian church had lost touch. As Blumhardt put it in a letter to his friend and Möttlingen predecessor C. G. Barth, “only now have I truly learned what we have in [Jesus].”35 The “victory” in which Blumhardt believed can be characterized as the present as well as imminent triumph of Jesus over the forces of evil, and the restoration by his power of all that is broken in the world. According to Friedrich Zündel,

Blumhardt recognized that in the current state of the Kingdom of God, the most urgent question is the question of power—who should have the power, the forces of spiritual darkness or the Savior?—that the Lord’s means for being victorious in this battle [Kampf] will be the faith of his church, and that only this sort of ongoing victory can pre-pare for a coming of the Lord.36

Blumhardt’s experience thus contained an eschatological element as well: The ongoing mediation through the church of Jesus Christ’s “victory” over the powers arrayed against his Kingdom is directly connected to his immi-nent eschatological return.37

Despite the inarguably massive and determining infl uence the Möttlingen events and revival had on Blumhardt, Frank Macchia has raised the impor-tant question of the degree to which Johann’s revelation that “Jesus is Victor” contained any material theological content that was not already present in Blumhardt’s thought, and in various strands of Württemberg

33 Zündel, Blumhardt, 109.34 J. D. Smart, The Divided Mind of Modern Theology: Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann

1908–1933 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967), 58.35 Quoted in Zündel, Blumhardt, 116.36 Ibid., 125.37 For a full theological explication of the elder Blumhardt’s “Jesus is Victor” theology,

see Gerhard Sauter, Die Theologie des Reiches Gottes beim älteren und jüngeren Blum-hardt (Zürich-Stuttgart: Zwingli Verlag, 1962), 16–45.



17

Pietism in general, prior to the experience with Gottliebin. Although “the battle clarifi ed for Johann the helplessness of those who suffer as intensely as Gottliebin had and the suffi ciency of Christ as Victor to heal” and that “the power of darkness (particularly as manifested through the occult) was a widespread cause of human bondage” and despite the fact that through the experience Blumhardt became “convinced . . . that the power of the Holy Spirit evident in the New Testament church was lacking in his day and that a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit was necessary to restore it,” nevertheless, “most of the above stated themes were present in Blumhardt’s pietistic envi-ronment[,] . . . in Blumhardt and among many of his contemporaries . . . before the battle took place.” The signifi cance of the “Kampf” [battle or fi ght] for Blumhardt’s theological development is instead to be found in “the renewed force and clarity he gave to his ideas and the unique ways in which he com-bined them together.”38 An understanding of both Blumhardts’ Pietist back-ground is important for elucidating the context for, and originality of, the pneumatology and anthropological pessimism Christoph Blumhardt was to develop in the decades following his father’s death.

Württemberg Pietism

Not unlike the Pentecostal and charismatic movement, Pietism is perhaps more easily defi ned historically, by the tracing of lines of personal and theo-logical infl uence, than through a clear and stable defi nition of its determi-native characteristics. In Württemberg as elsewhere, some “pietists” stayed within the local church; others were strongly separatistic; some saw them-selves as implementing an orthodox revival of mainstream Protestantism by reminding Christians of the importance of the “heart,” not just the head, in the working out of the Gospel, while others rejected traditional Protestantism altogether, considering themselves the only true people of God; eschatological convictions were central for many groups, while others did not bother themselves about the Second Coming. Under the broadest defi nition, associated with Martin Brecht, Pietism was “a transnational and transconfessional phenomenon beginning in a post-Reformation crisis of piety rooted in the diffi culties the Reformation churches experienced in real-izing Christian life and activity.”39 That is to say, Pietism existed wherever the question of Christian praxis was raised over and against the strict con-fessionalism that characterized Protestant orthodoxy after the Reformation.

38 Frank D. Macchia, Spirituality and Social Liberation: The Message of the Blumhardts in the Light of Wuerttemberg Pietism (London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc, 1993), 70–1. See also Martin Stober, Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt d.J.: zwischen Pietismus und Sozialismus (Giessen: Brunnen Verlag, 1998), 232–5.

39 Carter Lindberg, “Introduction,” in The Pietist Theologians: An Introduction to Theo-logy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Carter Lindberg (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 3.



18

More narrowly, Pietism has been seen as a renewal movement within (and later, without) the mainline Protestant denominations associated fi rst and foremost with German Lutheran Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), and characterized by its focus on small group lay Bible study, and “the chilias-tic hope for ‘better times’.”40 Through the infl uence of Moravian Pietism on John Wesley, a form of this movement spread beyond German-speaking lands, transforming into Methodism and ultimately paving the way for both contemporary evangelicalism and Pentecostalism.41

However one defi nes “Pietism,” various branches of this movement made strong inroads in the Württemberg region of southern Germany, becoming a major cultural force in the area by the early eighteenth century until at least the early twentieth century.42 Among the most famous and infl uen-tial Pietists were Württemberg teacher and biblical scholar Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752), who compiled one of the most important early critical editions of the New Testament, and who famously used a numerological interpretation of the Revelation of John to predict the return of Christ on June 18, 1836,43 and speculative theologian Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702–82), traces of whose mystical and theosophical ruminations can be found in the Blumhardts’ understanding of the cosmic scope of the Kingdom, and in their longing for a new outpouring of the Spirit.44

The question of the Blumhardts’ theological relationship to their Württemberg Pietist context and background has been a signifi cant theme in Blumhardt scholarship.45 The deeply eschatological outlook of both

40 Ibid., 2. This view of Pietism is associated primarily with Johannes Wallman.41 On the relationship between Methodism and Pentecostalism, see Donald W. Dayton,

Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1987), 35–61.

42 Lehmann’s astonishing account of the decline of Württemberg Pietism in the late nine-teenth and early twentieth century through its cultural bondage to an obsolete politics is a penetrating witness to the power of sociocultural forces in shaping theology. See Hartmut Lehmann, Pietismus und weltliche Ordnung in Württemberg vom 17. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1969), 349–59.

43 For discussion of Bengel in the context of Württemberg Pietism, see ibid., 69–74; Martin Brecht, “Der württembergische Pietismus,” in Der Pietismus im achtzehnten Jahrhun-dert, ed. Martin Brecht, and Klaus Depperman, Geschichte des Pietismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 251–9; and Macchia, Spirituality, 7–11.

44 See ibid., 18, 22, 82–4. For a general discussion of Oetinger, see Brecht, “Pietismus,” 269–78; and Martin Weyer-Menkhoff, “Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702–1782),” in The Pietist Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Seventeenth and Eight-eenth Centuries, ed. Carter Lindberg (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 239–55.

45 See in particular Macchia, Spirituality; and Friedhelm Groth, “Chiliasmus und Apoka-tastasishoffnung in der Reich-Gottes-Verkündigung der beiden Blumhardts,” Pietismus und Neuzeit 9 (1983): 56–116. “Württemberg Pietism” is a broad term that covers a variety of different Christian expressions in the region, including the offi cially sanc-tioned separatists at Korntal. Perhaps the dominant version, with which the Blumhardts



19

father and son is consistent with this tradition: As Macchia puts it, “the single most important impulse in the spirituality of nineteenth-century Württemberg Pietism was the conviction that the Christian must live in the light of the coming Kingdom of God.”46 Even as Johann Christoph Blumhardt departed in signifi cant ways from the distinct Württemberg eschatological tradition “from Bengel to M. Hahn,” his theology cannot be understood apart from his “taking up in a modifi ed way” of their chili-astic and apokatastasis-focused themes.47 The universalist eschatological soteriology emphatically proclaimed by the younger Blumhardt is the fruit of a long-developing interest in the transformation and restoration of the whole cosmos (the “apokatastasis panton”) among many Pietists in the region.48

Two further Pietist themes of special relevance to our study are the empha-sis on personal holiness and the importance of “unmediated experience” of God. For Bengel, according to Lehmann, “the most important aim of the true Christian” is “personal sanctifi cation.” Other concerns, including the relationship between the Christian and the world, are chiliastically relativ-ized.49 In his early years as a curate, as we shall see, the younger Blumhardt shared this stress on the importance of demonstrable sanctifi cation in the Christian life and the correspondingly high view of anthropological trans-formation in conversion it implies. Emphasis on personal growth in holiness was one of the hallmarks of German Pietism.50 It is on this front, more than any other, that Christoph Blumhardt eventually parts ways with his Pietist roots, starting in 1888.

The second major Pietist theme for our purposes is “unmediated experi-ences” [unmittelbaren Erfahrungen] of the Spirit.51 “Experience” of this kind tended to be quite important in Württemberg Pietism, despite the notable counterinfl uence of Bengel.52 Unmediated “Erlebnis” [experience] is one of the most important theological and homiletical categories for the younger Blumhardt throughout his career, and it is a theme largely carried over from his Pietist context.53 This important theological locus and its Pietist heritage

were primarily associated, worked from within the state church, was particularly infl u-enced by Bengel, and in the nineteenth century had close ties to the Basel Mission.

46 Macchia, Spirituality, 7.47 Groth, “Chiliasmus,” 95–6.48 See Macchia, Spirituality, 83; Sauter, Blumhardt, 262–3, n. 60; and Groth,

“Chiliasmus.”49 Lehmann, Pietismus, 74–5.50 Peter C. Erb, “Introduction,” in Pietists: Selected Writings, ed. Peter C. Erb (New York:

Paulist Press, 1983), 3.51 Lehmann, Pietismus, 16.52 Brecht, “Pietismus,” 251; Macchia, Spirituality, 9.53 Blumhardt himself does not distinguish theologically between “Erlebnis” and

“Erfahrung.” For a brief discussion of the difference between the two terms as they



20

will be explored more extensively in Chapter 4. Because of its importance for our study, however, a few notes as to what it does and does not signify are in order here, in anticipation of the more detailed discussion in the later chapter. The description of this kind of religious experience as “unmedi-ated” is taken most directly both from Blumhardt’s own usage and from the Lehmann quotation above.54 Three distinct features of such “unmedi-ated experience” can be discerned in the discussions in the Pietist secondary literature, as well as in Blumhardt: (1) “unmediated” in the sense of not necessarily directly mediated by scripture, that is, as opposed to a Lutheran concept of pneumatological “mediation” through the verbum externum; (2) “unmediated” understood in contrast to a sort of rational “mediation” through theological doctrine and confession, which makes the mistake of emphasizing the head instead of the true seat of religion, the “heart”; and (3) “unmediated” in the sense of a “felt” directness in the inner affective life of the individual, that is, as a descriptor of the feeling of the experience itself rather than that with which it contrasts. These features are closely related and appear to have become confusingly interwoven in the various uses of the term. In the fi rst two senses, “unmediated” means primarily “not mediated according to certain usual understandings of mediation”; in the third sense, it is more general and attempts to describe an inner directness understood as opposed to any form of “outward” mediation at all.55

This study addresses the problem of this complexity of use and mean-ing by interpreting such experience in light of Martin Luther’s analysis of pneumatological “enthusiasm,” above all as expressed in his debates with Andreas von Karlstadt. In Luther’s theological analysis, all three fea-tures of “unmediated” experience, properly understood, are interwoven subsets of the broader theological category of Schwärmerei. Any priority placed on the “heart” on its own terms or on “felt” directness of feeling has already failed to recognize the anthropological problem—the power of sin and self-deception—which is the primary reason for his criterion of the Word in the fi rst place. In his view, as soon as the verbum exter-num criterion in its strict sense has been compromised, the rest is sure to

have been understood in the German academic theological tradition, see Chapter 4, Note 1.

54 For references in Blumhardt, see Chapter 4, Note 8. For a variety of closely related descriptions of what is distinctive in Pietist “experience”—for example, as “inward feelings,” “subjective experience,” “heart religion” as opposed to “head religion,” “inward experience” that is “directly felt,” and so on—see the references to Track, Erb, Lindberg, Wesley, Knox, and Weigelt on pages 88–9.

55 The three “senses” in which “unmediated” and related terms are used, described here, are not to be confused with the different “types” of such experience discussed in Chap-ter 4. The “senses” refer to the general theological category, while the “types” are different genres of direct “experience,” such as revelatory guidance from God, “New Birth,” or miraculous healing.



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follow, and the only way to guard against all three is the criterion of the Word.56

Blumhardt, Father and Son: Continuity and Discontinuity

Every account of Christoph Blumhardt’s theology has to engage with the question of continuity and discontinuity with Johann Christoph Blumhardt’s thought. Is Christoph’s message primarily a further development and explo-ration of his father’s “Jesus is Victor” theology,57 or does it represent some-thing qualitatively new, grounded in a fundamental rejection of major aspects of his father’s views? There is no “correct” answer to this question. On the one hand, the younger Blumhardt’s theology is inconceivable apart from the Kingdom theology and expectation of a new outpouring of the Spirit that characterized his father’s thought; on the other hand, Christoph himself explains the inauguration of his most theologically creative phase in 1888, which paved the way for his well-known and prophetic political involvement, in terms of contrast with his father’s thought, not continuity. Whether a given study of the Blumhardts’ theologies highlights their simi-larities or their differences is fi nally determined by what question is being asked of their theology.

This study places greater emphasis on Blumhardt’s discontinuity with his father than his continuity. The main reason for this emphasis derives from the larger pneumatological question. The younger Blumhardt’s pneumatol-ogy is useful for addressing the impasse between Lutheran and Pentecostal views of the Spirit precisely because of the pessimistic anthropology he does not share with his father.

It is helpful at this point to look at the continuity/discontinuity question in more specifi c terms: Where are Johann Christoph and Christoph the same and where do they differ on our core theological themes of eschatol-ogy, “experience” of the Spirit, and anthropology? This question will be addressed at different points over the course of our discussions of these three themes in Christoph’s thought in Chapters 2, 3, and 4. For now, it is enough to sketch his father’s general views, and briefl y to indicate the thrust of their relation to Christoph’s mature theology.

Broadly speaking, Johann Christoph Blumhardt’s eschatology can be characterized as “underrealized.” On the subject of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the world in relation to the contemporary mission of the Christian church, the elder Blumhardt’s thought is thoroughly future oriented. The underside of this future orientation is a strong conviction of the spirit-ual poverty of the church in his day. In the aftermath of the Möttlingen experiences, he describes how much “more clearly than before I perceive

56 See the analysis of Luther’s treatise Against the Heavenly Prophets in Chapter 7.57 This view is most clearly articulated in Sauter. See Sauter, Blumhardt, 329.



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Christianity’s corruption and affl iction.”58 Both the reason for and the symp-tom of this “poverty” is that “the Holy Spirit was once present in person but is no longer, and that, according to the promises, he should be present with all his gifts and powers.”59 The Spirit is not absent in an absolute sense, but has truly been “withdrawn” in its Pentecostal role as empowerer and giver of spiritual gifts.60 The elder Blumhardt’s greatest hope is for a “new outpouring of the Holy Spirit” that will inaugurate the Eschaton in some sense.61 Importantly, he expected this “outpouring” to take place before his death, and it is in response to the disappointment of that hope that his son Christoph developed a more complex, but equally “underreal-ized,” eschatological framework. The development of this framework in light of the disappointment of Johann Christoph’s death is the primary subject of Chapter 3. As we shall see, Johann Christoph did not extend his belief in the spiritual “poverty” of the contemporary church quite as far as Christoph did, especially on the subject of sanctifi cation-transformation in believers.

The elder Blumhardt’s views on “unmediated experience” are not very dif-ferent from his son’s views. Zündel observes that the foundation for Johann Christoph’s famous ministry is three specifi c “great life experiences”—the exorcism, the revival that followed it, and the healing miracles. These expe-riences “were for Blumhardt himself a communication from God bordering on a revelation—they drowned out everything else for him, establishing him in an almost prophetic manner.”62 Both Johann Christoph and Christoph characterize the elder Blumhardt’s ministry not so much as a theological message as a witness to “new experiences.”63 Although there is less of the explicit exposition of the importance of “Erlebnis” for the Kingdom in the elder Blumhardt that is found in the younger, it is implied both in his under-standing of the “Jesus is Victor” message and in the longing for a decisive new “outpouring of the Spirit.” Although what we shall call “negative” experience of God, in suffering and judgment, is not elevated in Johann Christoph to the central theological status it receives in Christoph’s “ster-bet” theology, it is present to a certain degree in the confessional character of the Möttlingen “repentance movement.”

58 Blumhardt, Brevier, 129–30. See also his sermon, “The poverty of the Christian church,” in Blumhardt, AS II, 105–22.

59 Blumhardt, Brevier, 130.60 Ibid., 126. See also Johann Christoph Blumhardt, Blätter aus Bad Boll. Dritter Band:

Juli bis Dezember 1875, Januar bis Juni 1876, vol. II.3, Gesammelte Werke: Schriften, Verkündigung, Briefe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969), 1875, No. 29–30, 230–2, 238–40, 246–8.

61 See Groth, “Chiliasmus,” 75–82.62 Zündel, Blumhardt, 160.63 Blumhardt, Brevier, 137; Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt, Damit Gott kommt:

“Gedanken aus dem Reich Gottes” (Giessen/Basel: Brunnen Verlag, 1992), 34.



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The greatest point of theological difference between the elder and the younger Blumhardt, I will argue, is in their assessments of human nature. Although by all accounts Johann Christoph, in his pastoral ministry, was full of love and grace for Christians in their struggles,64 he nevertheless affi rmed a theology of regeneration that is unquestionably more optimistic about sanctifi cation in the believer than his son’s Cross-oriented theology. It is enough of a difference, in fact, to make Christoph a far more appropriate dialogue partner for the impasse between Lutheran and charismatic pneu-matologies than his father.

Important aspects of Christoph Blumhardt’s background in Württemberg Pietism and the infl uence of his father’s theology and ministry will be explored at more length in the chapters that follow, where appropriate. We turn now from this sketch of Blumhardt’s context to certain methodological questions raised by the nature of our study.

Methodological Considerations

The aim of this study, as I have stated, is to explore pneumatology beyond the fundamental impasse between classical Protestant and contemporary charismatic and Pentecostal conceptions of the locus of the Holy Spirit’s activity in the lives of believers through the resources of the theology of Christoph Blumhardt, which provides a place for both personal unmedi-ated experience of the Spirit and a radically Protestant anthropological pes-simism. In order to locate Blumhardt’s pneumatology between these two camps, a detailed study of his theology is in order, above all as he expressed it during the most Cross-oriented period in his preaching and writing, between 1888 and 1896.

Between Wittenberg and Azusa Street

Christoph Blumhardt is identifi ed here as a theologically useful middle fi gure between classical Lutheran and contemporary charismatic and Pentecostal theologies. In framing his theology in this way, it is important to under-score that the primary connection between Blumhardt and these theological positions is understood to be theological and dogmatic rather than histori-cal or genetic. For an ordained Lutheran minister, Blumhardt demonstrates remarkably little knowledge of Luther’s writings and theology, and would most likely have been quite unaware of the close connections between his own thought and Luther’s that will become clear over the course of our study. Blumhardt’s historical relationship to twentieth-century Pentecostal

64 See, for example, Zündel’s account of his ministry in Iptingen, Zündel, Blumhardt, 42–79.



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and charismatic movements and their nineteenth-century precursors is much more complex,65 but in any case the lines of historical continuity and infl u-ence, such as they are, are not by themselves adequate fully to justify our designation of Blumhardt as a “charismatic” and even “proto-Pentecostal” fi gure. The argument here, rather, is that Blumhardt’s pneumatology shares fundamentally and demonstrably one of the most important—arguably the most important—dogmatic features of charismatic and Pentecostal theology in its contrast with classical Reformation, and especially Lutheran, theology. Namely, dogmatically speaking, Blumhardt was what Luther, according to the clear categories he established in his rejection of Karlstadt and others, called a Schwärmer. In this formulation, the degree to which Blumhardt can serve as a mediating fi gure between Luther and Pentecostalism, therefore, depends on a theological judgment about what is most distinctive in char-ismatic and Pentecostal theology and practice in relation to other Christian theologies.

This question of a “Pentecostal distinctive” has shaped recent academic discussion among Pentecostal and charismatic theologians more than any other. It is widely agreed at this point that the common judgment earlier in the twentieth century, that glossolalia was the primary distinguishing fea-ture of this form of Christianity, is a superfi cial one, as it recognizes neither the abiding disagreements among Pentecostals, both early on and more recently, on this issue, nor the theological complexity of Pentecostalism’s matrix of premillenial eschatology, miraculous healing, and Wesleyan Holiness theology, to name just three of the most salient elements. This study follows Allan Anderson and Frank Macchia in identifying personal charismatic experience of the Spirit among those who are already “believ-ers” as the single most signifi cant Pentecostal distinctive, both theologically and in practice, though it is not the only such distinctive. According to Anderson, the history of the movement in its many forms has shown that

all the various expressions of Pentecostalism have one common expe-rience, that is a personal encounter with the Spirit of God enabling and empowering people for service . . . Through their experience of the Spirit, Pentecostals and Charismatics make the immanence of God tangible. . . . Although different Pentecostals and Charismatics do not always agree on the precise formulation of their theology of the Spirit, the emphasis on divine encounter and the resulting transformation of life is always there. This is what likens Pentecostals to the mystical traditions, perhaps more than any other contemporary form of Christianity.66

65 See Chapter 7.66 Anderson, Pentecostalism, 187–8. Macchia makes the similar claim that Spirit baptism

understood “as a postconversion charismatic experience” is “the crown jewel of



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As will be demonstrated in Chapter 4, Blumhardt without question shared this prioritization of “personal encounter with the Spirit of God” that makes “the immanence of God tangible” among Christians. For him, “unmediated” encounter with God, experienced individually, emotionally, viscerally, and with life-altering effects, was the key missing ingredient in the Christianity of his day.

This is not to say that there are no differences between Blumhardt’s under-standing of pneumatological experience and that of most Pentecostals. As we will see, the most reliable consequence of such experience in Blumhardt’s view was a feeling of judgment rather than blessing, and revelation of sin rather than new empowerment to overcome sin. Nevertheless, his regular use of language of “immediacy”; his conviction that the locus of Erlebnis is primarily the affections rather than the mind; his consistent willingness to affi rm, if with growing reservation, that such experience can indeed involve “warm feelings,” miracles, and direct divine communication with individu-als; and his life-long acknowledgement of a relationship between Erlebnis and miraculous healing indicate that his move toward a theology of the cross in his understanding of experience took place from within a charismatic, “enthusiastic” doctrine of the Spirit. For all of these reasons, the fact that, in the end, Blumhardt is willing in his more extreme statements to prioritize “negative” charismatic experience so radically as to appear to subvert the “Pentecostal” paradigm entirely does not disqualify him as a theologically useful mediating fi gure between Pentecostal and Lutheran theology. Even as his pneumatology becomes dominated by the theme of the cross, it remains in its fundamental makeup and expression a charismatic, “enthusiastic” theo-logy of the cross. In the vital respects of “immediacy” and the prioritization of affective experience over what takes place coram deo, it remains very far removed from a classically Lutheran theology of the Word.

Biographical Narrative or Theological Analysis?

My ultimate aim in this analysis of Blumhardt’s thought is dogmatic and constructive. However, as with any study of the theology of an his-torical individual, a certain methodological historicism is unavoidable: Christoph’s theology was expressed and developed over time, in relation to the events of his and his congregation’s lives, and to the wider societal developments he observed around him. The former is particularly crucial for Blumhardt, because his theology assumed an ongoing personal revela-tion and communication from God. More specifi cally, Blumhardt’s theol-ogy is perhaps best understood as a working-out of the implications of specifi c communicated purposes of God for the Bad Boll congregation, in

Pentecostal distinctives” (Frank D. Macchia, Baptized in the Spirit: A Global Pentecos-tal Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006), 20).



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the context of a larger eschatological movement toward the fulfi llment of the Kingdom on earth.

There is, therefore, an unavoidably dynamic and historical element, beyond the usual personal development in any theologian’s thought over time, built into the structure of Blumhardt’s theology. As a result, his theology is ini-tially inaccessible outside of the context of his personal history. Furthermore, the particular emphasis he placed on reading divine signs and meanings in large-scale societal events, in keeping with much of the Württemberg Pietist tradition, must be taken into account in the attempt to render his theology useful outside of its original historical context. For example, as we shall see, his joining of the Social Democratic Party was fi rst and foremost a theologi-cal decision, but its theological basis cannot be understood apart from his perception of the failure of the church to treat the rising German industrial class as Christ would have done.

At the same time, Blumhardt’s insights about the nature of the Holy Spirit and his critiques of objectifi ed forms of Christian religion, to name just two salient examples, have a theological power and relevance that transcends the details of the failings of the Württemberg state church or the specifi c communications he felt himself to have received from the Spirit that led him to give up his healing ministry for a time. Indeed, his conception of the relationship between Spirit and cross in the Christian life is perhaps more relevant to the world historical situation today, when there are hundreds of millions more Christians who view unmediated experience of the Spirit as central to their faith, than it was for the local pietists in relation to whom he developed his views. We are faced, then, with a common methodological diffi culty for a study of this sort, which, while requiring sensitivity to the “broad ugly ditch” between researcher and the object of research, seeks foremost to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of its subject matter. The problem, as we have said, is accentuated in Blumhardt’s case, because of the particularly historically oriented assumptions behind his theology.

Unsurprisingly, every major scholarly study on Christoph Blumhardt to date has taken some form of hybrid approach between what could be called an historical and a thematic or systematic theological method. Meier, Macchia, Stober, and Lim all expound his theology over the course of a nar-rative of its historical and biographical development, with a more explicitly constructive conclusion at the end of the book or of each section. Sauter, more traditionally dogmatic in his approach, still divides his thematic analy-sis into the widely, if provisionally, accepted four “periods” in Blumhardt’s development from 1880 until his death in 1917,67 and fi nds it necessary at

67 This theological periodization was fi rst proposed by R. Lejeune. In his view, the period from 1880–8 is characterized by continuity with the elder Blumhardt; 1888–96 marks a period of critical change and development, in the explication of the watchword “Ster-bet, so wird Jesus leben” [Die, so that Jesus may live]; 1896–1906 is the “turn to the



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times to insert more strictly biographical excurses to clarify the context for the theology under discussion. The line between intellectual biography and constructive theological exposition is crossed many times in the Blumhardt secondary literature, and rightly so. A thoughtful movement back and forth between the two methodologies is unavoidable for a study that wishes both to do justice to Blumhardt’s thought, and to establish its relevance in con-temporary context, given the nature of his theology and writing.

Our approach for the chapters expositing Blumhardt’s theology in the 1888–96 period will be closer to Sauter’s than to Meier’s: The analysis will be thematic, within this specifi c period. The necessary historical and bio-graphical information will be interspersed as needed within the discussion. Readers interested in a more cohesive and detailed biographical picture are directed to the section on the younger Blumhardt in Werner Jäckh’s popular biography of both Blumhardts,68 and to the more scholarly narratives to be found in the work of Stober, Meier, Lim, and Collins Winn. It is in part because these works are so helpful historically, that we are free here, build-ing on them, to engage primarily on the thematic level.

The Theological Priority of the 1888–96 Period in This Study

A further feature of this study requiring explanation is the decision to focus primarily on the “second period” in Blumhardt’s development, from 1888 to 96. As Martin Stober has pointed out, scholars have tended strongly to focus on the second half of Christoph Blumhardt’s life, from 1880 (and especially 1888) until his death in 1919.69 This emphasis is in large part due to the availability of primary materials: Lejeune’s collection starts with 1880, and Harder includes only ten pages of material from before Johann

world” and entry into politics; and 1906–19 is the postpolitical, more quietist period. Most interpreters have essentially agreed with Lejeune’s helpful periodization, with various provisions. In my view, it might be preferable to end the “second phase” either in 1895, with the publication of the fi nal chapter of the Gedanken aus dem Reiche Gottes, or in 1898–9, when the “optimistic” period that informs his political involve-ment begins; also, the theological shift away from politics begins in 1903, several years before his formal exit from the Landtag in 1906 (see Chapter 5). These are minor quibbles, however. For the sake of clarity and consistency with other works, we will follow more or less the established periodization. See R. Lejeune, “Nachwort,” in Ster-bet, so wird Jesus leben! Predigten und Andachten aus den Jahren 1888 bis 1896, ed. R. Lejeune (Erlenbach-Zürich: Rotapfel-Verlag, 1925), 19–21; and Collins Winn, Signifi cance, 112.

68 Werner Jäckh, Blumhardt: Vater und Sohn und ihre Welt (Stuttgart: J. F. Steinkopf Verlag, 1977), 103–202. Unfortunately, as of now no defi nitive scholarly biography of Christoph Blumhardt, on a par with Ising’s magisterial biography of Johann Christoph Blumhardt, exists.

69 Stober, Blumhardt, 7–13.



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Christoph Blumhardt’s death in that year. Stober’s Christoph Blumhardt d.J. zwischen Pietismus und Sozialismus, drawing on unpublished material from Blumhardt’s early decades, serves as a much-needed corrective. Stober focuses on the development of his thought in the 1860s and 1870s, when he attended Tübingen University (1862–6), served his curacy (“Vikariat,” 1866–9), and returned to Bad Boll to assist his father (1869–80).

Our study joins Meier in focusing primarily on the period from 1888. Although the earlier decades were greatly formative for Blumhardt, it was not until after his father’s death that his theology began to diverge signifi -cantly from Johann Christoph’s and Christoph becomes an important theo-logical fi gure in his own right. Most importantly, Blumhardt’s relevance to our larger pneumatological question is grounded in the strong anthropo-logical pessimism toward which he moved in the 1880s, culminating in the announcement of the “sterbet” watchword in 1888. Signifi cant structural elements of Blumhardt’s eschatology and theology of unmediated “Erlebnis” [experience] are in place long before, because they are to a signifi cant degree carried over from his father’s theology. We are primarily concerned here, however, with the creative interaction and integration of those themes in Blumhardt’s thought with the new low anthropology, rather than the escha-tology or pneumatology on their own terms. The themes of the fulfi llment of the Kingdom and “experience” of the Spirit are, therefore, most helpfully explored as they developed and were articulated during the 1888–96 period, rather than earlier.

But what of the years after 1896, which include the best-known event in Blumhardt’s life, his turn to politics, as well as his critique of the German war cause in 1914? There are three reasons for our decision to prioritize the “sterbet” phase over the later periods. The fi rst, and most important, is simply that Blumhardt deals most extensively and directly with the relevant pneumatological and anthropological concerns during the “sterbet” period. Although his anthropology did not change a great deal in subsequent years, his main discussions of it take place between 1888 and 1896. Relevant here is the fact that Blumhardt’s only theological monograph, the Gedanken aus dem Reiche Gottes, which deals closely with the interaction between the new pessimism and Blumhardt’s eschatology and theology of “experience,” dates from the prepolitical period.

The second reason is that Blumhardt’s period of political involvement has already received excellent scholarly attention, above all in Meier. This renders the need for further exploration less urgent than it once was.

The third reason for the prioritization is my view that there are no major material shifts in Blumhardt’s core theological principles in the later peri-ods on the scale of the “sterbet” turning point in 1888. There are minor shifts, but not major developments. The events and theological emphases of Blumhardt’s fi nal two decades can be explained to a signifi cant degree, and should be understood primarily, as variations on, rather than developments



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away from, the core themes that had developed by 1896. The overview of the later periods in Chapter 5 will help to demonstrate this point.

For all of these reasons, following a brief discussion of the pre-1888 period in the next chapter, the exposition of Blumhardt’s thought in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 will be limited to the “sterbet” years, from 1888 to 1896,70 and his development after that point will be outlined in a single chapter, Chapter 5.

The Shape of the Study

This study contains two major components. The bulk will consist of a close analysis of Christoph Blumhardt’s theology, especially during the 1888–96 period, in light of our larger anthropological and pneumatological interests. The core themes in Blumhardt’s theology in those years are anthropological pessimism, eschatology, and unmediated “experience” of the Spirit, and these loci will receive particular attention. Previous interpretations of Blumhardt’s thought will be taken into account and discussed where relevant. Chapter 6 will serve as a “bridge” between the “analysis” chapters and the dialogi-cal and constructive fi nal two chapters. In these last sections, I will draw on aspects of Blumhardt’s pneumatology to provide a critical assessment of Lutheran and Pentecostal pneumatologies, and to propose a theological principle for spiritual discernment that seeks to avoid the main weaknesses of those pneumatologies while preserving their strengths.

With this broader sketch in mind, the theme of our next chapter is the important development that took place in Blumhardt’s preaching and min-istry starting in 1888, as he became critical of aspects his father’s theological position and began focusing on sin and “egoism,” rather than the forces of spiritual evil, as the primary obstacles to the Kingdom of God. As a con-sequence of this development, Blumhardt preached highly critically about certain manifestations of Christian “egoism,” and the chapter will include an examination of several specifi c objects of this critique.

Blumhardt’s theology of the cross from the 1888–96 period is closely inter-woven with his eschatology and his conception of unmediated “experience” of God. Chapter 3 explores his eschatological framework of “stations” on the way to the fulfi llment of the Kingdom, describing an eschatological “for-ward movement” that nevertheless avoids a sense of progressive, immanent accumulation or growth. Blumhardt adapted his eschatology somewhat in this period in light of his father’s death and the new “sterbet” theology. One

70 Very occasionally, I will reference primary material from shortly before or after this period in these chapters, but only when there is strong material continuity with the theology of the 1888–96 sermons and writings, and a quotation from other years helps explain an aspect of that theology.



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important focus here is his 1895 monograph Gedanken aus dem Reiche Gottes, which contains Blumhardt’s primary theological exposition of the new eschatological outlook.

Chapter 4 examines the key category of “experience” in Blumhardt’s theology in the same period, using a typology of punctiliar, unmediated experience of God derived largely from Pietist and Pentecostal concepts of experience. His theology of the cross and his emphasis on the importance of unmediated “Erlebnis” are integrated in what I argue is a concept of “negative” experience of the Spirit. This latter category serves as the focal point for the dialogue with Lutheran and Pentecostal pneumatologies in Chapter 7, as well as the fi nal, constructive chapter.

Chapter 5 provides a brief overview of the key developments and events in Blumhardt’s life and thought between 1897 and his death in 1919, as they relate to the theology developed during the 1888–96 period. The particular focus is on his developing theological affi rmation of physicality and embod-iedness, his entry into politics with the SPD, and his theological critique of German war enthusiasm at the start of the First World War.

Chapter 6 gives a summary outline of Blumhardt’s pneumatology, relates it to other interpretations of his theology, and then raises theological ques-tions about aspects of his thought, including the viability of his eschatology today and his critique of traditional Protestant soteriology.

Chapter 7 places Blumhardt’s anthropology and pneumatology in dialogue fi rst with contemporary Pentecostal theologians, on the topics of “Spirit bap-tism” and the question of “empowerment” by the Spirit versus “negative” experience, and then with certain themes in Luther, in particular the role of the Holy Spirit in the “negative” (“theological”) use of the Law. Both Pentecostal and Lutheran pneumatologies are assessed in light of Blumhardt’s anthropologically pessimistic, yet charismatic, view of the Spirit.

In the fi nal chapter, I sketch aspects of a constructive theology of the Spirit that draws critically on Blumhardt’s thought in order to move beyond the impasse between classical Lutheran and contemporary Pentecostal pneuma-tologies. The focus is on the possibility of a limited criterion of “negative” experience in discernment of the Spirit, and certain potential theological and pastoral implications of such a “criterion” or principle.


Pneumatology and Theology of the Cross in the Preaching of Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt: The Holy Spirit between Wittenberg and Azusa Street ( T&T Clark/Continuum, 2010)

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