Foreword
A prominent pastor of our day concludes one of his
books with these words:
I’m enjoying God these days. He answers my prayers.
He empowers me. He gives me insights from his
Word. He guides my life. He gives me loving relationships.
He has wonderful things in store for me.
“I,” “my,” “me,” “me,” “me.” Is this what the kingdom
of God come in Christ is about? God catering to and
pampering individual Christians? Is God’s rule centered
on “me” and “mine”? And on an inner life of insights
and guidance set off from the vicissitudes of the world?
If so, then I can only sound alarm and paraphrase the
apostle Paul – then we Christians are “of all people most
to be pitied” ( Cor. :).
I write these words at the end of a week in which two
Arkansas schoolchildren, ages eleven and thirteen,
have gunned down classmates and a teacher with highpowered
rifles. Darkness bears down on us in many
other ways: deepening poverty in American cities and
rural areas, ongoing and desperate racial tensions, climbing
teenage suicide rates, and dozens of other profound
human problems. Suffering and crisis are not confined
to the United States, of course. The Middle East daily
stays just a gesture or two away from lethal violence.
The former Slovakian republics stagger barely, if at all,
toward some kind of healing after a decade of barbarities.
South Africa and other African nations attempt
bold experiments in reconciliation and democracy, while
all witnessing, knowing how precarious such experiments
are, hold their breath. Meanwhile the entire globe
wants most to follow North America in its wanton
accumulation, its wasteful fashions, and the grossest
elements of its popular culture.
Abortion and infanticide. Ecological destruction.
Hatred and misunderstanding between the sexes.
Scientific hubris. The legalization of euthanasia, as respect
for the elderly dwindles. A global economy built
and sustained on such inanities as “he who dies with
the most toys wins.” Skyrocketing rates of state murder
known as capital punishment. The lingering threat of
nuclear annihilation.
The world cannot save itself. And despite the fact
that so many churches in comfortable middle- and
upper-class circumstances now so proclaim it, the gospel
heralding God’s kingdom is not focused on the inner
serenity of materially comfortable individuals. The
world needs so much more than that. And the kingdom
of God is so much grander, so much more exciting
and challenging than that.
This is something an odd German pastor and someForeword
time politician named Christoph Blumhardt knew very
well. And this is why I have read the words of Blumhardt
(and his father) with so much appreciation and
encouragement. It is also why I have commended the
Blumhardts to so many friends. (I have a box of Vernard
Eller’s Thy Kingdom Come: A Blumhardt Reader, from
which I eagerly distribute copies to houseguests, hosts,
workmates, and other potential converts.) It is, at last,
why I consider it such a privilege to commend this
wonderful new collection of some of Christoph
Blumhardt’s finest sermons.
Both Blumhardts were servants of the common folk.
Their words are simple, straightforward, often bereft
of the subtlety we rightly find in many great doctors of
the church. Yet the Blumhardts rediscovered the kingdom
of God, the victory of Jesus Christ narrated in the
Bible, freshly and fully. They did not crowd it out of
the precincts of earth exclusively into those of heaven,
did not confine it to boundaries drawn by churches
liberal or evangelical or Catholic, did not delay all actual
change of the world by it until Christ’s return.
So if you read further into these pages you will find
Christoph Blumhardt declaring the expansiveness of the
kingdom: “When I await the Lord, my waiting is for
the whole world, of which I am a part.” You will find
him railing against the privatistic reduction of the
kingdom’s power to individual salvation: “We have been
much more concerned with being saved than with seeing
the kingdom of God. If we want our salvation first,
and then the kingdom of God, there will never be any
light on earth. No! We will not think of our salvation.
We will not seek our own good first! We want to be
servants! We want to seek God’s salvation, God’s glory,
God’s kingdom!” You will find his bracing expectation
that the world will change, however fitfully and incompletely,
through the witness of God’s people: “Today
we cry, ‘Oh, to be saved! Oh, to be saved!’ But God
says, ‘I do not need you in heaven, I have enough saved
ones here. I need workers, people who get things done
on earth. First serve me there.’ If we Christians simply
relate all the words of scripture to our precious little
selves without stopping to consider whether the conditions
of our life and of our world are right – then it is
our fault if nothing new breaks into our lives.”
Blessedly, and surely partly through the direct and
indirect influence of the Blumhardts, we live in a day
when a host of biblical scholars and theologians are reading
the Bible anew and appreciating both the centrality
of the kingdom to the gospel, and the full-orbed social,
political, and cultural (as well as “private” and “personal”)
inbreaking impact of that kingdom. This is in
many ways a more Jewish reading of Scripture – and
remember, Jesus and his apostles were Jews. In the early
days of the church, non-Christianized Jews argued quite
legitimately that if the world has not been changed,
then the genuine Messiah has not come. After all, the
prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others said that with the
kingdom’s advent would come the cessation of war, the
routing of famine and pestilence, the end of enmity
between humanity and the rest of creation.
