Click to join the conversation with over 500,000 Pentecostal believers and scholars
Click to get our FREE MOBILE APP and stay connected
| PentecostalTheology.com
PNEUMA_f3_4-16 2/27/06 17:10 Page 4
Pentecostal Theology, Volume 26, No. 1, Spring 2004
S SP
Articles
The Hope for the Kingdom of God and Signs
of Hope in the World: The Relevance of
Blumhardt’s Theology Today*
Jürgen Moltmann
A Personal Note
My “Theology of Hope” has two roots: Christoph Blumhardt and Ernst Bloch. I was not in Bad Boll; nor was I in Württemberg. But I was first influenced by Christoph Blumhardt before I read Ernst Bloch through my involvement with others in a “Blumhardt circle.” This happened in 1958 in Wuppertal, when, together with my soon-to-be-friend Rudolf Bohren, I was called to the Kirchliche Hochschule there. At the nearby Päda- gogische Hochschule I met Johannes Harder. Rudolf Bohren, who was from Switzerland, was touched early on by Blumhardt’s spirit of hope through Thurneysen and Ragaz. Johannes Harder, who came from the Mennonites at the Wolga, connected Blumhardt’s spirit of hope with the
* Editor’s Note: The Blumhardts, father (Johann) and son (Christoph) were nineteenth- century German pietists who exercised a profound influence on Protestant church life and theology with their emphasis on the Kingdom of God. Though authors at times refer to them both under the singular name “Blumhardt,” there was a difference between them. The father established himself as a preacher who prayed for the healing of a woman tormented by evil spirits. Her deliverance led to a lengthy revival in the town of Möttlingen and, later, to the establishment of a healing home at nearby Bad Boll. The son became known for his “turn to the world” of socialist politics in his effort to expand the healing work of Christ to a much broader context. The following text is a translation of an address entitled, “Reich-Gottes- Hoffnung und Hoffnungszeichen in der Welt. Die Aktualität von Blumhardts Theologie,” delivered at the Blumhardt-Pilgrimage on the occasion of the 28th “Deutscher Evan- gelischer Kirchentag,” held on June 19, 1999 at the Evangelical Academy of Bad Boll. The translation by was done by Michael Nausner, Christian Collins Winn, and Peter Heltzel. Sources were footnoted wherever possible.
© 2004 Brill Academic Publishers, Inc., Boston pp. 4–16
1
PNEUMA_f3_4-16 2/27/06 17:10 Page 5
The Hope for the Kingdom of God and Signs of Hope in the World
Mennonite vocation of radical discipleship in foreign countries. Johannes Rau was the fourth member in our Blumhardt circle. Bohren loved Blumhardt’s counseling, which he exercised with us, calling it “dining counseling.” In 1978, Harder edited from the somewhat chaotic Nachlass the “new texts” from Christoph Blumhardt’s Devotions, Sermons, Speeches and Letters (1865-1917):1 truly devotional books for one’s own soul and a rich source for unusual theological thoughts on hope.
By that time I myself had moved from Karl Barth to Christoph Blumhardt in order to rediscover, together with him and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the lost horizons of Christian faith: genuine worldliness, true humanness, simple naturalness, and the “wide space” of the Spirit in the dawn of the Kingdom of God.
Today I do not want to give a historical piece on Blumhardt, but simply to say what is important for me about Blumhardt and to describe how we can envision a future for our world by remembering his message of hope.
“Behold, the House of God” in Bad Boll
The elder Blumhardt, Johann Christoph, had bought Bad Boll because his parsonage in Möttlingen was no longer big enough for the many who came to him seeking help and healing. When “he moved from Möttlingen to Boll and changed from minister to principal and owner of a bath house, the Kingdom of God moved with him from the church into the world,” as Leonhard Ragaz has interpreted this journey. As the younger Blumhardt, Christoph, has reported, however, this journey did not happen without inner and outer struggles:
In Möttlingen as well as in Bad Boll the struggle continued, but there were also new promises. At that time it was not yet possible to liberate oneself from the religious institutions and forms of the time, even if my father was inwardly liberated. Later, in Bad Boll, the second struggle occurred, the divorce from the traditional church forms, which even then was a source of much divine life. That caused an enormous storm, and even today many peo- ple in Bad Boll are not reconciled to it. But Jesus, who showed himself as victor in Möttlingen, helped to get through even this storm.2
Blumhardt’s healing “bath house” was large: sixty to seventy persons could sit along two long tables in the dining room. Whoever came for
1
Christoph Blumhardt, Ansprachen, Predigten, Reden, Briefe: 1865-1917, ed. Johannes Harder, 3 vols. (Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany: Neukirchener Verlag, 1978-82).2
Christoph Blumhardt, Ansprachen 3:29.
5
2
PNEUMA_f3_4-16 2/27/06 17:10 Page 6
Pentecostal Theology, Volume 26, No. 1, Spring 2004
advice or healing was initially invited for a meal and into the house fel- lowship. There was song, prayer, and conversation around the table. This “atmosphere,” it was said, “affects the soul as fresh mountain air affects the body.” In the “spirit of the house” Blumhardt acted as one among others. Everything happened naturally but still with dignity. “Everything holy is so human and everything human is so elevated,” writes Zündel, “and all of this happens without compulsion, so naturally, that—being a part of it— one thinks that it could not be different, and one does not understand that it is not that way in all Christian households.”3
It is the natural and down-to-earth piety that constitutes Blumhardt’s attractiveness. To an overtly zealous lady who lost weight due to her piety, he was said to exclaim: “The first commandment in the Bible is: Eat!” Blumhardt liked to eat and drink with those who came to him for comfort. The regained appetite of the seekers was regarded as a first symptom of spiritual healing. The younger Blumhardt’s childhood was marked by “ter- rible hunger and lack of daily bread”!
Christoph Blumhardt’s table talks, as far as they have been handed down, are neither too narrowly intimate nor too abstractly political. For him the personal issues of the heart and mind belong together with the broader issues of the Kingdom of God. He saw the one in the other; as we say today, Think globally—act locally! He viewed the most intimate per- sonal details in the light of the coming Kingdom and he saw the dawning Kingdom in the small matters of everyday life. And, most importantly, there was no religious mediation in between. The small personal life and the great arch of the Kingdom of God confronted each other in unmediated fashion.
For Blumhardt, Jesus did not bring a new religion to the world, but new life. The Kingdom of God is present in the healing of life and in his rebirth on earth. All of life in this house was about the Kingdom of God and, therefore, special religious forms were not needed. Every greeting was a blessing. Every domestic activity, every word was a praise of God. There was no other business than God’s work. Therefore, everything holy was natural and everything natural was holy. This is why “no special religion” was needed, says Ragaz, and I want to add: this is why Blumhardt no longer needed a church office or organization. One already lived the new life that Jesus had brought with the Kingdom of God. Obviously many felt
3
Fr. Zündel, Johann Christoph Blumhardt, 19th ed. (Basel: Brunnen Verlag, 1979), 33.4
Christoph Blumhardt, Ansprachen 3:17.
6
3
PNEUMA_f3_4-16 2/27/06 17:10 Page 7
The Hope for the Kingdom of God and Signs of Hope in the World
how heaven and earth thrived in reconciliation with each other in Boll and how God’s future already enveloped the human present in the experienced healing powers of the future world.
“To be a hearth of hope for the Kingdom of God was in his eyes not the least vocation of Bad Boll…. And this spirit of hope was also the pulse, which shaped life in Bad Boll” (Zündel). These hopes transformed the house in Bad Boll into a “healing home.” Why? Thornton Wilder once declared despair to be the cause of all sicknesses of soul and body. For Blumhardt, “capitulation” when confronted with the unchangeability of conditions was the deeper cause of sickness. “Whoever accepts the dark, resists the light that expels the night, which God has lit twice in chaotic times: at the creation in the beginning and in Christ with whom a new cre- ation begins” (Johannes Harder).5 This is why this house of hope for the Kingdom of God became a house of healing from sicknesses and depres- sion and a place of resurrection unto life: “We are protesters against death.”
Actually one wants to find rest in one’s own house. The Schwabian finds his life’s fulfilment in the building of houses (Häusle-baue). But that did not happen in Bad Boll. There Christoph Blumhardt wanted to “live” and to “break up,” “wait,” and “hurry.” Not only the table was prepared there, but the coach was made ready as well, to travel toward Jerusalem to meet the Lord, should he come. Nowhere else has the last word in the Bible been prayed so often and so loudly as in Boll: “Marantha. Come, Lord Jesus, come soon!” Christoph Blumhardt repeated it every day. It goes like a red thread through all his devotions and letters. The hope of the Kingdom of God made him open for the news from world history: “Any house like ours is a small world history in itself.” The expectation of the coming God made him curious of everything that was to come: “I count everything that happens in our time to that which comes.” “Jesus Comes.”6 With this expectation Blumhardt experienced life with all his senses and received the world into himself.
He did not have to put a date on the “parousia/coming again” of Christ (as Bengel had done in 1836), or to assign it to a certain place (as did the Schwabian emigrants in 1816-17, who hoped to find at the Ararat the “refuge at the end of the world”), because for him God’s future was already present in the healing “powers of the future world” (Heb. 6:5).
5
Johannes Harder, “Einleitung,” in Christoph Blumhardt, Ansprachen 1:15.6
See Christoph Blumhardt, Ansprachen 1:112.
7
4
PNEUMA_f3_4-16 2/27/06 17:10 Page 8
Pentecostal Theology, Volume 26, No. 1, Spring 2004
The healing movement of Möttlingen guided by the elder Blumhardt was itself the springtime of God’s new world in Württemberg and beyond. The healing of the sick was for both the Blumhardts “miracles of the Kingdom;” that which has to happen when the Kingdom is about to come. Actually they were no “miracles,” but rather matter-of-course events at the arrival of the Kingdom that change the whole world. Only when the hopes and openings for the coming Kingdom are lost are those healings consid- ered “miracles” in an unchanged world. Blumhardt obviously was able to combine the contradicting qualities of hope in a good way: the hurrying and the waiting, the house and the coach, the close and the distant.
Jesus Brings New Life and Not a New Religion
The son was living according to the experiences of his father: The human being needs to be converted twice, first from a natural to a spiritual being, and then again from a spiritual to a natural being. Being “born again” is more than a personal experience of salvation; it is the beginning of a rebirth of the entire cosmos. “It belongs to the greatest things we can say about Jesus, that he is not only concerned with the inside of humans, but that he also has a wide horizon of promise for life for the entire world. The life of human beings shall rise up by struggling for truth and peace in all respects.”7
Life in the Presence of the Coming
This was the Möttlingen and Boll alternative to the nineteenth-century pietism of the heart. Against the pious slogan “only be blessed!” the fol- lowing word by Jesus was posited: “Look first for the Kingdom of God and his righteousness!” “O yes, dear Christian,” Christoph Blumhardt once preached, “act in a way so that you die blessed. But the Lord Jesus wants more. He does not want my or your salvation, but the salvation of the whole world. He wants to make an end to evil in general, wants to liber- ate the whole world, which moves in such godforsakenness. . . .” “We Christians need to objectively look forward to the day. But they [the pious Christians] want merely to feel subjectively and to enjoy inward blessed- ness. Today they mostly sit in the churches thinking only about them- selves. Everyone sighs about oneself and looks for something in oneself
7
Ibid., 12.
8
5
PNEUMA_f3_4-16 2/27/06 17:10 Page 9
The Hope for the Kingdom of God and Signs of Hope in the World
and for oneself without really knowing what. One would want to shout to them: People, forget yourselves! Think of God’s work.”8
Blumhardt here connects with the older Kingdom of God pietism of Bengel and Oetinger, which, after the French revolution in Württemberg, had given way to the pietism of a new awakening. Leonhard Ragaz once characterized the core of the awakening in Möttlingen and Boll as a way “from religion to God’s Kingdom, from the church to the world, from the concern for one’s own person to the hope for the whole.”9
Therefore, Blumhardt consistently searched for Christ in the world and saw the entire world at the same time in Christ. That is why we at last need to get “world hearts” and to learn a “thinking as vast as the world,” because “[w]e are a people of the world” (February 25, 1885).10 This global vision is the new “Christianity of the entire world,” entirely dedicated to the here and now and to the world, and it has nothing to do with a secularizing of Christianity, because it is surrounded and kept by the realistic hope for the future Kingdom of God. The Kingdom renews heaven and earth. The crowning of world history is the real, “natural” coming of Christ. His return will be a sensually perceivable event and a much more modest, matter-of-course event than we think. “I am used to saying in the middle of the events of world history, in the middle of developments of humanity, which happen so quickly these days: He comes…He comes in the devel- opments of this time.”11 Blumhardt interpreted the developing events of history through the lens of this certainty of “He comes,” and he welcomed the great future-oriented movements of his time as effects of the coming Christ: the workers’ movement, the peace movement, and the movement of liberation for colonized peoples.
God Believes in Every Human Being
From early on I have not only been fascinated by the Blumhardts’ open- ness to the world, but also by their limitless openness to people. The nasty dividing lines between believers and unbelievers, Christians and athe- ists, Christians and Muslims did not exist for them, for “believing people” were everywhere. This is why every human being needs to be addressed
8
Leonhard Ragaz, Der Kampf um das Reich Gottes in Blumhardt Vater und Sohn- und Weiter (Erlenbach-Zürich: Rotapfel Verlag, 1922), 58, 60-61.9
Ibid., 218f.10
Christoph Blumhardt, Ansprachen 1:80.11
Ibid., 3:109, 111.
9
6
PNEUMA_f3_4-16 2/27/06 17:10 Page 10
Pentecostal Theology, Volume 26, No. 1, Spring 2004
with regard to his or her “belief,” regardless of what the person believed of him or her. In Christoph’s words:
Once my father wrote to me that I should make it a habit, wherever I am, to look at every human being as a believer, never to doubt, never to talk differ- ently with him/her. That resonated with my soul. When a Muslim is coming, I call him a believer; I never suppose that some should be a non-believer. The objective belief that God believes in me and I in God, because God believes in me, that is faith to me. But I say it quite simply: Every human being believes, because God believes. Because Jesus has access to you, you have access to him. And whatever is in between needs to be removed. Remember one of my rules: treat all people, regardless of their appearance, as dedicated to God, every single sinner!…Do this for a number of years, then you will understand the Redeemer. Then you have passed through. To hate, to insult, to gossip, to curse, to judge, all of that we do not want to do any more, not even when we meet the most evil person. We want to say: he has access to God, I want to remove the obstacles, as much as I can. God has come to him, he needs to be able to come to God.12
Karl Barth took over this perception of every human being in Christ from Blumhardt, and he maintained that all people are objectively, from the perspective of God, already in Christ, since Christ has died for all peo- ple. Because Christ has saved them, they are all already saved. Objectively all of them are Christians, and subjectively they are potential Christians.
Subjectively, according to the secret of human faith, the church is dis- tinct from the world and Christianity from the peoples. If this is true, Christianity with its faith and hope vouches for all of humanity in an antic- ipating and substituting way. It is not a religious community among other religious communities, as modern pluralism wants to have it, but the be- ginning of a new creation of all things and a vanguard of saved humanity.
From Karl Barth we have received a theological explanation of the Blumhardts’ universal and humane understanding of faith. Heinrich Vogel and many other Christians in the atheistic German Democratic Republic have exemplified this attitude for us in practice. Are we then supposed to take the atheism of atheists more seriously than the divine fact that Christ has died for them and that they therefore are loved people in “God’s beloved Eastern zone”? Atheists, of course, should not be “loved to death,” as some called it back then, but one should not take their atheism too seri- ously either in order not to make their departure from it too difficult. “Obstacles” can be removed if they are approached by Christians about
12
Ibid., 2:133.
10
7
PNEUMA_f3_4-16 2/27/06 17:10 Page 11
The Hope for the Kingdom of God and Signs of Hope in the World
something entirely different from that of which they are aware. Judgment immobilizes, only hopeful love leaves an opening for God’s alternative future. Therefore: Every human being is believed in by God!
Theology of the Earth
“Brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and don’t believe those who talk about hope beyond the earth,” Christoph Blumhardt warned, together with Friedrich Nietzsche, in Sils Maria (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1:3). But Blumhardt did not need to say this to anybody in Bad Boll, since he was as faithful to the earth as he was committed to the future. His hope in Christ, “He comes!”, was always hope for the earth and hope from the earth. For sure, Christ is supposed to come “with the clouds,”13 but that only affirmed his universality. At the same time, he is coming again from the earth, as expressed in the Christmas hymn: “O Savior, from the earth come forth,” because “nature is God’s womb. From the earth God will come toward us.”14
Why? Where does this trust for the earth come from? I believe it comes from the belief in the cosmic Christ described in the Letter to the Colossians. If Christ is “the firstborn among all creatures” and “through him everything is created” and “everything reconciled” in heaven and on earth, then Christ in his future comes toward us from the earth as well.
Blumhardt certainly did not want to deify nature when he called it the “womb of God.” Perhaps he may have been thinking of the biblical cre- ation story, according to which only the earth was “bringing forth” all earthly life of plants and animals, and of Sirach 40:1, in which the earth is called “our mother.” “If, however, together with the earth, life-giving life was created, then eternal rebirth can be expected from the earth as well. God infuses his power into the earthly and he permeates the whole earth with his power of life. The earth contains something living from God, so does the water and the air, and it is in this life of the earth, deep below that the Kingdom of God begins.”15 These are all expressions of God’s Spirit, “which gives life,” the “wellspring of life,” and the “life giving life,” all of which Blumhardt uses when he talks about the earth. With this early “ecological theology,” which we have not reached again until today, he
13
Ibid., 3:311.14
Ibid., 2:295.15
Christoph Blumhardt, Eine Auswahl aus seinen Predigten, Andachten, und Schriften, ed. R. Lejeune, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Rotapfel Verlag, 1925), 257.
11
8
PNEUMA_f3_4-16 2/27/06 17:10 Page 12
Pentecostal Theology, Volume 26, No. 1, Spring 2004
clear-sightedly recognized modernity’s neglect of the environment: “We have no fellowship with nature…. So nature encounters us cold as ice, feels alienated from us. Something has to come.”16 What is it that has to “come”? “Harmony between humankind and nature has to come. Then everyone finds liberation. And that will be the solution to the social ques- tion.”17 One can hardly describe the connections between social and eco- logical crises more clearly, and one should be wary of trying to overcome the one crisis while neglecting the other.
Unfortunately, the theology of the earth has suffered under the distor- tions by the “blood-and-soil ideology” of the Nazis. It is only since the realization of ecological disasters, the oil crisis from 1973 and Chernobyl in 1986, that we can imagine again what it means, “Your Kingdom come in heaven and on earth.”
Christ-signs in the World
The Labor Movement
Just over one hundred years ago, on June 19, 1899, Christoph Blumhardt made a momentous decision. He attended a workers’ rally in Göppingen. Striking workers were to be taken into custody and put into jail. Blumhardt was upset and called it “a crime against justice.” Those who attended the rally did not belong to any of the powerful political parties but were frightened workers concerned about their “daily bread” and their liberty. “Where people are frightened, there I can be seen,” Blumhardt said, and he not only defended them but also joined their party.18 At that time the Social Democratic Party, Bebel’s party, was seen as atheistic and vulgar. A greater split than the one between state church and proletariat was hardly imaginable. Blumhardt’s decision for the Social Democratic Party was unheard of back then. In pious circles he was counted as one who had “lost his faith.” They did not attend his services any more. He had to waive his rights as minister of royal Württemberg as well as his pension. But in his consciousness he remained “with the Savior.” “Do you want me a servant of Christ or not?” he asked the Social
16
Christoph Blumhardt, Ansprachen 2:295f.17
Ibid., 2:296.18
See K. J. Meier, Christoph Blumhardt: Christ, Sozialist, Theologe (Bern: Peter Lang, 1979), 46-47, 60.
12
9
PNEUMA_f3_4-16 2/27/06 17:10 Page 13
The Hope for the Kingdom of God and Signs of Hope in the World
Democrats with his usual frankness. When they accepted him, he began every gathering with the words “I stand here in the name of Jesus Christ,” and the reports of his party always accepted that. He himself wrote in a let- ter to friends:
One has become used to the fact that social democracy and ungodliness are seen as connected and one is worried, that I am losing my faith. But the opposite is true: Whatever is Christ-like lives in me, whatever I believed and longed for in terms of the kingdom of God and his righteousness throughout my life is expressed in my connection with the large working class strug- gling for survival…. I see a Christ-sign in the aspirations of social democ- racy, because Christ also wants a humanity, in which justice and truth, love and life are permeating everything.
Blumhardt did not live to see the movement of “religious socialism” in the 1920s, but this movement is related to his decision to join that rally in Göppingen.
Popular Liberation
Blumhardt saw the other major Christ-sign of the time in the struggle for liberation of the peoples in Asia and Africa who were subject to the rule of European superpowers. He wholeheartedly wanted mission—not, however, the mission of Christian and European civilization, but rather the “mission of the Spirit” through the “gospel of life.” His correspondence with his son-in-law Richard Wilhelm in China witnesses to this explicitly. “Don’t you dare to baptize a Chinese!” Reason: “In China one does not perceive baptism as a religious change from Confucianism to Christianity, but rather treason due to one’s association with European civilization. And Wilhelm should not expose himself to this misunderstanding…. Wilhelm should baptize these people with fire and the Holy Spirit, then he does not need to baptize them [with water].” We do not know whether “this Wilhelm” did succeed with this. But he did translate Chinese religious lit- erature into German quite successfully. His epitaph shows the sign of yin and yang with all the Chinese cosmological signs.
Where Are the “Christ-signs” of Our Time?
Or, using a Catholic expression, where are the “signs of the time” that make our presence necessary? Given the globalization of the Western and modern worlds, they are the same signs as during Blumhardt’s time:
13
10
PNEUMA_f3_4-16 2/27/06 17:10 Page 14
Pentecostal Theology, Volume 26, No. 1, Spring 2004
• the new social question;
• the growing ecological crises of the earth;
• the misery of the people in the Third World;
• the duty of peace in a time of weapons of mass destruction.
Universal Reconciliation
The elder Blumhardt’s faith can be summarized in the simple sentence: “Jesus is Victor.” It expresses the experience of healing in Möttlingen. This victory of the risen Jesus is universal, as expressed in the hymn from Möttlingen:
That Jesus wins is eternally decided, his is the entire world.
The faith of the younger Blumhardt can be expressed in a similarly sim- ple sentence: “Jesus comes!” Regarding this he wrote on New Year’s Eve 1910: “So far I have always experienced the following, as often as some- thing was moved by the great and powerful might: ‘He comes’ has become a tug within me and also in my house. Through this tug the past has van- ished. We were walking forward.”19
This future orientation of Blumhardt the son is also a universal one: “He comes in the whole development of time.” The final judgment and its uncertain outcome have filled the nightmares of people throughout cen- turies. In medieval churches, on doors and above altars, one can see images from the “great judgment of the world,” in which God terminates human history: At the right side angels carry the righteous into the heaven of eternal bliss, while at the left side the devils drag the unrighteous down to the hell of eternal damnation. Because no one knows how righteous one needs to be, the expectation of the final judgment causes everyone to fear and tremble. The fear of hell intensifies the fear of death in dying people. Dies irae, dies illa . . . The “final judgment” becomes the day of God’s wrath over miserable humanity in its entirety. Throughout the centuries the expectation of judgment has been one of the church’s most terrible expres- sions of threat and has caused much “God poisoning.”20
19
Christoph Blumhardt, Ansprachen 3:111.20
Pun on Tilmann Moser, Gottesvergiftung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), a dark novel on the destructive consequences of a religiously oppressive upbringing. (Translator’s note.)
14
11
PNEUMA_f3_4-16 2/27/06 17:10 Page 15
The Hope for the Kingdom of God and Signs of Hope in the World
Having discovered the gospel behind the judgment, the two Blumhardts inspired joy over God’s coming righteousness. Christ “comes,” and not just as the “great destroyer.” Christ comes “not to execute, but to erect.” He comes not to destroy the world but to “bring back all things,” as the old Württemberg pietism has it. God’s last word is not the word of judgment over believers here and non-believers there, but a word of creation: “See, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5). “Jesus can judge, but he cannot damn” (2:131). That is why at the end there is reconciliation of everyone and the restoration of all things.
Theology of the Cross
Is this general love for humanity optimistic humanism? No; with the Blumhardts this universality is a consequence of their theology of the cross. In his Good Friday sermon of 1872 in Möttlingen, the elder Blumhardt proclaimed:
What the Lord Jesus went through will become revealed once again. It is because of all this that the Savior has earned his right to darkness, so that exactly here at the cross a new perspective opens up, so that it would come to pass that all knees will bend in heaven as well as on earth and beneath the earth, and all tongues shall confess that Christ is Lord…. Good Friday pro- claims general amnesty over the whole world, and this general amnesty has still to be revealed…he will still come soon.
I say the same in the following way: Jesus gave himself up in order to look for all the lost and in order to save. He endured the suffering of hell in order to open up hell. He was condemned in order to bring hope to the condemned. Through having suffered the feeling of being abandoned by God on the cross Christ has opened the doors of hell and torn down its wall, as it is said in the Easter hymn: “He has destroyed the door of hell” (Evangelical Hymnbook 113:3). Ever since his resurrection from the dead there is no “eternal damnation” anymore.
That is why the final judgment is no punitive judgment, because “Jesus comes” as judge. He will bring God’s righteousness all over the world, which he himself has proclaimed. He brings justice to those who have suf- fered violence, to the victims of sin. He brings justice to those who have committed injustice and incurred guilt, to those who have committed sin. He overcomes the suffering of some and the burden of others and brings both into the community of God’s Kingdom. The “judgment” is the great, final day of reconciliation in the presence of the God who gives life and
15
12
PNEUMA_f3_4-16 2/27/06 17:10 Page 16
Pentecostal Theology, Volume 26, No. 1, Spring 2004
who “will wipe away all tears from their eyes.” “The day of Jesus Christ will be a judgment day over the world, which removes all rubbish. The judgment of the world is salvation of human beings in spite of their sins and it is at the same time mercy, which brings life, resurrection, and rebirth”21 (2:184).
At this point Blumhardt argues logically:
They say: ‘If there is no eternal punishment, then there is no eternal salva- tion.’As if good and evil could ever be equal! Exactly because good is eter- nal, evil cannot possibly be eternal; because God’s salvation is eternal, suffering cannot be eternal…. Since there is good, evil will end. Since God’s righteousness in his creatures is eternal, sin cannot be eternal. Since there is God’s salvation, everything that is not salvation is coming to an end.22
That is perfectly logical. Of course, we can call evil “not-good,” but we cannot call good the “not-evil.” We recognize the negative only through the positive.
Blumhardt calls this perspective of universal salvation and the restora- tion of all things “the confession of hope”; he thought that the church had “entirely lost its grip of it.”23 His father,
had found this confession of hope in a new pouring out of the Spirit…. Today I want to proclaim again as my father, but in a different way, in a small circle: It is inconceivable that God should abandon anything or anyone in the entire world, neither today nor in eternity…. The end must be: See, every- thing belongs to God! Jesus comes as the one who has carried the sin of the world. Jesus can judge, but he cannot damn. That I want to have proclaimed as far down as the lowest level of hell and I will not come to shame.24
Precisely in this way I believe it, hope it and proclaim it as well, and I will not come to shame either.
21
Christoph Blumhardt, Ansprachen 2:184.22
Ibid., 2:134f.23
Ibid., 2:130.24
Ibid., 2:131.
16
13
