Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Everyone Belongs to God: Discovering the Hidden Christ
Everyone Belongs to God: Discovering the Hidden Christ
Everyone Belongs to God: Discovering the Hidden Christ
Ebook117 pages2 hours

Everyone Belongs to God: Discovering the Hidden Christ

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

Read preview

About this ebook

A pastor’s frank advice for Christians who want to bring the gospel to their neighbors.

Gold Medal Winner, 2016 Illumination Book Award in ministry/mission, Independent Publishers

How can Christians represent the love of Christ to their neighbors (let alone people in foreign countries) in an age when Christianity has earned a bad name from centuries of intolerance and cultural imperialism? Is it enough to love and serve them? Can you win their trust without becoming one of them? Can you be a missional Christian without a church?

This provocative book, based on a recently uncovered collection of 100-year-old letters from a famous pastor to his nephew, a missionary in China, will upend pretty much everyone’s assumptions about what it means to give witness to Christ.

Blumhardt challenges us to find something of God in every person, to befriend people and lead them to faith without expecting them to become like us, and to discover where Christ is already at work in the world. This is truly good news: No one on the planet is outside the love of God.

At a time when Christian mission has too often been reduced to social work or proselytism, this book invites us to reclaim the heart of Jesus’ great commission, quietly but confidently incarnating the love of Christ and trusting him to do the rest.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 1, 2015
ISBN9780874866476
Everyone Belongs to God: Discovering the Hidden Christ
Author

Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt

Pastor, politician, and author, Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (1842–1919) with his unconventional ideas about the kingdom of God, profoundly influenced a whole generation of European seekers. Among the luminaries he influenced were Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Emil Brunner, Oscar Cullman, and Karl Barth. Yet his vision and witness are still waiting to be discovered by most Americans, few of whom have had access to his works. He carried forward the work of his father, Johann Christoph Blumhardt (1805–1880), who is regarded by many as the key figure of German pietism.

Read more from Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt

Related to Everyone Belongs to God

Related ebooks

Christianity For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for Everyone Belongs to God

Rating: 4.0999999 out of 5 stars
4/5

10 ratings8 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book is a compilation of writings by Blumhardt, who lived and died over a century ago. As such, it was kind of a dry read, which is why it took five months for me to write a review on it...While my beliefs basically line up with Blumhardt's, I don't consider myself super-religious and probably wouldn't reread this. My copy will be re-homed to a family member who will probably be more than happy to read it again and again.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was a pretty decent little book. As it is a compilation of multiple sources written by Blumhardt, there were spots where it did not flow as well as one would expect had he written it as a book. However, it flows well enough to make for a pretty quick read (though one may spend more time dwelling on the thoughts Blumhardt shared). I would also be interested to understand better the theological basis from which he wrote; it would help with understanding the context for his perspective. I loved the push toward not making people similar to us, but to showing the love our Father to everyone around us. I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program in exchange for my honest review.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book was gook. It had great nuggets to pick out and really savor. One really important part for me was he's writing on loving all people, even the unloveable. This is what we are called to do. That made the whole book worth it for me. There were other valuable nuggets in there as well.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Everyone Belongs to God is a series of letters written by Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt to his missionary son-in-law, Richard Wilhelm. The wisdom and guidance in his writings are just as relevant today as they were in 1898. Although initially some of what he says sounds shocking, he explains his message with scripture and the wisdom of a man with a heart for Jesus Christ. Blumhardt knew that he had a great influence over his son-in-law and felt a responsibility for his guidance. He wrote over a hundred letters to Wilhelm between 1898 and 1914. I found the book so challenging and encouraging that I plan to go through again and read each chapter as a devotional. It offers practical spiritual advice encouraging the reader to look where Jesus is already moving and our contributions are to have a quiet influence.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book of collected letters by Blumhardt forms an inspiring read. It is a constant reminder that justs because one thinks of themselves as Christian they are no better than the next person. God is bigger than denominations, sects and other divisions of man. God is so big that everyone belongs to him and for whom he sent His Son into the world.Written nearly a century ago, the message of this book is timeless and should be read by everyone who thinks that they have a mission of talking or working with others for God.J. Robert Ewbank author "John Wesley, Natural Man, and the Isms" "Wesley's Wars" and "To Whom It May Concern"
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is an excellent collection of writings by Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt. Mined from the many letters he sent to his son-in-law, who was working as a missionary, these excerpts are arranged topically/thematically and are each gems worthy of serious reflection. Here, Blumhardt present a way of living out one's Christian faith in a robust, yet humble manner. I will be returning to this book often for encouragement and counsel.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (1842-1919) was a German Lutheran theologian and pastor and a founder of Christian Socialism in Germany. In 1899, he was forced to resign his ministry when he joined the Social Democratic Party, after which he served a six-year term in the Wurttemberg legislature. As a Christian socialist, Blumhardt evinced a passionate solidarity with the oppressed working class and a burning desire to help bring about the kingdom of God.Blumhardt corresponded extensively with his son-in-law, Richard Wilhelm, during the latter’s service as a missionary in China. For Everyone Belongs to God, Charles E. Moore has stitched together edited extracts from these letters and from Blumhardt’s sermons and lectures. The resulting passages are organized under various thematic headings to form the book’s nine chapters. A common thread, however, runs throughout the book: that the kingdom of God is at hand and that all persons, without exception, belong to God. Moore has also inserted Bible verse references in the text to provide the scriptural underpinnings for Blumhardt’s views.Moore firmly believes that Blumhardt’s words speak directly to today’s world, particularly in the West, with its increasing secularism, materialism, and skepticism about religious posturing. Blumhardt is extremely critical of church and political structures, dogmas, and practices that create barriers to the gospel. He consistently appeals to Wilhelm simply to radiate and proclaim the love of God and then to let the hidden Christ quietly draw people to Himself. This approach may leave church-related readers wishing for more discussion on the role of doctrine, sacraments, and ecclesiastical governance. Nonetheless, Plough Publishing has served us well by bringing back the words of Blumhardt to remind us that Christ came to proclaim a new kingdom, not to establish a new religion
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A sample collection of Pastor Blumhardt's letters addressed to his missionary son-in-law. It is a challenging book for those who tend to put distance between themselves as Christians and those who are not. It places focus not on how we as Christians actually practice the love God demands but how God himself actually loves, and that he loves everybody, as demonstrated in Christ: "For God so loved the world..." It is an example that demands emulation.At the same time, his theology can be a bit difficult to pin down. At times, his comments tend to suggest universalism, that everyone will eventually be saved. or even vaguely implies "ultimate reconciliation," which includes the salvation of the Satan and demons. Even the idea that men can be saved without necessarily knowing Christ is hinted. At times, his writings sound more like a social gospel, a message against political oppression and social injustice, and the exhortation is to resist and obtain deliverance from worldly powers and structures.However, not having a full idea of his theological beliefs, these thoughts on what Blumhardt's comments are merely conjecture.Blumhardt's father, Johann Christoph Blumhardt, wherein is the account of his battle with real demonic forces in the book "The Awakening," seems to have had an influence as to the reality of Satan and demons, at least, implied in some places in this collection of his son's letters too his missionary son-in-law; for example, where he writes, "God reveals himself as the one, holy God through the deeds of the Spirit, which no amount of piety or learning can replace" (p.3); and, again, "If we can't see any of God's help in this world, who can guarantee that there will beheld in the next? ...The Bible guarantees to us the deeds of God, here and now, where you and I live" (p.6-7).These edited letters of Blumhardt show a man very much against organized or institutional religion and the concept of what we today take to be as "Christian." He contends that Christ did not come into the world "to give us a new religion or to help us live a bit more decently" (p.16). He also encourages his son-in-law to "Preach the gospel of the kingdom of God, not that of the church." He tells his son-in-law that the task of the missionary is to "carry to the world...the gospel of Jesus Christ, and not the gospel of the Christians" (p.xviii). At times, when he speaks of divine grace and the gospel, he almost sound like Dietrich Bonhoeffer.Here is a short book of actually only 137 pages, which includes questions at the end for each chapter for group study. It will challenge not only your theological outlook but your concept of the authentic gospel message and what a genuine life of the Christian, in general terms, in it's relation to the world ought to be.

    1 person found this helpful

Book preview

Everyone Belongs to God - Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt

Everyone Belongs to God

Discovering the Hidden Christ

Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt

Compiled and edited by Charles E. Moore

Ploughlogo.pdf

Plough Publishing House

Published by Plough Publishing House

Walden, New York

Robertsbridge, England

Elsmore, Australia

www.plough.com

© 2015 by Plough Publishing House All Rights Reserved

Front Cover Image: X-ray Manhattan © Eric Drooker

Sources translated by Alan Stevenson, Miriam Mathis, and Jörg Barth

Print ISBN: 978-0-87486-646-9

Pdf ISBN 978-0-87486-649-0

Epub ISBN 978-0-87486-647-6

Mobi ISBN 978-0-87486-648-3

Here, there is no Gentile or Jew,

circumcised or uncircumcised,

barbarian, Scythian, slave or free,

but Christ is all, and is in all.

Colossians 3:11

Foreword

Your Gospel Is Too Small

In every age, God’s people need prophets to help us see beyond our blind spots – to expand our vision of what God is about.

Jeremiah was a prophet. To a people in exile, caught between the false hope that their God would destroy Babylon and the despair of thinking God had forgotten them, Jeremiah proclaimed a new vision. The old images of God’s faithfulness would no longer suffice. Yes, their God had saved humanity in an ark and washed away the wicked in a great flood. Yes, their God had brought them out of Egypt, drowning Pharoah’s army in the Red Sea.

But a salvation that requires someone else’s destruction is too small a salvation, Jeremiah proclaimed. To a people in exile, he wrote, Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper (Jer.29:7).

You will not be saved apart from your neighbors, the prophet says. Everyone belongs to God. Or, to quote another of the biblical prophets:

It is too light a thing that you should be my servant

to raise up the tribes of Jacob

and to restore the survivors of Israel;

I will give you as a light to the nations,

that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.

Isaiah 49:6, NRSV

Jesus came preaching peace to all people. But he got into the most trouble for showing the religious insiders how the people they counted out often understood the advent of God’s reign better than they did. Take Luke 4. For his first sermon in his own hometown, Jesus took a text from Isaiah, the prophet. And when he said that the great day of Jubilee had arrived for God’s people, everyone rejoiced.

But when he pointed out that a Syrian soldier and a Gentile woman had more faith than anyone else in their day, the hometown crowd tried to throw him off a cliff.

Your gospel is too small, Jesus said. But no one wants the prophet to speak so directly to them.

Better to celebrate that the scripture is fulfilled in our hearing than to grapple with the ways God’s Word forces us to expand our imagination.

But expand we must. At least, that’s what the prophets tell us.

The text of the book you now hold in your hands is over a century old, but it contains the words of a prophet who was ahead of his time. At the beginning of the so-called Christian Century, when science and progress seemed to be bringing Christendom to its full height of glory, Christoph Blumhardt heard a word that cut through his cultural formation and easy assumptions: Everyone belongs to God.

Cultural captivity is, of course, a far cry from exile, but the long march of Christendom, as we now see more clearly, took God’s people as far from the Promised Land as Nebuchadnezzar’s forces ever did. As in the Babylonian captivity, we face a dual temptation.

On the one hand, there are those who say, All you’ve got to do is believe. God is greater than the forces of secularism and materialism, atheism and individualism. Yes, Western Christianity is compromised. But the pure in heart – those who really believe – can be saved right here, right now. All you have to do is bow your head and say this simple prayer…

On the other hand, the cynics point out, the Good Book became the Bad Book in so much of the Western missionary enterprise. We over-evangelized the world too lightly, exporting cultural hegemony along with the faith, doing more harm than good. Christendom has failed, they say, and so it is best to leave the name of Christ behind. Do good, for goodness’ sake. At the very least, try to do no harm.

In the midst of this crisis, I hear Blumhardt’s words for twenty-first-century Christians in the same vein as Jeremiah’s to seventh-century-BC Israel: The Risen One wants to draw people to himself, and so propaganda for a particular confession of faith or church is no concern of his. You must stand up and represent the gospel of the kingdom that shines for all people, no matter who they are.

We cannot give up on the missionary enterprise because we have misunderstood and abused it. Instead, Blumhardt insists, we must reclaim the heart of Christian mission.

Our gospel has been too small. It is, indeed, too small a thing to think that the hope of the world rests in our ability to recruit others into a religion which has too often made us morally worse.

To confess that the hope of the world is Jesus Christ is to open ourselves to a kingdom beyond our control – beyond our imagination, even. It is to embrace the revolutionary notion that everyone belongs to God.

Though Bonhoeffer had not yet introduced the term when Blumhardt wrote these letters, it was in the midst of his own confrontation with the crisis of Western Christianity that he wrote of religionless Christianity. Bonhoeffer had so little time to explore what this term meant, even less how one might practice it in the world.

But this volume fills some of that void. For it, we can all be grateful. Take and read the words of a prophet for our time.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Introduction

Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (1842–1919), a Lutheran pastor in Germany, was not at home either in church or secular circles; his views seemed to challenge and disconcert everyone. And yet he possessed a strange, infectious confidence in God’s history and an uncanny ability to see what it takes to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to the world.

Son of the renowned Johann Christoph Blumhardt, a pastor in Möttlingen and later in Bad Boll, Christoph Blumhardt continued his father’s work. But he found himself increasingly alienated from the established German church and eventually broke with all the outward forms of church life, clerical robe and all. His exit from the institutional church was partly due to his growing concern over the dire social conditions around him, which eventually led him to take to the streets in support of the labor movement.

Though he served in the Wurttemberg parliament as a Social Democrat from 1900 to 1906, he could never really bring himself to be a tried-and-true party member. He returned to Bad Boll and in his later years sought to point those who would listen to him to a vision of God’s kingdom that would bring about lively communities of faith where people could give themselves completely to God’s future.

Richard Wilhelm was one of many who were greatly influenced by Blumhardt’s fiery conviction that the advancement of God’s kingdom – its here-and-now actualization – must take precedence over all else. When Wilhelm set out to become a missionary in China, he was already closely involved with Blumhardt. During his short service as an assistant pastor in Bad Boll, Wilhelm had been deeply moved and gripped by this spirit-filled man of faith. He went on to marry Blumhardt’s daughter Salome. So it was of special significance to Blumhardt that Wilhelm and his wife went oversees to serve the cause of Christ. To him they were, above all, envoys of God’s kingdom – a cause far greater than what was expected of missionaries.

In May 1899 the General Evangelical-Protestant Missionary Society (Far East) assigned Wilhelm the territory of Kiaochow, on China’s Yellow Sea. Under European duress, China had been forced to cede this area to Germany on a ninety-nine-year lease. As a missionary pastor in Tsingtao (fast becoming a flourishing colonial city), Wilhelm was assigned a threefold task: to be a pastor, spread Christianity among the Chinese, and promote understanding between China and Germany.

Under Blumhardt’s influence, however, Wilhelm viewed the Missionary Society, of which he was formally a part, as merely an outward instrument serving the higher purpose of God’s kingdom. He was neither interested in traditional mission nor in representing Germany. He wanted something entirely new.

Blumhardt, for his part, felt a special responsibility for the work of his son-in-law, whom he had so obviously influenced. This motivated Blumhardt to write over a hundred letters to Wilhelm between 1898 and 1914..¹ Many of the selections that follow are extracts, thematically arranged, from these

Enjoying the preview?
Page 1 of 1