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The Salvation Army, Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2024
Abstract
This article explores the convergences and divergences between the Salvation Army, Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof up to 1939. While the secondary literature makes passing reference to the influence of the Salvation Army on Arnold, no study has examined what it was about this movement which initially attracted him to it and would lead to lifelong appreciation of the Booths and their Army. This article addresses this gap in the literature. It argues that it was the Salvationist presentation of a living, Spirit-filled Christianity as opposed to a dead and establishment-oriented faith in Arnold's mind that best constitutes this relationship.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2024
Footnotes
The author would like to thank Captain Callum McKenna, Coretta Marchant, Major Stephen Oliver and Chris Zimmerman for their input and comments on this article. Particular thanks are due to Dr Cameron Coombe who read multiple versions of the article, contributing detailed comments and editorial suggestions.
References
1 The General of the Army, Salvation, The Salvation Army yearbook, London 2023, 40Google Scholar.
2 Bruderhof Historical Archive, Walden, NY (hereinafter cited as BHA) to author, email, June 2023.
3 The Salvation Army was expressly not established as another ‘Church’ but as a parachurch ‘mission to the unconverted’ or a ‘movement for the revival of religion’, in the phrasing of General Albert Orsborn in 1954. While it has always seen itself as part of God's people worldwide, it was only in 1998 that the revised international Handbook of doctrine began referring to the Salvation Army as a Church: ‘One very important change since the Eleven Articles were formulated and adopted is the evolution of the Movement from an agency for evangelism to a church, an evangelistic body of believers who worship, fellowship, minister and are in mission together’: the General of the Army, Salvation, Salvation story: Salvationist handbook of doctrine, London 1998, 100Google Scholar. For Salvationist ecclesiology see Taylor, D., Like a mighty army? The Salvation Army, the Church, and the Churches, Eugene, Or 2014, esp. pp. 100–47Google Scholar; Clifton, S., Who Are These Salvationists? An analysis for the 21st century, Alexandria, Va 1999Google Scholar; and P. Needham, Community in mission: a Salvationist ecclesiology St Albans 1987. The Bruderhof has a similar history of rejecting the institutional Church (Kirche) for the church community (Gemeinde). On Arnold's conception of Church as Gemeinde see M. Baum, Against the wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof, Farmington, Il 1998, 37–8, 56–8, 158–9. Baum writes as an independent journalist, though his work was edited and published by Plough, the Bruderhof press.
4 Baum's Against the wind, and I. Randall's Church community is a gift of the Holy Spirit: the spirituality of the Bruderhof community, Oxford 2014, and A Christian peace experiment: the Bruderhof community in Britain, 1933–1942, Eugene, Or 2018, all examine the influence of the Salvation Army on Eberhard Arnold. The relationship between the two movements is not a focus of any of these studies, however, and they do not look more broadly to the theological and spiritual foundations of the Salvation Army that would have appealed to Eberhard. It is this which will be the focus of this article.
5 The Hutterites are Anabaptists originating in Europe in the sixteenth century Radical Reformation from the community founded by Jakob Hutter. For a brief account of the Hutterites, and Arnold's involvement with them, see Baum, Against the wind, 72–3, 189–214.
6 The Methodist New Connexion or ‘Tom Paine Methodists’ was a splinter group within Methodism, formed in 1797 after some leaders in the Methodist Conference were concerned about power being concentrated with the ministers above the laity. The Booths' lifelong distrust of ecclesial authority, nurtured in the Connexion, would play out in the Salvation Army's theology of ordination and stress on the importance of the priesthood of all believers.
7 R. Carter-Chand, ‘Doing good in bad times: the Salvation Army in Germany, 1886–1946’, unpubl. PhD diss. Toronto 2016, 15.
8 Ibid. 87.
9 Ibid. 88.
10 ‘Die Heilsarmee’, Die Gartenlaube v (1887), 96, quoted in Carter-Chand, ‘Doing good’, 77.
11 ‘Die Heilsarmee’, Realencyclopädie für Theologie und Kirche, vii, ed. D. Albert Hauk, 3rd edn, Leipzig 1899, 587, quoted in Carter-Chand, ‘Doing good’, 88.
12 Wiggins, A. R., The history of the Salvation Army, IV: 1886–1904, Edinburgh 1964, 3Google Scholar.
13 Ibid. 8.
14 Quoted ibid. 3.
15 Carter-Chand, ‘Doing good’, 94–119.
16 Ibid. 104.
17 Ibid. 94.
18 The Salvation Army yearbook 1914, London 1913, 39.
19 Carter-Chand, ‘Doing good’, 109.
20 Baum, Against the wind, 2.
21 Ibid. 5.
22 Corrected. The English translation has ‘the Silesian Lutheran Church Counsel’: Baum, Against the wind, 8. But see Baum, Markus, ‘das Konsistorium der schlesischen evangelischen Kirche’: Eberhard Arnold: ein Leben im Geist der Bergpredigt, Schwarzenfeld 2013, 19Google Scholar.
23 Baum, Against the wind, 8.
24 Ibid.
25 Arnold, Emmy, A joyful pilgrimage: my life in community, Walden, NY 2015, 2Google Scholar.
26 C. Arnold, ‘His way: pictures from Eberhard Arnold's childhood and youth’, 1936, trans. from German, BHA, coll. 0288_05, box 12, folder 12. Archival translations of German Bruderhof sources have been edited for clarity throughout.
27 Randall, Peace experiment, 2.
28 See Eberhard Arnold, ‘The youth of Eberhard Arnold’, manuscript, Sept. 1918, BHA, <https://www.eberhardarnold.com/archive/2020/07/08/2012608201s>.
29 Baum, Against the wind, 11.
30 Ibid. 13.
31 Eberhard Arnold to Emmy von Hollander, 23 June 1907, trans. from German, BHA, coll. 0288_02.
32 Baum, Against the wind, 13.
33 Arnold, ‘His way’.
34 Ibid.
35 Eberhard Arnold to Emmy von Hollander, 29–30 June 1907, trans. from German, BHA, coll. 0288_02.
36 Baum, Against the wind, 51.
37 Emmy von Hollander to Eberhard Arnold, 18 May 1909, in E. Arnold and E. von Hollander, Love letters, Rifton, NY 2007, 266.
38 Baum, Against the wind, 125.
39 Eberhard Arnold to John Horsch, 9 Jan. 1929, BHA, <https://www.eberhardarnold.com/archive/2023/03/09/2012634504s>.
40 See Barth, E., An embassy besieged: the story of a Christian community in Nazi Germany, Eugene, Or 2010Google Scholar.
41 Randall, Peace experiment, 71.
42 Heini Arnold to Annemarie Arnold, 25 Sept. 1938, trans. from German, BHA, coll. 0005.
43 H. Arnold, meeting transcript, Cotswold Bruderhof, 26 Feb. 1939, trans. from German, BHA, coll. 0055, box 8, folder 1. Brief reference to this meeting is made in the Salvationist press: ‘Band Visits Cotswold Settlement’, The musician, London 1939, 168.
44 Baum, Against the wind, 15.
45 Quoted in de Latour Booth-Tucker, F., The life of Catherine Booth, i, New York 1892, 74Google Scholar.
46 For helpful overviews of Methodism and its interactions with wider society see David W. Bebbington, ‘Methodism and culture’, in James E. Kirby and William J. Abraham (eds), Oxford handbook of Methodist studies, Oxford 2009, 712–29, and M. Edwards, A study of the social and political influence of Methodism in the middle period (1791–1849), Eugene, Or 2013. For accounts of Methodism and Chartism see Faulkner, H. Underwood, Chartism and the Churches: a study in democracy, New York 1968CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scotland, Nigel, ‘The role of Methodism in the Chartist movement’, Themelios xxii/1 (1996), 37–46Google Scholar; and Eileen Yeo, ‘Christianity in Chartist struggle, 1838–1842,’ Past & Present no. 91 (May 1981), 109–39.
47 Walker, P. J., Pulling the devil's kingdom down: the Salvation Army in Victorian Britain, Berkeley, Ca 2001, 206–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
48 Ibid. 211.
49 Eason, Andrew, ‘“We're marching on to conquer all”: the question of imperialism in early Salvation Army music’, Word and Deed xvii/ 2 (2015), 21–32Google Scholar.
50 Quoted in Walker, Pulling the devil's kingdom down, 217.
51 Ibid. 218. For an account of the role of women in the Salvation Army and Catherine Booth's thought in particular see Murdoch, Norman H., ‘Female ministry in the thought and work of Catherine Booth’, Church History liii/3 (1984), 348–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
52 C. Booth, Popular Christianity: a series of lectures delivered in Princes Hall Piccadilly, 3rd edn, London 1891, 122.
53 Ibid. 141.
54 William Booth quoted in Booth-Tucker, F., William Booth: the general of the Salvation Army, New York 1898, 51Google Scholar.
55 Catherine Booth, ‘Mrs Booth's last public address [part 1]’, The War Cry, 18 Oct. 1890.
56 Carter-Chand, ‘Doing good’, 118–19.
57 Eberhard Arnold, meeting transcript, 22 Aug. 1934, BHA, <https://www.eberhardarnold.com/archive/2021/01/08/2012613123s>.
58 Eberhard Arnold, meeting transcript, 1 Nov. 1928, BHA, <https://www.eberhardarnold.com/archive/2020/04/24/2012607924s>. It is worth noting that as well as the Salvation Army (and the Quakers), another strand of influence upon Eberhard in this regard was clearly the reaction against liberal Protestantism represented by Karl Barth and the dialectical theologians of the German-speaking world in the early twentieth century. Eberhard read Johann and Christoph Blumhardt, who had led an evangelical renewal in the mid- to late nineteenth century and whose work profoundly impacted Barth: see Baum, Against the wind, 146–8. For an account of the Blumhardts see F. Zuendel, Johann Christoph Blumhardt: a biography, ed. Christian T. Collins Winn and Charles E. Moore, trans. Hugo Brinkmann, Walden, NY 2010. Eberhard interacted with Barth at various points in his life and was present in 1919 when Barth – fairly unknown at the time – took a conference by storm with his message of the radical ‘otherness’ of God: see Baum, Against the wind, 106–8. There is no indication that German Salvationists interacted with the work of the Blumhardts, and there is little interaction between the Salvation Army and the work of Barth, apart from Taylor's Like a mighty army which specifically draws Salvationist ecclesiology into conversation with Barth's.
59 See A. Woodall, What price the poor? William Booth, Karl Marx and the London residuum, Aldershot 2005; J. Fairbank, Booth's boots: social service beginnings in the Salvation Army, London 1983; D. Pallant, Keeping faith in faith-based organizations: a practical theology of Salvation Army health ministry, Eugene, Or 2012, 88–124; J. D. Waldron (ed.), Creed and deed – towards a Christian theology of social services in the Salvation Army, Oakville, On 1986; R. J. Green, War on two fronts: William Booth's theology of redemption, Alexandria, Va 2017; and C. McKenna, ‘“A Christian church and a registered charity”: exploring the relationship between faith and charitable action within the Salvation Army in dialogue with William Booth and Lesslie Newbigin’, unpubl. MA diss. Cambridge 2021.
60 See, for instance, Booth, C., The Salvation Army in relation to the Church and State and other addresses, London 1883, 39–40Google Scholar.
61 Booth, Popular Christianity, 129.
62 Victorian journalist and ‘chronicler of the dispossessed’ Margaret Harkness captures well the work of the Salvation Army in 1889 that would have inspired Eberhard: ‘They go to the slummers with a Bible in one hand, with the other free to nurse the sick and help the helpless. No room is too filthy for them to work or pray in; no man or women is too vile for them to call brother or sister. They penetrate into cellars where no clergyman or priest has ever entered, and spend hours among people who frighten policemen’: In darkest London, Cambridge 2003, 73.
63 Eberhard Arnold, ‘The youth of Eberhard Arnold’, manuscript, 1 Sept. 1918, BHA, <https://www.eberhardarnold.com/archive/2020/07/08/2012608201s>.
64 Idem, ‘The God Mammon’, manuscript, 1 Jan. 1924, BHA, <https://www.eberhardarnold.com/archive/2020/02/25/2012598714s>.
65 P. Palmer, Way of holiness: a narrative of religious experience resulting from a determination to be a bible Christian, New York 1849, 26–7. For more on Palmer's influence on the Booths see Taylor, Like a mighty army, 23–33.
66 C. Booth, Papers on godliness: reports of a series of addresses delivered at James's Hall, London, W., during 1881, London 1889, 114–15.
67 There is no published source of William Booth's with this quotation, but another evangelist, Dr J. Wilbur Chapman, claims to have heard it from him: Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser, 22 Oct. 1910, 2.
68 W. Booth, Purity of heart, London 2007, 50.
69 Eberhard Arnold to Emmy van Hollander, 10 Apr. 1907, in Love letters, 35.
70 Eberhard Arnold to Emmy van Hollander, 12 Nov. 1907, ibid. 163.
71 Eberhard Arnold to Emmy van Hollander, 5 July 1909, ibid. 274.
72 Arnold, Eberhard, Why we live in community, Walden, NY 2016Google Scholar (German edn 1925, rev. 1927), 19.
73 Quoted in Baum, Against the wind, 225.
74 Balz Trümpi, meeting transcript, Cotswold Bruderhof, 26 Feb. 1939, trans. from German, BHA, coll. 0055, box 8, folder 1.
75 The Booths’ eschatology was unmistakably post-millennial in the sense that it is the task of Christians in partnership with God to bring about the millennium and the Parousia. For a helpful outline of the importance of eschatology for the Booths and early Salvation Army see Andy Miller iii, ‘The good time coming: the impact of William Booth's eschatological vision’, unpubl. MA diss. Asbury Theological Seminary 2005.
76 While Eberhard's eschatology cannot be described as post-millennial, it is fair to say that, like the Booths, he put eschatology front-and-centre of his theological outlook in opposition to a Protestant liberalism which had banished it to a tangential and future-oriented aspect of Christian theology. Perhaps the best designation of Eberhard's eschatology would be ‘apocalyptic’ along the lines of the Blumhardts and Barth, where Christ's return is not pushed away into the future, nor necessarily expected imminently, but the stress is upon anticipation of God's final victory breaking through in invasive and unexpected ways into the present.
77 This is a significant theme in much early Salvationist writing. Contrasting modern, unfaithful Christianity with the biblical and Early Church witness is a major theme in Catherine Booth's Popular Christianity, as some of the previous quotations have illustrated. This was also a major theme for Eberhard Arnold who edited a volume of early church writings: The early Christians in their own words, Farmington, Ct 2007.
78 For the Salvation Army and socialism see A. R. Wiggins, The history of the Salvation Army, V: 1904–1914, London–Edinburgh 1968, 292–8, and Woodall, What price the poor? Eberhard had significant links with socialists and social democrats at various stages throughout his life but would forcefully state in 1920: ‘just as much as we support the positive demands of justice and community of the Revolution, of Socialism and Communism, we energetically deny and fight against their negative, destructive way of achieving this’: ‘Reply from Eberhard Arnold’, Sept. 1920, BHA, <https://www.eberhardarnold.com/archive/2020/02/25/2012599401s>.
79 Eberhard Arnold to Emmy von Hollander, 17 Mar. 1908, trans. from German, BHA, coll. 0288_02.
80 Eberhard Arnold to Emmy Arnold, 23 Sept. 1930, BHA, <https://www.eberhardarnold.com/archive/2023/04/05/2012636903s>. ‘Hofs’ here refers to the different Hutterite communities.
81 Eberhard Arnold, meeting transcript, Nov. 1934, BHA, <https://www.eberhardarnold.com/archive/2019/11/06/000000011527s>.
82 Arnold, Joyful pilgrimage, 4.
83 Quoted in Baum, Against the wind, 42.
84 Randall, Church community, 27–8.
85 Eberhard Arnold, meeting transcript, 18 June 1933, BHA, <https://www.eberhardarnold.com/archive/2020/10/02/2012612303s>.
86 Eberhard Arnold to his sister, Feb. 1925, BHA, <https://www.eberhardarnold.com/explore/all-articles/2019/10/10/letter-to-his-sister-hannah>.
87 Eberhard Arnold, meeting transcript, 1 July 1934, BHA, <https://www.eberhardarnold.com/archive/2019/10/29/000000011317s>.
88 Rebecca Carter-Chand criticises the Heilsarmee for naively attempting an apolitical witness in the 1930s: ‘Doing good’, 222–80, and ‘The politics of being apolitical: the Salvation Army and the Nazi revolution’, Word and Deed xviii/2 (2016), 3–32.
89 See Taylor, Like a mighty army, 124–9; Pallant, Keeping faith, 167–8.
90 Button, Christopher, ‘That all shall be one: the theological interplay of holiness and hierarchy’, Word and Deed xxv/1 (2022), 49–66Google Scholar.
91 See R. D. Rightmire, The sacramental journey of the Salvation Army: a study of holiness foundations, Alexandria, Va 2016. It is Rightmire's central thesis that pneumatology was privileged above ecclesiology and sacramental theology with regard to the Salvation Army's understanding of the sacraments. As an extension of this, Rightmire criticises (pp. 132–3) William Booth for underappreciating creation and Christology: ‘There were two crucial theological omissions, however, that have bearing on Booth's sacramental theology. One was in the area of creation and the other in the area of Christology … Whether Booth's omission of a theology of creation was conscious or not, his sacramental position nonetheless implies a depreciation of the material order in the economy of salvation. Closely connected to this is his Christological omission. While following Field with regard to evidences of Jesus’ divinity, Booth omits the discussion of the humanity of Christ. Although holding to a Chalcedonian Christology in his doctrinal statement, his spiritualized sacramental theology points in the direction of Docetism, with its denial of the mediation of the spiritual through the material.’
92 Eberhard Arnold, meeting transcript, May 1935, BHA, <https://www.eberhardarnold.com/archive/2019/11/27/000000012725s>.
93 Eberhard Arnold, meeting transcript, 8 May 1935, BHA, <https://www.eberhardarnold.com/archive/2020/04/08/2012604219s>.
94 Baum, Against the wind, 83.
95 Ibid. 89.
96 Ibid. 102.
97 Andrew M. Eason, ‘Religion in an age of empire: the Salvation Army and British imperialism, 1878–1914’, Journal of Religious History xlv/1 (2021), 91–111. Incidentally this also coincides with the death of Catherine in 1890, arguably the more systematic thinker of the two Booths and the more radical in her attitude towards the British establishment. For an account of Catherine Booth as a thinker and theologian see J. Read, Catherine Booth: laying the theological foundations of a radical movement, Eugene, Or 2013.
98 Walker, Pulling the devil's kingdom down, 242.
99 Carter-Chand, ‘Doing good’, 94–119.
100 Tomlin, Sam, ‘Conceiving the corps as a polity: the Salvation Army and Stanley Hauerwas’, Word and Deed xxii/1 (2019), 5–18Google Scholar.
101 Wiggins, History, v. 20.
102 Ibid. v. 17.
103 Carter-Chand, ‘Doing good’, 235–6.
104 See Barth, Embassy besieged. For the Heilsarmee in the 1930s see n. 88 above.