Eberhard Arnold Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Eberhard Arnold (1883, 1935) was a German theologian, pastor, and communal founder whose search for an authentic Christian discipleship led to the establishment of the Bruderhof movement. Born in East Prussia, he grew up in a Protestant home shaped by church life and the currents of late nineteenth-century German culture. As a young man he studied theology and related fields at German universities, where he encountered both academic criticism and the fervor of revival movements. Early influences included the preaching of the pastor-theologians Johann Christoph Blumhardt and Christoph Blumhardt, who called for expectant faith in God's kingdom, and the writings of the early Anabaptists, whose insistence on believers' baptism, nonviolence, and community of goods impressed him deeply.

Conversion, Marriage, and Early Ministry
In his student years and early adulthood, Arnold underwent a decisive inner conversion that turned his interests from academic achievement toward practical discipleship. He became active as a speaker and writer in evangelical and student circles and was drawn to social outreach among the poor. In Berlin he worked as an editor and lecturer, seeking language that would call readers to the Sermon on the Mount. His marriage to Emmy (Emilie von Hollander) gave him a lifelong partner in faith and work. Emmy Arnold was a decisive presence at every step: she shared the housework of hospitality, wrote and edited, stood beside him in public controversy, and eventually chronicled their years together and the formative experiences of the community they founded. Together they opened their home to seekers disillusioned by church formalism and by the devastations of World War I.

Founding the Bruderhof
In 1920, driven by the conviction that the gospel demanded a shared life beyond private charity and Sunday religion, Eberhard and Emmy gathered a small group in Sannerz, in central Germany. This experiment matured into the first Bruderhof, a community where possessions were shared, daily work and prayer were joined, and hospitality to guests was taken as a basic calling. Children grew up in the midst of worship and labor, including their son Johann Heinrich (known as Heini), who later became an elder in the movement. The group launched a publishing work that became Plough Publishing House, a vehicle for their testimony and for voices across the Christian tradition calling people to concrete discipleship. Arnold's teaching emphasized Jesus' call to leave everything and follow, the renunciation of violence, and a church life that was both sacramental and social.

Encounter with the Hutterites and the Anabaptist Tradition
Arnold's study of sixteenth-century Anabaptism had long kindled his imagination. Names such as Jakob Hutter and Peter Riedemann were not for him remote figures; their confessions and communal rules seemed directly relevant to the twentieth century. Seeking living continuity with this heritage, he traveled to North America in 1930 to meet the Hutterian Brethren. The Hutterite elders recognized a spiritual kinship with the Bruderhof and affirmed Arnold's leadership, while he in turn pledged to align the community with the tested church order of the Hutterites. From this point, the Bruderhof explicitly embraced believers' baptism, disciplined community of goods, and conscientious objection as nonnegotiable marks of the church.

Conflict with the Nazi Regime
With the rise of National Socialism after 1933, the Bruderhof's public stance brought intense pressure. The community's refusal to support militarism, its insistence on the authority of Christ over state ideology, and its practice of international fellowship were intolerable to the regime. Police searches, surveillance, and the closure of the community's school followed. Arnold, as the community's founder and leading voice, endured interrogations and repeated legal obstacles, but he held fast to nonviolence and to the primacy of conscience. He sought paths of legal protection and, when necessary, prepared for emigration, always counseling his people to meet hostility with patience and love.

Writings and Teaching
Arnold's books and talks sprang from lived experience. Inner Land, a collection of meditations and exhortations, urged readers to recover an inner life that would bear fruit in outward justice and brotherhood. Why We Live in Community explained, often in simple, practical terms, the theological and human reasons for a shared economy, common education of children, and work as service. He wrote letters tirelessly, counseled individuals in crisis, and edited essays by other voices he considered sound guides. While scholarly by training, he aimed at clarity, drawing on Scripture, Anabaptist sources, and voices like the Blumhardts to insist that Jesus' teaching must be enacted in concrete social forms.

Family, Colleagues, and Community Life
Throughout, Emmy Arnold remained his closest collaborator, shouldering leadership burdens, nurturing the young, and testing decisions against Scripture and conscience. Their son Johann Heinrich (Heini) grew into responsibility among the youth of the community and, after his father's death, helped carry forward the Bruderhof's spiritual discipline. The Hutterian leaders across the Atlantic, though distant, were a constant reference point and source of counsel. Within the Bruderhof, a circle of co-workers shared teaching, administration, and the daily rounds of agriculture, crafts, and publishing; this collective leadership embodied Arnold's conviction that authority must serve, not dominate.

Final Years and Death
Strain and illness marked Arnold's final period, even as he continued to write, preach, and shepherd the community. He worked to stabilize the Bruderhof amid persecution, explored options for resettlement, and strengthened bonds with the Hutterites. In 1935 he died, leaving a community under pressure but spiritually consolidated. Emmy and the brothers and sisters around her bore the responsibility of guiding the Bruderhof through the next steps, including the departure from Germany and a difficult pilgrimage that took them to safer ground.

Legacy
Eberhard Arnold's legacy lies in a lived interpretation of the gospel that wove together worship, shared property, reconciliation, and peacemaking. The Bruderhof communities that trace their origin to Sannerz continue to embody this vision, and Plough Publishing House preserves and circulates his voice alongside others who call for radical discipleship. Through the lives of Emmy Arnold and Johann Heinrich Arnold, and through continued fellowship with the Hutterian Brethren, his aims outlived the turbulent decades in which he worked. For many readers and visitors, his life remains a sign that the Sermon on the Mount is not an ideal to admire from afar, but a social reality to be entered, together, in faith.

Our collection contains 2 quotes who is written by Eberhard, under the main topics: Wisdom - Parenting.