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When the Time Was Fulfilled: Christmas Meditations
The 40 short, pithy meditations in this collection witness to the fact that the birth of Jesus is more than history for those who feel their need of him.
Christmas is the season of joy for good reason: it is the news of a savior being born, of light breaking into darkness, of God's peace and goodwill to all. But joy is more than merriment. For those who only want to have a good time or a feeling of togetherness, Christmas brings a temporary feeling of cheer. But for those who feel bankrupt, without real meaning or hope - either for themselves or for the world - Christmas can be genuinely life-changing.
Christmas is the season of joy for good reason: it is the news of a savior being born, of light breaking into darkness, of God's peace and goodwill to all. But joy is more than merriment. For those who only want to have a good time or a feeling of togetherness, Christmas brings a temporary feeling of cheer. But for those who feel bankrupt, without real meaning or hope - either for themselves or for the world - Christmas can be genuinely life-changing.
166 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1996
1 person is currently reading
30 people want to read
About the author
Eberhard Arnold
70 books64 followersEberhard was born in Königsberg, East Prussia into an academic family. He studied theology but, because of his views on infant baptism and his decision to leave the Lutheran church, he was refused his degree. He changed majors to philosophy. He married Emmy von Hollander and together they dedicated their lives in obedience to God’s will. This led to the beginning of community in 1920.
Eberhard was criticized for his uncompromising faith, which cost him many friends. Not wanting to form a separate sect, he always sought out others who felt as he did. This led to a year’s trip to North America (1930-31) to visit the Hutterites. He was accepted as a minister and the Bruderhof became part of the larger Hutterian movement.
When Hitler came to power in 1933 Eberhard spoke out clearly, recognizing early on the direction German politics were taking. He spent the last years of his life preparing the Brotherhood for possible persecution. Returning from a visit to government authorities in October 1933, he slipped and broke his leg—a complicated fracture which ultimately led to his death.
Eberhard was criticized for his uncompromising faith, which cost him many friends. Not wanting to form a separate sect, he always sought out others who felt as he did. This led to a year’s trip to North America (1930-31) to visit the Hutterites. He was accepted as a minister and the Bruderhof became part of the larger Hutterian movement.
When Hitler came to power in 1933 Eberhard spoke out clearly, recognizing early on the direction German politics were taking. He spent the last years of his life preparing the Brotherhood for possible persecution. Returning from a visit to government authorities in October 1933, he slipped and broke his leg—a complicated fracture which ultimately led to his death.
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December 31, 2019Plough Publishing puts out a lot of free ebooks, which I greatly appreciate. I downloaded this one last year for Advent reading but didn’t get around to it then, so it became my Advent companion for 2019. Plough Publishing is affiliated with the Bruderhof, who are Anabaptists of sorts once affiliated with the Hutterites. Eberhard Arnold, in some sense the founder of the Bruderhof, is featured prominently in this Advent book. When Arnold was starting in publishing, he was editing a magazine called “The New Work”, which not only published religious writers like Barth and Buber, but also radical writers like Luxemburg, Kropotkin and Landauer.
I believe I first heard of the Bruderhof by way of Stanley Hauerwas who I have complex feelings towards now. This deep fascination I have with the radical ideas extolled by theologians like Hauerwas and practiced by the Bruderhof are also mixed with some uncomfortable reservations. For example, this a quote by Eberhard Arnold from this book:
“the church must represent now God’s peace and justice in our world. This is why it must be free of all actions by which human individuals are made great. This is why it cannot shed blood or tolerate private property. This is why the church cannot lie or take an oath. This is why it cannot tolerate the destruction of bridal purity and of faithfulness in the marriage of two people. This is why it lives as simply as possible in order to help as many people as possible.”
There are radical ideas about the abolition of private property, which the Bruderhof take seriously. They are Christian communists. They hold all things in common as the early Christians in the book of Acts do. They believe in the coming kindom of God, which is effused in the eschatological premise of this Advent book, but they also practice prefigurative politics now in the way they organize their communities. Yet they do not only practice a ‘communism of consumption’ as Rosa Luxemburg termed it in her essay “Socialism and the Churches”, but also a sort of ‘communism of production’. For context, this is an excerpt from Luxemburg’s essay:
“Thus the Christians of the First and Second Centuries were fervent supporters of communism. But this communism was based on the consumption of finished products and not on work, and proved itself incapable of reforming society, of putting an end to the inequality between men and throwing down the barrier which separated rich from poor. For, exactly as before, the riches created by labour came back to a restricted group of possessors, because the means of production (especially the land) remained individual property, because the labour – for the whole society – was furnished by the slaves. The people, deprived of means of subsistence, only received only alms, according to the good pleasure of the rich.”
In Bruderhof communities however, they have socialized production of various goods, although ultimately goods sold in a capitalist economy. But the dynamic of relying on the alms of the rich, as Luxemburg says, is not present in Bruderhof communities, though your life is ultimately constrained by the consensus of the community. For example, if you want to take a trip somewhere, you have to ask your community for money and explain why you want to go and they will decide if they should give you resources to go on this trip. It is not a place where the free and fancy liberal individualism that I am accustomed to thrives. Yet the Bruderhof prove a fascinating cluster of communities that have garnered the attention of even secular radicals. For example, this is a little excerpt from “Anarchy in Action”, which describes some of the collectivized production the Bruderhof engage in:
“Factory workers come and go whenever they please, and they report to no boss. "Nor is there any hierarchy within the factory," writes the ecosocialist Joel Kovel. Factories have managers, but they "have no particular authority beyond their differentiated task". The factories do not accumulate wealth beyond what is needed to support the Bruderhof's anti-consumerist, materially simple lifestyles. Adults and children work alongside each other. Workers are not paid individually. Instead, all of the revenue goes to the community.”
The Bruderhof manufacture classroom equipment and toys for children under “Community Playthings”, adaptive equipment for people with disabilities under “Rifton Equipment”, and custom signage under the name “Danthonia Designs”. The community as a whole owns the means of production: each member contributes as they are able to, and each is given as they need. There are no wages in this communism of production. Joel Kovel, in his book “The Enemy of Nature”, describe the Bruderhof in this way:
“the Bruderhof are communists. In the enterprises from which their money is made, they are all paid the same amount: nothing. Nor is there any hierarchy within the factory; there is division of labor, of course, but no boss. The plant managers have no particular authority beyond their differentiated task. A visitor to the plant is greeted with a starkly different scene from that which obtains in the standard capitalist workplace. Workers self-direct, come and go at different hours, punch no time-clocks. Time is not bound, nor is work dominated by considerations of productivity. Octogenarians and seven-year-old children work side by side as they please, sharing in the labor. There is no contradiction between this relatively indifferent productivity and the profitability of their factories, because the Bruderhof are not driven to accumulate and increase market share, but are content with sufficient incremental profit to meet their needs, which is made possible by the technology at their disposal. Work is driven by the desire to make fine objects and the larger ends to which it is put.
Third, being communists, the Bruderhof hold “all things in common.” Beyond a few minor personal possessions, they have no individual property – no cars, no DVD players, no designer jeans, no subscriptions to Self and Connoisseur magazines.”
However, as you might have gleaned from that Arnold quote, the Bruderhof retain certain views on sexuality. There have been documented cases of homophobic engagements with other peace activists, for example, which is mentioned Joel Kovel mentions in an endnote from his Bruderhof chapter:
“Bruderhof are very strongly homophobic; for example, they went out of their way to try to close gay bars in their vicinity, and they refused to join coalitions against the death penalty in which gay rights groups participated. Within the commune, though women have a definite voice, there is also distinct inequality, for example, in dress code, where the men can wear what they please while the women must wear traditional calico. Furthermore, divorce is forbidden. Moreover, the moral authority of the community devolves from the paternal voice of the Arnold family. There are signs that the generation coming up may see things differently; it will be interesting to follow this development. But in general, it remains harder for radical religions to give up patriarchal than class domination.”
If one ever needs an example of why dismantling capitalism will not end the many other facets of oppression, they need not turn much farther than the Bruderhof. And I will place an Arnold quote here that I think is relevant, because I know so many of my queer friends face oppression in their faith communities because of their identity and the eradication of this sort of oppression is also part of my own eschatological faith:
“The Lord is the Spirit, and the Spirit frees us from oppression of all kinds. The spirit of expectation is the spirit of action because it is the spirit of faith. Faith is bravery. Faith is reality. He who has faith cannot believe that anything is impossible, since faith is what gives us the clear vision of life’s ultimate powers. It discloses God’s heart to us as the pulse of the entire living creation, and it gives us the conviction that the secret of life is love.”
However, I cannot generalize to every member of the Bruderhof. I’m sure there are people within some Bruderhof communities who hold dissenting convictions, as Joel Kovel hinted at. And I know that many are willing to hear dissenting opinions out. For example, the Bruderhof are pacifists of sorts, as the Arnold quote I started with shows, but this book is also full of excerpts from the writings of Alfred Delp, who was involved in the Kreisau Circle’s July 20 Plot to overthrow Hitler (the same one Bonhoeffer was involved in, as many evangelicals seem to know). Delp would eventually be executed by the Gestapo. There were many Delp quotes I enjoyed in this book, but I wanted to start with this one:
“Christmas is not only a historic event that happened once... Christmas is the promise of a new order of things, of life, of our existence."
If Christmas fails to retain its revolutionary raison d’etre for Christians, as a site for a radical social change, joining hands with the majority beyond the Church engaging in such work, then Christians have lost the spirit of Christmas. Unlike Rod Dreher's reactionary reading of the Bruderhof as a community in retreat, I'm far more interested in how such communities can be sites of transformation for wider society. That is what Christmas means to me. It is not a regressive act of nostalgia trying to recapture a lost paradise, but about the city of the future. As Jesus said: "Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these..." This is a humorous quote I encountered by the Nicaraguan liberation theologian Ernesto Cardenal that speaks to the revolutionary impulse of Christmas for Christians:
“I told [my friends] that I approved of the shift of Christmas to the 26th of July, [the anniversary of the Cuban Revolution,] even though many Catholics thought of it as a profanation. The primitive Church celebrated the birth of Christ on the 6th of January…and the feast was later moved to the 25th of December because on that date the Romans celebrated the birth of the sun… Wasn’t it better to celebrate the birth of Jesus on the birthday of the Revolution than on the birthday of the sun?”
This Plough book is probably one of the more traditionally religious books I read this year, but once in a while I'd bump into Delp going a little anarcho-primativist, which I found enjoyable:
“Woe to an age when the voices of those who cry in the wilderness have fallen silent, out-shouted by the noise of the day or outlawed or swallowed up in the intoxication of progress, or smothered and growing fainter for fear and cowardice. The devastation of our time will soon be so terrifying and universal that the word “wilderness” will readily slip off our tongues. This is already happening. But there are still no crying voices to raise their plaint and accusation. Not for an hour can life dispense with these John-the-Baptist characters…”
And another thing by Delp that is wonderfully written:
“Poets and myth-makers and other tellers of stories and fairy tales have often spoken of mothers. Sometimes they meant the earth; other times, nature. By this word they tried to disclose the mysterious creative fount of all things, to conjure up the welling mystery of life. In all this there was hunger and anticipation and longing and Advent- waiting for this blessed woman. That God became a mother’s son; that there could be a woman walking the earth whose womb was consecrated to be the holy temple and tabernacle of God…”
Finally, there is Christoph Blumhardt, the other of the three authors featured in the book. Blumhardt was a Christian Socialist and member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (which draws its lineage back to the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany, to which Marx and Engels were involved in). With characteristically socialist emphasis, Blumhardt demands human action, not passivity in this little Advent excerpt:
“For this reason God’s time depends partly on us. If we follow God’s word faithfully, if we understand the ways of God and hold firmly to the goal, the last days will come… When the Word of God becomes true through faith, something is made ready in the hearts of people… Preparations for this can begin already. When it matures in our hearts, it will spread rapidly throughout the world; then the Last Day will come, the last, great Christmas!”
The great paradox in Christianity is that we claimed Jesus as our Messiah, but oppression and exploitation are still abundantly with us. Yet Advent is a moment to indulge the radical messianic impulse we cannot escape within us, one which Christianity received from Judaism (whether it is an arrival or rearrival, is not of importance to me, but rather that there is hope of another world), and shares with many other faiths including Islam, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, et al. To finish with an Arnold quote:
“But at any moment the resplendent abundance of prophetic reality can break in upon our poverty and shame. In the prophetic word God’s loving will takes shape on earth… This God has laid his Spirit in a special way upon the One who is to proclaim justice to the peoples and who will never weary until he has founded righteousness upon the earth (Isa. 42:1–4). The Spirit of God in its unique fullness – the spirit of understanding and power – shall be upon the Child, so that he can judge the needy and the poor with equity and smite the oppressors with his word (Isa. 11:1–4).”
I believe I first heard of the Bruderhof by way of Stanley Hauerwas who I have complex feelings towards now. This deep fascination I have with the radical ideas extolled by theologians like Hauerwas and practiced by the Bruderhof are also mixed with some uncomfortable reservations. For example, this a quote by Eberhard Arnold from this book:
“the church must represent now God’s peace and justice in our world. This is why it must be free of all actions by which human individuals are made great. This is why it cannot shed blood or tolerate private property. This is why the church cannot lie or take an oath. This is why it cannot tolerate the destruction of bridal purity and of faithfulness in the marriage of two people. This is why it lives as simply as possible in order to help as many people as possible.”
There are radical ideas about the abolition of private property, which the Bruderhof take seriously. They are Christian communists. They hold all things in common as the early Christians in the book of Acts do. They believe in the coming kindom of God, which is effused in the eschatological premise of this Advent book, but they also practice prefigurative politics now in the way they organize their communities. Yet they do not only practice a ‘communism of consumption’ as Rosa Luxemburg termed it in her essay “Socialism and the Churches”, but also a sort of ‘communism of production’. For context, this is an excerpt from Luxemburg’s essay:
“Thus the Christians of the First and Second Centuries were fervent supporters of communism. But this communism was based on the consumption of finished products and not on work, and proved itself incapable of reforming society, of putting an end to the inequality between men and throwing down the barrier which separated rich from poor. For, exactly as before, the riches created by labour came back to a restricted group of possessors, because the means of production (especially the land) remained individual property, because the labour – for the whole society – was furnished by the slaves. The people, deprived of means of subsistence, only received only alms, according to the good pleasure of the rich.”
In Bruderhof communities however, they have socialized production of various goods, although ultimately goods sold in a capitalist economy. But the dynamic of relying on the alms of the rich, as Luxemburg says, is not present in Bruderhof communities, though your life is ultimately constrained by the consensus of the community. For example, if you want to take a trip somewhere, you have to ask your community for money and explain why you want to go and they will decide if they should give you resources to go on this trip. It is not a place where the free and fancy liberal individualism that I am accustomed to thrives. Yet the Bruderhof prove a fascinating cluster of communities that have garnered the attention of even secular radicals. For example, this is a little excerpt from “Anarchy in Action”, which describes some of the collectivized production the Bruderhof engage in:
“Factory workers come and go whenever they please, and they report to no boss. "Nor is there any hierarchy within the factory," writes the ecosocialist Joel Kovel. Factories have managers, but they "have no particular authority beyond their differentiated task". The factories do not accumulate wealth beyond what is needed to support the Bruderhof's anti-consumerist, materially simple lifestyles. Adults and children work alongside each other. Workers are not paid individually. Instead, all of the revenue goes to the community.”
The Bruderhof manufacture classroom equipment and toys for children under “Community Playthings”, adaptive equipment for people with disabilities under “Rifton Equipment”, and custom signage under the name “Danthonia Designs”. The community as a whole owns the means of production: each member contributes as they are able to, and each is given as they need. There are no wages in this communism of production. Joel Kovel, in his book “The Enemy of Nature”, describe the Bruderhof in this way:
“the Bruderhof are communists. In the enterprises from which their money is made, they are all paid the same amount: nothing. Nor is there any hierarchy within the factory; there is division of labor, of course, but no boss. The plant managers have no particular authority beyond their differentiated task. A visitor to the plant is greeted with a starkly different scene from that which obtains in the standard capitalist workplace. Workers self-direct, come and go at different hours, punch no time-clocks. Time is not bound, nor is work dominated by considerations of productivity. Octogenarians and seven-year-old children work side by side as they please, sharing in the labor. There is no contradiction between this relatively indifferent productivity and the profitability of their factories, because the Bruderhof are not driven to accumulate and increase market share, but are content with sufficient incremental profit to meet their needs, which is made possible by the technology at their disposal. Work is driven by the desire to make fine objects and the larger ends to which it is put.
Third, being communists, the Bruderhof hold “all things in common.” Beyond a few minor personal possessions, they have no individual property – no cars, no DVD players, no designer jeans, no subscriptions to Self and Connoisseur magazines.”
However, as you might have gleaned from that Arnold quote, the Bruderhof retain certain views on sexuality. There have been documented cases of homophobic engagements with other peace activists, for example, which is mentioned Joel Kovel mentions in an endnote from his Bruderhof chapter:
“Bruderhof are very strongly homophobic; for example, they went out of their way to try to close gay bars in their vicinity, and they refused to join coalitions against the death penalty in which gay rights groups participated. Within the commune, though women have a definite voice, there is also distinct inequality, for example, in dress code, where the men can wear what they please while the women must wear traditional calico. Furthermore, divorce is forbidden. Moreover, the moral authority of the community devolves from the paternal voice of the Arnold family. There are signs that the generation coming up may see things differently; it will be interesting to follow this development. But in general, it remains harder for radical religions to give up patriarchal than class domination.”
If one ever needs an example of why dismantling capitalism will not end the many other facets of oppression, they need not turn much farther than the Bruderhof. And I will place an Arnold quote here that I think is relevant, because I know so many of my queer friends face oppression in their faith communities because of their identity and the eradication of this sort of oppression is also part of my own eschatological faith:
“The Lord is the Spirit, and the Spirit frees us from oppression of all kinds. The spirit of expectation is the spirit of action because it is the spirit of faith. Faith is bravery. Faith is reality. He who has faith cannot believe that anything is impossible, since faith is what gives us the clear vision of life’s ultimate powers. It discloses God’s heart to us as the pulse of the entire living creation, and it gives us the conviction that the secret of life is love.”
However, I cannot generalize to every member of the Bruderhof. I’m sure there are people within some Bruderhof communities who hold dissenting convictions, as Joel Kovel hinted at. And I know that many are willing to hear dissenting opinions out. For example, the Bruderhof are pacifists of sorts, as the Arnold quote I started with shows, but this book is also full of excerpts from the writings of Alfred Delp, who was involved in the Kreisau Circle’s July 20 Plot to overthrow Hitler (the same one Bonhoeffer was involved in, as many evangelicals seem to know). Delp would eventually be executed by the Gestapo. There were many Delp quotes I enjoyed in this book, but I wanted to start with this one:
“Christmas is not only a historic event that happened once... Christmas is the promise of a new order of things, of life, of our existence."
If Christmas fails to retain its revolutionary raison d’etre for Christians, as a site for a radical social change, joining hands with the majority beyond the Church engaging in such work, then Christians have lost the spirit of Christmas. Unlike Rod Dreher's reactionary reading of the Bruderhof as a community in retreat, I'm far more interested in how such communities can be sites of transformation for wider society. That is what Christmas means to me. It is not a regressive act of nostalgia trying to recapture a lost paradise, but about the city of the future. As Jesus said: "Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these..." This is a humorous quote I encountered by the Nicaraguan liberation theologian Ernesto Cardenal that speaks to the revolutionary impulse of Christmas for Christians:
“I told [my friends] that I approved of the shift of Christmas to the 26th of July, [the anniversary of the Cuban Revolution,] even though many Catholics thought of it as a profanation. The primitive Church celebrated the birth of Christ on the 6th of January…and the feast was later moved to the 25th of December because on that date the Romans celebrated the birth of the sun… Wasn’t it better to celebrate the birth of Jesus on the birthday of the Revolution than on the birthday of the sun?”
This Plough book is probably one of the more traditionally religious books I read this year, but once in a while I'd bump into Delp going a little anarcho-primativist, which I found enjoyable:
“Woe to an age when the voices of those who cry in the wilderness have fallen silent, out-shouted by the noise of the day or outlawed or swallowed up in the intoxication of progress, or smothered and growing fainter for fear and cowardice. The devastation of our time will soon be so terrifying and universal that the word “wilderness” will readily slip off our tongues. This is already happening. But there are still no crying voices to raise their plaint and accusation. Not for an hour can life dispense with these John-the-Baptist characters…”
And another thing by Delp that is wonderfully written:
“Poets and myth-makers and other tellers of stories and fairy tales have often spoken of mothers. Sometimes they meant the earth; other times, nature. By this word they tried to disclose the mysterious creative fount of all things, to conjure up the welling mystery of life. In all this there was hunger and anticipation and longing and Advent- waiting for this blessed woman. That God became a mother’s son; that there could be a woman walking the earth whose womb was consecrated to be the holy temple and tabernacle of God…”
Finally, there is Christoph Blumhardt, the other of the three authors featured in the book. Blumhardt was a Christian Socialist and member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (which draws its lineage back to the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany, to which Marx and Engels were involved in). With characteristically socialist emphasis, Blumhardt demands human action, not passivity in this little Advent excerpt:
“For this reason God’s time depends partly on us. If we follow God’s word faithfully, if we understand the ways of God and hold firmly to the goal, the last days will come… When the Word of God becomes true through faith, something is made ready in the hearts of people… Preparations for this can begin already. When it matures in our hearts, it will spread rapidly throughout the world; then the Last Day will come, the last, great Christmas!”
The great paradox in Christianity is that we claimed Jesus as our Messiah, but oppression and exploitation are still abundantly with us. Yet Advent is a moment to indulge the radical messianic impulse we cannot escape within us, one which Christianity received from Judaism (whether it is an arrival or rearrival, is not of importance to me, but rather that there is hope of another world), and shares with many other faiths including Islam, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, et al. To finish with an Arnold quote:
“But at any moment the resplendent abundance of prophetic reality can break in upon our poverty and shame. In the prophetic word God’s loving will takes shape on earth… This God has laid his Spirit in a special way upon the One who is to proclaim justice to the peoples and who will never weary until he has founded righteousness upon the earth (Isa. 42:1–4). The Spirit of God in its unique fullness – the spirit of understanding and power – shall be upon the Child, so that he can judge the needy and the poor with equity and smite the oppressors with his word (Isa. 11:1–4).”
January 7, 2025
40 Christmas Meditations from 3 differing authors. Some hit the mark with bright clarity & others not so much as you might expect. Each chapter is short so ideal for Advent Devotionals
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