Rocky Cape Christian Community

The Cannon Ball -- woodcut from Johann Arndt's 1605 book "Wahres Christentum" (True Christianity).

 
This is a cannon ball. It sits perfectly balanced, and comfortably, in any position. Only the tiniest part of it touches the earth. So it is with the true Christian. No matter where he comes to rest he keeps his balance. Contact with the earth is his smallest concern and he lives surrounded by things above.
 
* * * * *
 
The first spiritual writing, apart from the Bible, that fascinated me was my great-grandfather's tattered copy of Johann Arndt's "Wahres Christentum."
 
Regularly, when I came home from school, I would pull a chair up to my Dad's high book cupboard (Bücherschrank) and pull out "that book" -- 's Buch -- as my great-grandfather called it. Even though he died before my time, my Dad remembered how when things got rough, when everything started to go in circles, my great-grandfather would say, "Ja wohl, ich denk ich besse geh un les mal widde in mei'm Buch" (Very well, I had better go and read my book again.) And the older I grew, the better I knew why.
 
Johann Arndt, even though he served as a court preacher to a Lutheran prince, had made an important discovery. Jesus is easy to understand. Any simple person can follow him. If we wake up with Jesus in the morning and walk with him through the day, we begin to see Jesus, the Truth, shining from everything around us. Like Hans Hut, an early Anabaptist, had written nearly two hundred years earlier:
 
Christ revealed the secret of the Kingdom of God to common people. He spoke of ordinary work-related things, familiar to them. What he never did was point them to books of theology like religious experts do in our time.  

Christ taught people while working with them. To farmers he spoke about seeds and weeds. . . . To husbandmen he spoke about grapes and vines. To seamstresses he spoke about patching clothes. To merchants he spoke about buying pearls. To hired hands he spoke about reaping and threshing grain. To woodcutters he spoke about chopping down trees, and to shepherds he spoke about sheep. To household managers he spoke about buying and selling goods, to butchers he spoke about meat, to secretaries he spoke about keeping accounts, to mothers he spoke about having children. And Paul, in his turn, explains the entire nature of the church by describing the human body. So, we see that the Gospel of the Kingdom gets preached, not through men’s wisdom but through ordinary created things.

* * * * *

"Je härter Krieg, je edler Sieg" (the harder the battle, the more noble the victory) goes the caption for another of Johann Arndt's pictures:

This is a pile of green, sappy, wood. It is burning slowly, making much smoke and little light. But when the green wood dries out and the fire takes over, the smoke diminishes and light breaks out. So it is with the new Christian. As long as the Spirit’s fire struggles with the old sap of the flesh his testimony remains dim. But when the Spirit overcomes the flesh, the heat and light of his testimony shine.

* * * * *

Johann Arndt's wisdom, long relegated to obscurity in Braunschweig and Eisleben, where he lived, survives in unlikely spots today. When his books (that caused him so much trouble in Lutheran Germany) got to Moravia, they stirred up a remnant of believers that fled north to establish a Christian community at Hernnhut in Saxony.
 
When his books got smuggled into Catholic Austria they began a revival in Kärnten that resulted in the Hofers, Waldners, Glanzers, Kleinsassers, Wurtzes and others, getting converted and saving the Hutterites from extinction.
 
In the Rhein valley of Germany, Arndt's writings set another revival in motion that resulted in the conversion of Alexander Mack and "the Brethren" (Dunkards).
 
In Russia, Johann Arndt's writings stirred the Mennonites into their greatest "awakening" since the 1500s -- a spiritual revival that produced both the Brüdergemeinde (Mennonite Brethren) and the Kleingemeinde.
 
Known as the "father of German Pietism" (a movement much attacked and criticised in our time) his books are kept in print by the Amish and Old Order Mennonites of North America.
 
The fire still smokes, but the cannon ball, praise God, has kept its balance well.
 
Peter
 
Rocky Cape Christian Community
19509 Bass Highway
Detention River, Tasmania 7321
Australia
www.thecommonlife.com.au