Eberhard Arnold came into the world an emblem of upper-middle-class German life, solidly established within the state church and society. As he grew older, he shed this identity piece by piece in his intense search for the kingdom of God – a place where everything is shared in common and where all are committed to peace.

As a teenager, Eberhard found his comfortable lifestyle challenged by the poverty and injustice he encountered in his work with the Salvation Army. His social conscience was also stirred through studying the lives of evangelists George Müller (who founded homes and schools for orphans in England) and Charles G. Finney (a popular Christian evangelist also involved in social reform, particularly the abolitionist movement in America).

In 1910 Eberhard read They Must by Hermann Kutter, a Zürich pastor. A positive evaluation of socialism and its agenda from a Christian viewpoint, They Must deeply impressed Eberhard. Although most socialist writing was aggressively atheist, Kutter recognized that social democracy shared the same goals as many of Jesus’ commandments – commandments that in his view had been watered down and misinterpreted by the churches. Others now had to preach what the church ought to be preaching and had to carry out the tasks that the church should have been doing. Eberhard once described his own spiritual development as “from Luther to Kutter.”^[1] However, Eberhard did not share Kutter’s admiration of the Social Democratic Party, and he criticized the communists’ atheism and the socialists’ optimistic belief in automatic progress. Without Jesus at the center, Eberhard believed, remedies to social problems would be merely superficial.

Eberhard began incorporating thoughts and themes from Herman Kutter into his lectures. He testified that faith demands action on behalf of social justice. The Sermon on the Mount was central to his convictions, and Bible passages about wealth and power became intensely relevant to him. Like the pastors Johann Christoph Blumhardt and his son Christoph Friedrich, Eberhard spoke of the kingdom of God as a reality on earth. Following the First World War, the fate of destitute and neglected people propelled Eberhard in a more radical direction, resulting in his vow of poverty and decision to live in community.

The war experience also changed him from an ardent supporter of the German cause to a convinced pacifist. On his regular visits to military hospitals in Berlin he listened as wounded soldiers confessed their agonizing feelings of guilt and distress of conscience.

Friedrich Wilhelm Förster, a philosopher and pacifist who taught ethics and spoke out against militarism, influenced Eberhard with his political analysis and predictions. The religious socialist Leonhard Ragaz from Zurich likewise had a profound influence on the Bruderhof fellowship, as did the pacifist socialist anarchist Gustav Landauer.

These convictions came at a cost – first, through Eberhard’s break with the Student Christian Movement and its publishing house Die Furche, which continued to support the German military; later, and more seriously, with the rise of the Nazi regime, which placed the Bruderhof under threat and ultimately necessitated its departure from Europe following Eberhard’s death.