Eberhard Arnold

Meeting Transcript, 1934

[Arnold, Eberhard and Emmy papers - T.S.H.]

[Draft Translation by Bruderhof Historical Archive]

EA 225

The New People of God and its City on a Hill

A Call to Gathering for All who earnestly wish to become Christian

Eberhard Arnold, 1934

Word Leader of the Bruderhof in Germany

Section 1

The New Covenant replaced Israel, the earlier people of God that had been led out of Egypt and had striven to reach the Promised Land. This did not come about through a body of churchgoers of a so-called Christianity, but rather simply and solely by the people purified to become a people belonging to God (Titus 2); the holy people who belong to Him (1 Peter 2); the new people of God whose members truly believe in Christ, who stand in grace and proclaim the full pure light (1Peter 2); the new people whose members all know God and receive forgiveness of sins in Christ (Heb. 8); the people who are brothers and whose sins have been atoned for by the new High Priest (Heb 2. 17). Only this people who possess the fruit of the Spirit is entrusted with God’s kingdom in our present time (Mat. 21, 43).

If we want to compare the conditions of our days to the way through the desert, to the tabernacle and the encampment during the wanderings long ago, then the only possible comparison for the old people of God is a new people of God, without adding or inserting anything alien, without anything invented by humankind, without mixing in anything to do with the fall that took place within human history, as might be done by the Christians-in-name only, who may in no way be compared or confused with the people of God in this respect.

The New Testament compares the new people with the old people. This comparison, in which the new dwelling of God is set above the old tabernacle, is made by the Holy Spirit and is given in the Letter to the Hebrews, and we must not deviate from this revelation of the truth if we want to base our beliefs on the same Holy Spirit which inspired both the Letter to the Hebrews and Revelation. No one should dare make personal alterations to the words of the prophecy. What a serious warning, given by Jesus Christ, is at the end of the Revelation! (Rev. 22, 18-21) This is true for the whole of Scripture. There is only the one new tent of witness and revelation, and for the present era of the gospel only this corresponds with the old tabernacle of the time of pilgrimage and the later temple established in Jerusalem. According to the decisive apostolic councils in Jerusalem (Acts 15), continual new building is done through the cleansing of hearts and the gift of the Holy Spirit. In salvation through the grace of Jesus Christ, one people is continuously gathered from among all the peoples to bear his name as the newly made dwelling of God. This is the new people of God which shall have no unnecessary burden placed on it: no such burden as, at that time, the outward circumcision for the Jewish nation, or, today, the corresponding child baptism of the great churches (Acts 15, 14-16).

God’s holy dwelling or even the encampment of his city of God is no longer seen in any building constructed by human hands and having tower or spire. God will not grant even the slightest preference to parts of the earth that are said to be Christian. He will not regard races that have adopted Christianity as having even the smallest degree of advantage. Instead the whole heaven and earth are throne and footstool for his dwelling (Acts 7). His worship is no longer to be regarded as rightly offered from a place or temple built by human hands, from a church with a bell tower, or in a church or a service with fixed forms and words. It is to be seen simply and solely in spirit and in truth (John 4). No church prayers and no liturgy or formal church worship shall be held with those who are Christians in nothing but the name. God wants only those to call on him who, gripped by his spirit, are ready to receive his words of truth without twisting them, and to follow them in every area of their lives. That is why the Letter to the Hebrews says: We are God’s house as long as we listen to the voice of his Holy Spirit (Hebrews 3). The will of God is to be done on earth as it is in heaven. His kingdom shall come on earth.

God rules and dwells in another world which we cannot understand with our earthly senses. But Jesus brought his kingdom to the people on earth. Christ, as the high priest of a new people of God, has passed through the higher dwelling place of a heavenly sanctuary so that in the Holy Spirit it may come right down and reach believing people on this earth. It comes to humankind as God’s new dwelling place. As coming from God’s heaven, as the only place fit for God, this dwelling can be built only by God, never by human beings. God’s name can be hallowed by himself alone. God’s people and God’s church can be created through him alone. It is the church sanctuary of the heavens (See Hebrews 8) for which we pray: “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Hallowing his name, treating it as holy, means that God himself will be revealed in the innermost place of God’s dwelling. Under the old covenant the people had to hold their worship meetings of God in the outer court. The new gathering through the cross of Christ has ended this gathering in a separate place, for it has access to the Most Holy Place, to God himself.

The old tent of the Lord’s presence, like the temple in Jerusalem that followed it, was part of the first creation and its history of the nations. But God’s dwelling in our present time does not belong, as in the past epoch of creation, with its human beings and their national histories. Instead their priest, who is Christ, rules through the Holy Spirit over the future age which is a new creation: God’s heavenly order for his final kingdom (Hebrews 9)! The old nomadic camp of the Semitic people, just like every world city among all nations of the present day, had a separate and especially isolated tent or house of God, a provisional temple of God which must be sharply distinguished from the ordinary dwellings and work places of the people. The final kingdom, however, which will be God’s final dwelling place, is God’s city for God’s people. The church of Christ, as the embassy belonging to this kingdom, is never simply a temple and nothing else, never a church building which is built to a different design from the people’s homes. It is a city on a hill. In the church of Jesus Christ, people’s living place and God’s dwelling, city life and church, community of work and community of faith, city of God and temple have become one, just as the holy place and the Most Holy Place have done. The narrow gate to the way of Jesus is the door to the new city of God, for it is the gate to the dwelling place of the people of the new covenant. Here the whole of life has become worship in the Most Holy Place.

As righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit the entire future kingdom of God is brought to reality in the life of the church community. The kingdom should become a reality here and now in the whole life of the believing and loving church (Rom. 14, 17 and 18). Life in the camp and worship in the Most Holy Place, city life and temple service, the “social” and the “religious”, the love to God and love to one’s neighbor have come together. They are at one in the common life of the church of Jesus Christ. To the extent that the new people of God truly follow him in genuine surrender to him, both have become the same. For only in this way shall it come about that one day, the last day of all, the heavenly sanctuary of witness and revelation shall be so completely opened that the whole city of God as the one dwelling place of all people of God comes down from heaven. Only then will God’s dwelling place be with men and this, of course, means a new earth for all men.

The true people does not have a temple. Without any division between the tabernacle of God and its own encampment, everything is lit through and through in the light of God. With all its life and activity it remains in the light of the sanctuary and therefore completely under the rulership of the kingdom of God, just as this rulership, which he himself appointed to govern, shall one day reign over everything without exception (Rev. 15, 5 and chapters 21 and 22). In the believing church of Jesus Christ, which is living together here and now, united and active in God’s love, this goal of his future has become present reality through the Holy Spirit. It is not the prince of the earth, as the spirit of the times in the world and therefore the evil god of the world, but it is the God and Father of Jesus Christ who is the one and only ruler and director for the city of God that is the church. That is why the dragon and its beast raise their blasphemies against the city of God, against the church that exists here and now. They attack the united life of God’s dwelling for his new people. They rise up against all those who, with their whole way of life within the camp, are consecrated to God and his dwelling. Their fight is directed against God and therefore against all people whose life is in unity with his dwelling place and without any distancing from it whatsoever. The powers of the abyss rage against these with such indescribable force that nearly every one of them becomes a worshiper of the overpowering might of the beast. Great and small, rich and poor, slave and free take his sign on their arm or on their brows. The whole inhabited world will allow only those people to live, and only those people to buy and sell who openly display the sign of the beast. In this way the whole inhabited world becomes one single camp of all nations that is completely opposite in every way from the community life of God’s people of the new covenant.

The national life everywhere in the world is in opposition and at enmity to God’s house of his covenant. What we speak of here is the whole world, which is in fact anti-Christian. We speak of all people, whether Jewish, Arian or non Arian. Not the slightest claim to any connection with Christ or to a Christian church in however weakened a sense may be made for this dwelling place for all nations that includes the whole earth. The spirit of Christ bears witness that it lies outside. Whatever lies outside the city of God belongs to the world separated from Christ.

In comparison to the church of Christ there is no difference at all between Christians in name only and the Jewish or heathen world. Absolute difference exists between the city of God and everything outside it. One totally excludes the other: this is why there is always an ultimate martyrdom in discipleship under the cross, when the world must be left behind for the sake of the city of God. Jesus was led out of the city belonging to this world because he was to be crucified (Mark 15, 20). In ancient times the dead bodies from the blood sacrifices were burned outside the camp (Lev. 31, 19). Jesus had to endure execution and death outside the habitations of men, beyond the gates of their city. In all eras the people’s king sent by God is met with rejection. From the moment Jesus—despised by all the Greeks and cast out by the Romans and the Jews—was brought to his death, the people of the city of God have had no permanent place to live on this present earth. Nowhere—and it is represented as “God’s” will—are they able or intended to remain in a place of their own. The only place they can settle is in the future city! The future encampment of God’s people is the only place where they can stay. They seek for this alone (Heb. 13). It is their homeland, their fatherland and motherland. And so they all have to say: “We want to leave and go to Jesus who has been rejected! We must be outside the camp as he was and share in his disgrace.” The shame of his execution must be carried. Today, just as in Jesus’ time this departure takes place in stark reality. Again and again it must happen, starting in the heart and leading to outward action, first of all in leaving all houses and homes and concerns of the unjust world, and then in enduring the inevitable onset of continuous hostility—finally and at the very end, in a martyr’s death. The people of the covenant had to be led out of Egypt and all its unjust enslavement. The same people later left the towns to find John the Baptist, though still knowing only the Old Testament at that time. Finally Jesus called his disciples away from the places where they carried on their daily occupations—this time as a decisive break and for always. And just in the same way the spirit of Jesus Christ calls to all believers today: “Leave the city that will not listen to you!” (Luke 9, 5). “Go out from among those who cannot share a yoke with you because of their unbelief, people with whom you cannot mingle because of their wrong actions, people where the light entrusted to you must not be mixed in with their darkness.” You must go out to the new tabernacle, to the new camping place for the people. You are to belong to the temple of God. You shall break away and go to the pure dwelling of God, to live in that new place which is both the city of God and the city of his people!

Christ never makes an agreement with the devil. Those who believe in him can have no kind of community with those who do not believe, neither as a “church” nor as a community on a purely social basis! (2 Cor. 6). From now on the endangered “Corinthians” must not touch anything unclean, anything mixed or all-inclusive, above all any confusion of the true worship of God with the practices of other religions. The reason is clear: “You are the temple, which is like God’s tabernacle. You are the dwelling of God for the new covenant of nations! God wants to dwell among you: God, who is pure, the spirit of God and Jesus Christ who is not to be confused with any other spirit. He can do this only when the whole city you live in, with all its work places, is filled with his spirit. You are to be his new people. So God must say: “I accept you only when you are unmixed with other elements and not to be confused with them. I accept you only when you are a separate people.” (2 Cor. 6) So the new people is like the old in this way: The old people of God had to be apart from the other peoples and have a separate camp. No uncircumcised person could remain in the camp of Israel. The encampment of the holy twelve tribes during their wandering was to be kept pure.

The twelve apostles of the new nation correspond with this group as the twelve branches of God’s new mission. Just like the old group, the disciples of the new group of twelve should be clearly separated from all other peoples and find a separate camp. This is what actually took place in the early church in Jerusalem under the leading of the twelve apostles. There they came to full community for the whole of life. There everything became clear. No place was left for camp worship in a state church or world state. There was no place for any “unaffiliated” mixing of religions, where practices fall so abysmally away from the pure, crystal-clear spiritual order of the people of God in the New Testament.

To the very end of the Last Days it must remain as at the beginning of the Early Church: The book of Revelations calls on every single believer in the present time to leave the church of Babylon with its mixed religion. (Rev. 18) “Go out from her and depart, you who are my people.” The reason is once more given in the clearest way: firstly the spiritual prostitution which consists in mixing true worship of God with idolatrous human practices. For such practices, with their general confession and forgiveness of all sins, must inevitably allow all sins to continue and grow worse and worse. And, secondly, the blood of the saints is shed, the blood of God’s servants that has to be shed by the state authorities under protection of these same religious laws, and will continue to be shed (Rev. 18 and 19).

Under the hand of the state authority and with the protection of the church with its confused religion, the blood of God’s martyrs has been shed from the time of the Jewish prophets right up to the time of the Reformation. It is still being shed today and must continue to be spilled until the terrible days at the end of time! It is not only the Roman Catholic church that does this through its kings and dukes, not only the new heathen emperors and dictators like one or another faithless Julius the Apostate, not only the Jewish synagogue of long ago, and the murderous forces of present day Bolshevism that make a religion out of atheism, or the demonic belief in the blood of a nation’s soul. The so-called evangelical churches of the Reformation with their worldly bishop-princes and state government have shown just as clearly a thousand times over that they belong to those who are confused by idolatry and are murderers of God. For they all carry the two signs of the adulterated religion that they permit and practice, as well as being actively or passively guilty for shedding the blood of martyrs. They are all connected in the closest way with the scarlet beast of the world power of Nero. They sit and ride upon it like the woman drunk with the blood of the witnesses of Jesus.

Just from the one movement of our brothers known as the Hutterians there were more than two thousand believers in half a century who witnessed by their blood. They were killed in the cruelest ways by the tyrannical, blood-thirsty beast and its Catholic-evangelical rider. The beast and its rider control the national camp outside the church life of God, outside the church of the covenant with Jesus Christ. They govern the whole vast extent of city life, all the thoroughly warlike relationships between all the world powers that lie far, far outside the people of the temple camp that is consecrated to God, outside the new covenant of peace and righteousness. Outside Jesus Christ’s city of peace, national life and state life remain part of the world. They are and remain a concern for the princes of this world. As friendship to the world it is and remains enmity to God, and continues to be so even--or still more so—when it is an apparently Christian “church” assembly.

God gives the name “Not My People” to the world-embracing “outside the camp” of stateless inhabitants and church people with no real commitment. It includes the whole world, the so-called Christians by name as much as the Jewish, the heathen, the idealistic, the materialistic, the atheistic, the believers in blood and race, the unbelievers, and the superstitious and whoever else there may be in the world. But for this whole great wide world of the abyss there remains one thing in spite of it all and even because of it all: God loves this world: he loves a world that responds so unclearly to him and at the bottom is his enemy and wants to kill him. He loves it and his heart longs to save it. He loves his enemies. He offers his best for them: Christ, his only son, is the sacrifice he offers for the sin of the whole world! God’s love and what it accomplished is the underlying reason for the fact that the littlest souls throughout the whole world do not need any religious ceremonies. All that God has done is valid for them. According to Jesus’ words, the Kingdom of God belongs to them all. The innocent little children of the apparently Christian world, just as those from every branch of the heathen world, do not need child baptism. It is as unnecessary as outward circumcision was in ancient Jewish times! But the innocent become guilty. That is why the church, as the new people of God, sends out messengers of God into the whole world from its sanctuary, its city of God for apostolic mission. Out into the whole world. Messengers must be sent out from the church, from the city of God.

Mission by the Holy Spirit has its starting point in the church, not in the individual. This mission sends its call to everyone who mixes other elements into religion and to all enemies of God. It goes out into all the world. It is directed to all peoples! The message of the church that stands for the Kingdom of God applies everywhere and to everyone. It is total and absolute. It is the gospel of all creation that is spread to all peoples when God’s messengers go out on mission journeys. In the apostolic word and apostolic action it goes out to everyone. Set apart from other peoples, the people of God directs its loving service to all nations. The heart of the city of God is concerned with the whole world. Its service of mission is directed to all the outposts and world cities of the whole inhabited world. It is directed to the whole world: the same world that violently attacks it and treats it with hostility. Its service is there for all peoples, just as God’s heart is turned to the whole earth. That is why the work of love by the apostolic church can never come to an end until the new age begins. The resistance of the whole world continues unrestrained until the end. The mission in all towns and villages must remain open and unfinished until the end. But the city of God does not shut even one gate. Right to the end it holds its gates open for each person--for each one who wants to draw near in true reverence, in genuine repentance, with real longing, and with a circumcised heart, to become one body with the holy people through the bond of baptism.

The open doors of the city on the hill can be plainly seen. Everyone can see it. Here the Most Holy Place, the forecourt, the intervening space and the dwelling area have become one and the same, as in the community of God: Here is Christ! Here is the city of God. Here is the city on the hill! It sends its light to the other encampment. It calls to the whole war-mongering and hostile world that is gathered against it: Today is still the day of salvation. The great day is still with us. Now is still the time of the Gospel. Hear what the spirit says to the churches!