Arnold, Eberhard | Why We Live in Community

Why We Live in Community
Eberhard Arnold 

Paperback: Plough Books, 2016, 75pp.

Introduction

Eberhard Arnold and his wife Emmy founded the Bruderhof community in Germany in 1920. Over the last 100 years, the Bruderhof has grown and spread around the globe, and is today one of the largest Protestant intentional Christian communities.

Written in 1925, Why We Live in Community is one of Arnold’s earliest and best-known works, a case for sharing life together in intentional Christian community. Thomas Merton has said: “[Why We Live in Community] is a fine gospel statement of community against the background of false community that was being spread in [Arnold’s] day” (33). Merton goes on to observe that the temptation of false community continues to be a pressing challenge, long after Arnold put these thoughts to paper.

Although we were created for community and desire community, Arnold notes, many forces inside us and among us (including “possessive impulses, and cravings for physical and emotional satisfaction, powerful currents of ambition and touchiness, the desire for personal influence over others, and human privileges of all kinds”) conspire to make us incapable of community. “The only power that can build true community,”Arnold writes, “is faith in the ultimate mystery of the Good, faith in God” (6).

Regardless of whether we have a vocation for intentional Christian community, Arnold emphasizes that the life we are called to in Jesus Christ is a life in community, and his wisdom in this brief book is relevant for all who seek to follow Christ, whether they are in a traditional or nontraditional church congregation or in an intentional Christian community.

Radical Kinship

Eberhard Arnold believed in a radical kinship that would ultimately subsume all humanity. “All life created by God exists in a communal order,” he writes, “and works toward community” (3). Later in the book, he expands on this idea: “In the same way as each individual living body consists of millions of independent cells, humankind will become one organism. This organism already exists today in the invisible church” (21). It is the Holy Spirit, Arnold argues, that is calling us and guiding us into the divine life of radical kinship. “The future unity of humankind, when God alone will rule, is ensured by the Holy Spirit,” he writes, “The only things we can already perceive of this great future of love and unity, is the Spirit” (27).

Participatory Worship

Following the admonition of the apostle Paul in Romans 12:1 (“I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship”) Arnold depicts a life of worship that is driven by individuals submitting to the unifying life of the Spirit. He writes: “The secret of community lies in the freedom of self-determination, in the personal decision of each member to surrender to the whole and, at the same time, to exercise his will for the good” (22). Worship, for Arnold, is not limited to a particular gathering, but is the ever-unfolding act of each person submitting to the life of the Spirit.

Rooted in History

Eberhard Arnold saw the new Bruderhof community that he co-founded as integrally connected with the earlier movements of the Spirit in which diverse people “joined together to live in community.” Although the Bruderhof was a new expression, it was united in its witness to community life in the Spirit with the early Christians of Jerusalem, “the itinerant communities of Francis of Assisi,” the Beguines and Beghards, the early Anabaptist and Quaker movements, and many others. “We must live in community,” Arnold writes, “because we are compelled by the same Spirit that has led to community time and again since the days of biblical prophecy and early Christianity” (11).