“When the Poor Are Redeemed, then the World Will be Redeemed”: Eschatology and Political Economy in the Thought of Christoph Blumhardt

Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (1842-1919) was the son of Johann Christoph Blumhardt (1805-1880), a well-known Lutheran pastor who had established a holistic healing ministry at Bad Boll, southeast of Stuttgart. The elder Blumhardt, and later his son, enjoyed the good favor of many Christian groups, particularly those associated with the Awakening Movement (Erweckungsbewegung), when in 1899 Christoph dramatically declared himself in favor of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD). Shocking the politically conservative circles of the Erweckungsbewegung and the nascent Gemeinschaftsbewegung, Blumhardt was reviled in the press, labelled a traitor and heretic. Nevertheless, Blumhardt never understood his declaration as evidence of a defection from the Christian faith to the atheist orientation of the SPD. Rather, from the very beginning Blumhardt would consistently interpret his move towards socialism on explicitly theological grounds, arguing that in the aims and aspirations of socialism he detected a vision that had much in common with Jesus’ description of the “kingdom of God.”

The purpose of this paper is to mine the written record of Blumhardt’s thinking on the relationship between socialism and eschatology, in order to understand the ways in which eschatology and socialist political theory together shaped his understanding of political economy leading him to advocate for specific public policies. By 1903, Blumhardt had already begun to turn away from socialist party politics. The paper will consider the utopian and eschatological structure of his political vision; his critique of imperialism and nascent capitalism as “mamonism” (i.e., idolatry); the internationalism that marked his policy advocacy; and his attempt to articulate a “preferential option for the poor” in both religious and political terms. What will emerge is a complex personality who attempted to retool classical Christian convictions to address modern political and economic challenges