Reviving a Radical Tradition

I love to tell the story about how, in the 1930’s, when Dietrich Bonhoeffer was resisting the Nazis in Germany and praying for a “new monasticism that has in common with the old a strict adherence to the Sermon on the Mount,” a little community of believers, calling themselves the “Bruderhof,” gathered around a simple mission: to live out Jesus’ instructions in the Sermon on the Mount. They were run out by the Nazis for being pacifists, then by the British for being German. They were dismissed at first for being idealists, then later for being traditionalists. But all along, they kept going with the Sermon on the Mount at the center of their life together.

For 80 years, the Bruderhof has lived honestly and openly, with both successes and failures, Bonhoeffer’s dictum:

“Humanly speaking, we could understand and interpret the Sermon on the Mount in a thousand different ways. Jesus knows only one possibility: simple surrender and obedience, not interpreting it or applying it, but doing and obeying it. That is the only way to hear his word. He does not mean that it is to be discussed as an ideal; he really means us to get on with it.”