Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

an Baptists), believed that socialists were “tools in the hands of the Almighty”.'® His German origin and education and travels in continental Europe explain similarities between his version of Christian activism and European Christian Socialism. In their search for their roots, socialists often look to Christian communes established by the radical wing of the Reformation since the sixteenth century. In the Baltic context, a fascinating figure from the modern period is Eberhard Arnold, who came out of the evangelical “religious-social” movement in Germany, founding a Christian commune in 1920. (It was dissolved by the Nazis in 1937.) In 1930, after visiting a Hutterite commu- nity in America, he joined the Hutterite Church."' His wife Emmy was born in Riga of a Dutch family whose ancestors received their noble rank from the Emperor Joseph II.” Arnold, like other Anabaptists, had no links with orthodox Marxism. darity with workers during the Great Dock Strike of 1889 in London. ? Edward Royle, Radical Politics, 1790-1900: Religion and Unbelief (Harlow: Longman, 1971), p. 84. . tte Wilkinson, Christian Socialism: Scott Holland to Tony Blair (London: SCM, 1998), » 26. Sabin Atherton (ed), Social Christianity: A Reader (London: SPCK, 1994), p. 25. '© Walter Rauschenbusch, “Christianizing the Social Order’, in Benson Young Landis (ed), A Rauschenbusch Reader: the Kingdom of God and the Social Gospel (New York: Harper, 1957), p. 61. s) a Cort, Christian Socialism: an Informal History (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1998), p. 79. '2 Gertrud Hiissy, A Joyful Pilgrimage: Emmy Arnold, 1884-1980 (Rifton, New York: Plough 104 We cannot deny, however, that being in constant opposition to the political and religious status quo creates the potential for radical socio- political ferment. As written by Ernst Troeltsch, “Social reorganisations of any importance were only desired by the small Anabaptist groups. [...] The Protestantism of the great Confessions was on its part essentially conservative, and scarcely recognised the existence of social problems as such.” By the end of eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, some Baptists responded to the revolutions in Europe with enthusiasm. Norwich [England] Baptist preacher Mark Wilks claimed in a sermon delivered on 14 July 1791, the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, that Jesus was a revolutionary and that the French Revolution was of God." In 1848, in a letter to Simon Wilkin in England, European Baptist leader Johann Gerhard Oncken referred to the revolutions of the time in terms of liberty “descending like an angel of peace from heaven’. Later in the twentieth century, there were cases when radicalism was expressed in the form of “Christian Communism’. We recall, for example, the Protestant communes established in the 1920s in Soviet Russia and favoured for some years by authorities. In 1924, the Thirteenth Congress of the Bolsh