and unharmed.“It was a time of rejoicing for me,” Blumhardt later said.
He had earned that joy. Even his best friends had warned him not to get involved in the conflict. But Blumhardt had acted boldly, staking everything on his assurance that Jesus Christ is the same today as he was two thousand years ago, when for the sake of suffering humankind, he had stopped the powers of darkness in their tracks. He had remained at his post like a soldier, neither advancing rashly nor retreating, and had held the field.
When the fight was at its fiercest, on July 9, 1842, he wrote to his predecessor and mentor Barth, “Whenever I write the name of Jesus, I am overcome by a holy awe and by a joyous, fervent sense of gratitude that he is mine. Only now have I truly come to know what we have in him.”
But if anyone thought the fight was now over, they were wrong. As Blumhardt put it, he seemed to have taken on an enemy who constantly brought out fresh troops.
In August 1842 Gottliebin came to him, pale and disfigured, to tell him something she had been too shy to reveal but could keep hidden no longer. At first she hedged, making him tense and apprehensive, but finally came out and told him how every Wednesday and Friday she would bleed so painfully and severely that she was sure she was dying. In her description of other things she experienced in connection with this bleeding, Blumhardt recognized several bizarre fantasies of popular superstition, apparently become reality. He later recalled:
To begin with, I needed time to collect my thoughts, as I realized what a hold the power of darkness had gained over humanity. My next thought was “Now you are done for; now you are getting into magic and witchcraft, and what can you do to protect yourself against them?” But as I looked at her in her distress, I shuddered to think that such darkness could be possible, and help impossible. I recalled that there are people thought to have secret powers enabling them to ward off all manner of demonic evils; I thought of the sympathetic magic that people swear by. Should I look around for something of that sort? But I couldn’t. I had already long felt that that would be using devils to drive out devils. At one point, it is true, I considered affixing the name of Jesus to the door of a sick person’s house, but then I found a warning in Galatians 3:3: “Can it be that you are so stupid? You started with the spiritual; do you now look to the material?” I took this as a reminder to keep to the pure weapons of prayer and God’s word.
Questions flooded through me: Cannot the prayers of the faithful prevail against this satanic power, whatever it be? What are we poor people to do if we cannot call down direct help from above? Because Satan has a hand in it, must we leave it at that? Can he not be defeated through faith? If Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil, ought we not to hold on to that? If magic and witchcraft are at work, is it not a sin to let them continue unchecked when they could be confronted?
With these thoughts I struggled through to faith in the power of prayer, where no other counsel was to be had. I said to Gottliebin, “We are going to pray; come what may, we shall dare it! There is nothing to lose. Almost every page of Scripture tells of prayer being heard. God will keep his promises.” I let her go with the assurance that I would pray for her and asked her to keep me informed.
The next day, a Friday, was unforgettable. Toward evening – as the first storm clouds in months began to gather across the sky – Gottliebin was thrown into a veritable frenzy. First she raced madly from room to room looking for a knife so she could kill herself. Then, running up to the attic, she sprang onto a windowsill. While standing on the ledge, ready to jump, the first lightning of the approaching storm startled her and brought her to her senses. “For God’s sake, I don’t want that!” she cried. But her sanity lasted only a moment. Once more delirious, she took a rope – later she was not able to say how it had come into her hands – wound it artfully around a beam in the loft, and made a slip knot. Just as she pushed her head through the noose, a second flash of lightning caught her eye and brought her around as before. The next morning when she saw the noose on the beam, she wept, claiming that in a sober state of mind she never could have tied such a clever knot.
At eight o’clock the same evening, Blumhardt was called to Gottliebin and found her in a pool of blood. He said a few comforting words to her, but she did not respond. Then, as thunder rolled outside, he began to pray earnestly.
As I prayed, the anger of the demons afflicting Gottliebin broke loose with full force, howling and lamenting, “Now the game is up. Everything has been betrayed. You have ruined us completely. The whole pack is falling apart. It is all over. There is nothing but confusion, and it is all your fault. With your unceasing praying you will drive us out completely. Alas, alas, everything is lost! We are 1,067, but there are many others still alive, and they ought to be warned! Oh, woe to them, they are lost! God forsworn– forever forlorn!”
The howls of the demons, the flashes of lightning, the rolling thunder, the splashing of the downpour, the earnestness of all present, and my prayers, which seemed to literally draw the demons out– all this created a scene that is very difficult to imagine. Among other things, the demons yelled, “Nobody could have driven us out! Only you have managed it, you with your persistent praying.”
After fifteen minutes of intercession, Gottliebin came to and Blumhardt and the others left the room while she changed her clothes. As he tells it, “When we came back and found her sitting on her bed, she was a completely different person. There was no room in us for anything but praise and thanks. The bleeding had ended for good.”
Before long other demonic manifestations made their appearance. Blumhardt, unable to see the way forward, poured out his need to a friend, the director of a seminary, who pointed him to Jesus’ words, “There is no means of casting out this sort but by prayer and fasting” (Matt. 17:21). Thinking on it further, Blumhardt began to wonder whether fasting might not be more meaningful than he had previously assumed:
Insofar as fasting enhances the intensity of prayer and shows God the urgency of the person praying (in fact, it represents a continuous prayer without words), I believed it could prove effective, particularly since this was specific divine advice for the case at hand. I tried it, without telling anybody, and found it a tremendous help during the fight. It enabled me to be much calmer, firmer, and clearer in my speech. I no longer needed to be present for long stretches; I sensed that I could make my influence felt without even being there. And when I did come, I often noticed results within a few moments.
A few other accounts of demonic manifestations are worth mentioning here too. Blumhardt tells, for example, of apparent differences among the demons. Some were defiant and full of hatred toward him, crying, among other things, “You are our worst enemy, and we are your enemies. Oh, if only we could do what we want!” Some expressed a horror of the abyss, which they perceived to be very near, and uttered things such as, “Would that there were no God in heaven!” And yet they assumed full responsibility for their own downfall. One particularly dreadful demon, whom Gottliebin had seen earlier in her house and who now admitted to being a perjurer, repeatedly exclaimed the words painted on the window shutter of that house:
Man, think on eternity,
And do not mock the time of grace,
For judgment is not far off.
Then he would fall silent, contort his face, stiffly raise three of the sick woman’s fingers, and then shudder and groan. There were many bizarre scenes of this kind, and Blumhardt would gladly have welcomed more witnesses to corroborate his reports of them.
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