Jesus is Victor!: Blumhardt's Battle with the Powers of Darkness

More gripping than Frank E. Peretti and Stephen King, this book written by Johann Christoph Blumhardt in 1844 is not a novel, but an enthralling eye-witness account sent to the Senior Church Authorities of the Kingdom of Württemberg. The consequence of the events described was a powerful revival in which the whole village of Möttlingen, with only a few exceptions, was converted. A movement sprang up in which thousands of people were healed from physical sickness and released from spiritual bondage. The lame could walk, the blind could see and bread was multiplied. Even the King of Württemberg paid an anonymous visit to one of the Sunday services which often attracted up to two thousand people to the small country church in Möttlingen.

In 1852 the Blumhardts moved as a family to Bad Boll, where they established a healing community to which people from all over Europe were drawn. Blumhardt concluded that the in-breaking of the kingdom of God he had experienced in Möttlingen represented what Jesus had in store for the whole cosmos. Johann Christoph Blumhardt and his son Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt had a major influence on Theologians such as Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jürgen Moltmann.