The Lutheran pastor (1872 to 1938) who co-founded The Christian Community with Rudolf Steiner in 1922 and served as its first Erzoberlenker.
Friedrich Rittelmeyer in Anthroposophy is the Lutheran theologian who left the Protestant ministry in Berlin to co-found The Christian Community (Die Christengemeinschaft) with Rudolf Steiner on 16 September 1922 in Dornach, together with 45 founding priests, men and women, ordained in the Goetheanum's Schreinerei after a course of priest-lectures Steiner gave that month (later collected as GA 344). Rittelmeyer was named the first Erzoberlenker, the senior priest of the renewed sacramental movement, and held that office until his death in Hamburg on 23 March 1938. His memoir Rudolf Steiner Enters My Life (1928) and his book Meditation: Letters on the Guidance of the Inner Life (1928) remain foundational texts of the Christian Community.
Friedrich Rittelmeyer stood at the doorway between two Christianities. Born in Schweinfurt, trained at Erlangen, parish pastor in Nuremberg and then Berlin, he carried the academic Lutheran tradition into a working relationship with Rudolf Steiner that produced a renewed priesthood. The Act of Consecration of Man, the central sacrament Steiner gave to the founding 45 in September 1922, has been celebrated through his line of successor Erzoberlenker continuously since.
In Steiner's Own Words
I had to tell the theological friends who had come to me for the purpose described that if true community were to come of the work of religious renewal, there would have to be a new form of worship, a new cultus, suited to the age we live in. Shared experience of the cultus is something that quite of its own nature calls forth the community building element in human souls. The Movement for Religious Renewal understood this and accepted the cultus. I believe that Dr. Rittelmeyer spoke weighty words when he said from this platform that such a development of community could conceivably become one of the greatest threats to the Anthroposophical Society that the Movement for Religious Renewal could present. For the cultus contains a tremendously significant community building element. It unites human beings with one another.
What it Means Today
Rittelmeyer's life records a specific decision that has shaped sacramental Christianity for a century. In 1921 a group of younger theology students approached Steiner asking for help renewing Christian ritual; the courses Steiner gave them, later collected as GA 342 through GA 346, taught the priestly path from the inside. Rittelmeyer was older than the rest, already a respected Protestant pulpit-preacher in central Berlin. He could have stayed. Instead, he resigned his Berlin parish at the Neue Kirche in 1922 and accepted ordination through the Act Steiner had given. The community he led, headquartered after the war at the seminary in Stuttgart, now has congregations in roughly thirty countries and continues the unbroken Erzoberlenker line, with Vicke von Behr having served as the eighth in that succession from 2005 to 2021 and Bastiaan Baan among the recent priests guiding seminary formation in Spring Valley, New York. The Act of Consecration of Man, celebrated daily in those parishes, is the same sacrament Rittelmeyer first received in the Goetheanum's Schreinerei on 16 September 1922.
What Rittelmeyer demonstrated, and what later writers like Sergei Prokofieff drew out in detail, is that anthroposophy does not replace Christianity but enables its sacramental and esoteric renewal. He kept his Lutheran rigour, his Bach, his Luther scholarship; he added to them Steiner's path of meditation and the renewed Mass. The two lived together in him. That is the bridge his name still names. Among the seven sacraments Rittelmeyer ordained priests to administer is Sacramental Consultation, the confidential meditative-listening sacrament that replaces juridical confession.
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