The Inner Life

Inner Land--A Guide into the Heart of the Gospel, Volume 1

by Eberhard Arnold

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Pub Date Jul 16 2019 | Archive Date Jan 07 2020

Plough Publishing | Plough Publishing House

Christian | Religion & Spirituality

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Description

A trusted guide into the inner realm where our spirits find strength to master life and live for God.

It is hard to exaggerate the significance of Innerland, either for Eberhard Arnold or his readers. It absorbed his energies off and on for most of his adult life--from World War I, when he published the first chapter under the title War: A Call to Inwardness, to 1935, the last year of his life.

Packed in metal boxes and buried at night for safekeeping from the Nazis, who raided the author’s study a year before his death (and again a year after it), Innerland was not openly critical of Hitler’s regime. Nevertheless, it attacked the spirits that animated German society: its murderous strains of racism and bigotry, its heady nationalistic fervor, its mindless mass hysteria, and its vulgar materialism. In this sense Innerland stands as starkly opposed to the zeitgeist of our own day as to that of the author’s.

At a glance, the focus of Innerland seems to be the cultivation of the spiritual life as an end in itself. Nothing could be more misleading. In fact, to Eberhard Arnold the very thought of encouraging the sort of selfish solitude whereby people seek their own private peace by shutting out the noise and rush of public life around them is anathema. He writes in The Inner Life:

Advance Praise

Arnold’s writing has all the simple, luminous, direct vision into things that I have come to associate with his name. It has the authentic ring of a truly evangelical Christianity and moves me deeply. It stirs to repentance and renewal. –Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

Innerland calls men and women to a life of such trust in God that their attitudes toward his kingdom, other people, material wealth, and earthly power are transformed. –Christianity Today

Arnold’s writings are a light of hope in an age which seems very dark. May they no longer remain hidden under a bushel, but shine out to be heeded by many. –Jürgen Moltmann

Innerland is a bold and challenging invitation to the path of discipleship that speaks to both the terrors and the hopes of our time. Along with the likes of John Woolman, Thomas Kelly, and Dorothy Day, Eberhard Arnold is one of the great secrets of radical Christianity. The reprinting of this masterpiece is truly a gift. –Chris Faatz, Powell’s Books

The witness of Eberhard Arnold is a much needed corrective to an American church that has lost the vital, biblical connection between belief and obedience. –Jim Wallis, Sojourners

The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of persons with Christ as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant. Arnold’s vision incarnates just such a community. -Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline

The undeniable power of Arnold’s writing owes to the fact that there is no difference between what he professed to believe and the way he lived. It gives his words a resonance and depth, a right to be heard. --Juli Loesch Wiley, New Oxford Review