Lightning and forest fires could strike terror in primitive humans,
yet they also cherished fire as a life-giving gift from the gods.
Eberhard Arnold surveys the symbolism of light and fire in the
Bible, literature, and history to illuminate our love/fear
relationship with God. The Holy Spirit, like fire, is a two-edged
sword: it brings the blazing wrath of God's judgment, consuming all
that is dead and cold in us, but also the radiant warmth of his
love, mercy, and redemption. Though Inner Land was not explicitly
critical of the Nazi regime, it nevertheless attacked the spirits
that animated German society at the time: racism and bigotry,
nationalistic fervor, mass hysteria, and materialism. The chapter
"Light and Fire," in particular, was a deliberate public statement
at a decisive moment of Germany's history. Eberhard Arnold sent
Hitler a copy on November 9, 1933. A week later the Gestapo raided
the community and ransacked the author's study. After this first
raid, Eberhard Arnold asked two friends to pack the already printed
signatures of Inner Land in watertight metal boxes and bury them at
night for safekeeping. They later dug up Inner Land and smuggled it
out of the country, publishing it in Lichtenstein after Eberhard
Arnold's death. The fourth volume of five in Inner Land, Fire and
Spirit contains two chapters, "Light and Fire" and "The Holy
Spirit." About Innerland: 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: "These are times of distress. We cannot retreat, willfully
blind to the overwhelming urgency of the tasks pressing on society.
We cannot look for inner detachment in an inner and outer
isolation...The only justification for withdrawing into the inner
self to escape today's confusing, hectic whirl would be that
fruitfulness is enriched by it. It is a question of gaining within,
through unity with eternal powers, a strength of character ready to
be tested in the stream of the world." Innerland, then, calls us
not to passivity, but to action. It invites us to discover the
abundance of a life lived for God. It opens our eyes to the
possibilities of that "inner land of the invisible where our spirit
can find the roots of its strength and thus enable us to press on
to the mastery of life we are called to by God." Only there, says
Eberhard Arnold, can our life be placed under the illuminating
light of the eternal and seen for what it is. Only there will we
find the clarity of vision we need to win the daily battle that is
life, and the inner anchor without which we will lose our moorings.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
