What makes the Bible more than ink on paper? The living word,
Eberhard Arnold writes, is greater than the words of the Bible,
which even the devil used to tempt Jesus. The scriptures on their
own can never produce the righteousness, mercy, and faithfulness
that count before God. But when the Holy Spirit speaks this living
word into the hearts of those who have set out on the way of
discipleship to Christ, the deepest meaning of the scriptures are
opened up to them. Those who have accepted this living word, which
never contradicts the Bible, also agree with one another.
Transformed from within, they receive the strength, clarity, and
unity they need to carry out the task God has given them - to make
God's kingdom a reality on earth. The final volume of five in Inner
Land, The Living Word includes a preface by Eberhard Arnold's son
J. Heinrich Arnold, who has written elsewhere: "My father not only
believed that Inner Land was the most important book he had
written; he also believed and told me that he included in this book
everything in his life he had ever experienced of Christ, of the
suffering of humankind, of the murderous spirit of mammon, of human
life and divine life altogether." 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.
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