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INNERLAND A Guide into the Heart of the Gospel Eberhard Arnold Please share a link to this e-book with your friends. Feel free to post and share links to this e-book, or you may e-mail or print this book in its entirety or in part, but please do not alter it in any way, and please do not post or offer copies of this e-book for download on another website or through another Internet-based download service. If you wish to make multiple hard copies for wider distribution, or to reprint portions in a newsletter or periodical, please observe the following restrictions: • You may not reproduce it for commercial gain. • You must include this credit line: “Copyright 2011 by The Plough Publishing House. Used with permission.” This e-book is a publication of The Plough Publishing House, Rifton, NY 12471 USA (www.plough.com) and Robertsbridge, East Sussex, TN32 5DR, UK (www.ploughbooks.co.uk) Copyright © 2011 by Plough Publishing House Rifton, NY 12471 USA Contents PREFACE 4 INTRODUCTION 6 THE INNER LIFE 15 THE HEART 36 SOUL AND SPIRIT 61 THE CONSCIENCE AND ITS WITNESS 89 THE CONSCIENCE AND ITS RESTORATION 115 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 152 THE PEACE OF GOD 191 LIGHT AND FIRE 248 THE HOLY SPIRIT 300 THE LIVING WORD 346 INNERLAND: A GUIDE INTO THE HEART OF THE GOSPEL 4 Preface It is hard to exaggerate the significance of Innerland, either for Eberhard Arnold or his readers. The author’s magnum opus, 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. The fruit of this long labor of love was not only a book, but a wellspring of remarkable depth. 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 WWW.EBERHARDA RNOLD. COM INNERLAND: A GUIDE INTO THE HEART OF THE GOSPEL 5 by shutting out the noise and rush of public life around them is anathema. Thus he writes in the section “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 isola tion… The only justification for withdrawing into the inner self to escape today’s confusing, hectic whirl would be that fruitful ness 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. The Editors March 1999 WWW.EBERHARDA RNOLD. COM INNERLAND: A GUIDE INTO THE HEART OF THE GOSPEL 6 Introduction The object of this book is to make an appeal in the midst of today’s political, social, and economic upheaval. It is an appeal for decision in the area of faith and beliefs, directed to the hearts of all those who do not want to forget or lose God and his ultimate kingdom. This book attempts to point out that God’s approaching judgment is aimed at our hearts, that the living Christ wants to move our innermost being through his quickening spirit. Through this spirit, who moves and stimulates everything, we are meant to gain, from within, a life that outwardly demonstrates justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, as a way of life shaped by God’s active love. In contrast to the path generally trodden today – one that tries to reach the inner life from the outside – this way must shine out ward from within. Our spirit, received by the first man as God’s breath, must first of all be at home in our innermost being; our spirit must find the living roots of its strength there before it can press on to the periphery of life. Yet its calling – to gain mastery over all external things – has been to a large extent lost in the world of today. We have lost rulership over the earth and the just WWW.EBERHARDA RNOLD. COM INNERLAND: A GUIDE INTO THE HEART OF THE GOSPEL 7 use of its wealth and resources because, through deep inner revolt, our spirit has been estranged from the breath of God and his love. This book, then, should indicate a way into the inner land of the invisible; it should bear witness to the way of God and of the Spirit – to the way of love. Fichte says: Blessed for me the hour when I decided to think about my des tiny. All my questions are answered; I know what it is possible for me to know; and I have no worries about what I cannot know. I am satisfied; there is perfect agreement and clarity in my spirit, for which a glorious new existence begins. What the whole of my destiny will be, I do not know: what I am to be and will become is beyond my comprehension. Part of this destiny is hidden from me, visible to one alone, the Father of spirits, to whom it is en trusted. I only know that it is secure, and that it is eternal and glorious, as he himself is. But that part which is entrusted to me, I know thoroughly, and it is the root of all the rest of my knowl edge.* In recognizing this destiny, which the Father of spirits alone sees quite clear and open before him, Fichte came progressively closer to the Bible. For him it was the book of those witnesses who were filled with the spirit of all good spirits, the book in which God’s spirit has found the deepest and purest expression. Innerland is meant as a guide into the heart of the gospel. The heart of the gospel is more than its letters. Even with the Bible, literal interpretation leads to spiritual death, to inner untruthful ness. Only the spirit that fills the words of the Bible can lead us to its heart in spiritual freedom, and through that, on to the holy bond of a divine calling. The path this calling is to take starts in the *Johann Gottlieb Fichte, –. WWW.EBERHARDA RNOLD. COM INNERLAND: A GUIDE INTO THE HEART OF THE GOSPEL 8 human soul. Yet not for a moment must this calling draw the soul away from God’s history in the whole of humankind, away from his calling in the world outside. What is said in the Bible about the stirring of life in the soul, about the workings of the soul, and about its goal is to be interpreted and clearly presented in a concentrated form here. With this, the book’s task and its limita tions could be considered well enough described. And yet Innerland is not meant to serve some purely abstract purpose. Rather, as with the prophets and apostles of the Bible, its real task is to take hold of life vigorously and master it – not by means of theoretical discussion, but through something much more important: through witnessing to an inner energy that finds practical expression in work that is vital and has visible results. At this point we cannot speak simply about the outward effects of this work, about the community life that arises out of it and the public responsibility involved. First of all, we have to speak about what is individual and personal – precisely this land of our inner being. Then it will become clear that a soul filled with the spirit of love cannot get stuck in individualism (which is the starting point), let alone in the private sphere of subjectivism. This soul, impressed by events in God’s history, will gain power in its innermost depths from the Holy Spirit to intervene in history, making God’s kingdom a reality. For this, however, the deepest feeling, thought, and will of the soul has to be enlightened and clarified. The conviction basic to this book is this proverb: “As a man thinks in his heart, so he is.” Our attention should not be arrested by the dreary mixture of those outward habits, relationships, and subserviencies with which the life of an unfree soul exhausts itself.