About The Book

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.”