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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 Inner Land, 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), Inner Land 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 Inner Land stands as starkly opposed to the zeitgeist of our own day as to that of the author’s.
At a glance, the focus of Inner Land 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.”
Inner Land, 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.
A Christian classic, but best read slowly and savored. There is much to appreciate here, teachings on the “divisive callousness of pride,” and the importance of spending time in prayer so we may cultivate an inner life that prepares us to live an outer life of love and non-violence. Written following the First World War yet while anticipating the Second (Arnold sent a copy to Hitler), the book is eerily relevant to current world affairs.
Eberhard Arnold's The Inner Life brings some of the most accessible pastoral wisdom of Arnold into our world. At a time when Christian nationalism is again on the rise, Arnold challenges those of us who follow Jesus to remain citizens of the Kingdom of God, with all the distinctiveness of those who walk the way of the cross. Arnold, who remains much less known that Karl Barth or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, served as a pastor in Germany in the tumultuous times of the 20s and 30s, and remained highly influential in the thought and faithfulness of both men. Here, Arnold challenges the church to remain faithful to God made known in Jesus Christ. That makes The Inner Life quite unlike the other books that parade in “Christian living” these days. Those of us who take Jesus so seriously as Arnold know better than to take ourselves, or our politics, cultures, or even individualities, too seriously. It's a small book that packs so much spiritual wisdom, I read it twice – and each time in one sitting.
When you think of people like Eberhard Arnold and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the same sentence you are reaching the stratosphere of Christianity. We all wonder if we would have been brave enough to speak out against the Nazis, but in this time of #everything, we sadly already know the answer, don't we? Arnold seems to be the equivalent to the man we know as Bonhoeffer. He too watched the German church give in, rather than resist, the pressure from the Nazis and the similarities of what we see today are amazing. No, there are no Nazis, but the pressure to conform is still as strong. Inner Life is a helpful book for anyone who seeks to make their "lips match their life". This is not the pop and fable words of today so at first you may struggle but the scripture referencing and the beliefs you will find in here are both rewarding and self evident. - Ranger Harper
