Pages
112
Year
2019
Language
English

About

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 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:

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Reviews

"The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of persons with Christ as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant. Arnold's vision incarnates just such a community."
Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline
"The undeniable power of Arnold's writing owes to the fact that there is no difference between what he professed to believe and the way he lived. It gives his words a resonance and depth, a right to be heard."
Juli Loesch Wiley, New Oxford Review
"Innerland calls men and women to a life of such trust in God that their attitudes toward his kingdom, other people, material wealth, and earthly power are transformed."
Christianity Today

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