Eberhard Arnold Centennial Editions

What happens when we let the living God into our practical lives? Everyone is looking for deeper meaning in their lives and for personal peace as well as peace for all. But are we ready for what can happen when we invite the living God to rule our personal lives and transform us and our society? Where religion, self-help, and the political ideologies of left and right have failed us, God enters with power to break the grip of money, violence, and tribalism and bring about a new life of justice and fellowship. This book is not for those who look to spirituality as an escape from reality. But for those who hunger for change that is genuine and tangible, for a personal peace of heart that is inseparable from justice and peace between nations, Arnold's words will be a rousing encouragement to expect more than you ever dared hope. Experiencing God is the third volume in Inner Land: A Guide into the Heart of the Gospel.

When troubled consciences find healing, they become a force for good. The conscience, our inner moral compass, is a sensitive instrument meant to warn us against all that might endanger our life and happiness. Many today despise or ignore the conscience, calling its working unhealthy repression of natural urges, or rejecting any certainty in the name of relativism. Others are tormented by its accusations. In this little book, Arnold points the way to complete healing and restoration of even the most troubled conscience. When Christ's forgiveness sets the conscience free and floods it with his live-renewing spirit, it becomes an active force for good, giving us clarity in personal, social, and political questions and leading us to peace, joy, justice, and community. 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. 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.

A radical vision for a society transformed by the teachings and spirit of Jesus. Do you feel powerless to change the injustice at every level of society? Are you tired of answers that ignore the root causes of human suffering? This selection of writings by Eberhard Arnold, who left a career and the established church in order to live out the gospel, calls us to a completely different way. Be warned: Arnold doesn't approach discipleship as the route to some benign religious fulfillment, but as a revolution-a transformation that begins within and spreads outward to encompass every aspect of life. Arnold writes in the same tradition of radical obedience to the gospel as his contemporaries Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.