The Inner Life (Inner Land: A Guide into the Heart of the Gospel, vol. 1)
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
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.
This is a Logos Reader Edition. Learn more.
- Explores the cultivation of the spiritual life as a means to active, impactful engagement with the world
- Opposes the societal spirits of racism, nationalism, and materialism through a call to inwardness
- Encourages readers to find clarity and strength through a life lived for God
- Preface
- Introduction
- The Inner Life
- The Heart
- Soul and Spirit
Inner Land is a bold and challenging invitation to the path of discipleship that speaks to both the terrors and the hopes of our time. Along with the likes of John Woolman, Thomas Kelly, and Dorothy Day, Eberhard Arnold is one of the great secrets of radical Christianity. The reprinting of this masterpiece is truly a gift.
—Chris Faatz, Powell’s Books
Inner Land 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
The witness of Eberhard Arnold is a much needed corrective to an American church that has lost the vital, biblical connection between belief and obedience.
—Jim Wallis, Sojourners
- Title: The Inner Life
- Author: Eberhard Arnold
- Series: Inner Land: A Guide into the Heart of the Gospel
- Volume: 1
- Publisher: Plough Publishing House
- Print Publication Date: 2019
- Logos Release Date: 2025
- Pages: 95
- Era: era:contemporary
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- Subjects: Spiritual life › Bruderhof Communities; Bruderhof Communities › Doctrines
- ISBNs: 9780874861792, 0874861799, 9780874861679, 0874861675
- Resource ID: LLS:NNRLNDNNRLF01
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-12-12T22:03:22Z