Christ’s people are sent out to work among humanity, to have an effect in the world, just as Jesus himself did. They must represent the message of the future kingdom, and their task and their actions cannot be different from Christ’s: to bring help and deliverance for soul and body, to heal and help in all sufferings and torments.
- Eberhard Arnold
Selected Reading
A Child’s Sympathy for Poverty and Suffering
Eberhard Arnold
“It is not true that children have no feeling for suffering, for the injustice and social guilt of our world…The educator’s task of awakening the child to all humankind accords with a living concern inherent in the child.” Eberhard Arnold discusses the inborn sensitivity of a child toward poverty and suffering.
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The Jesus of the Four Gospels
Eberhard Arnold
We live in an age where it seems Jesus has become almost unknown or his words distorted and disfigured, his work weakened. All the more, we must rediscover this Jesus and hold him up before all the world. We must place the Jesus of the four Gospels in the center of our faith and our life.
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The Eve of Advent
Eberhard Arnold
Advent is a time in which we share in the yearning of all those who, in their suffering and struggle, long for redemption and liberation, for unity, for peace, for a golden age – for a manifestation of God’s love and unity, for a breaking in of his justice among the nations.
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Is Pacifism Enough?
Eberhard Arnold
Eighteen months after Hitler’s rise to power, Eberhard Arnold warned of the threat of a second major war – and foresaw that the international peace movement, which he had championed, would be powerless to stop it. His reflections remain unsettlingly relevant today.
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Millions are oppressed, languishing, barely alive. True identification with them can come only the hard way of personally sharing their need. We must expose ourselves to the all-too-real horrors of their daily life, together with those who are physically enervated, spiritually ruined, and emotionally diseased. We can comprehend the measureless suffering of the world and the unsolved need of man only when we ourselves actually suffer poverty, shame, and want. We can speak about them only when our words come from the very depth of our hearts.
- Eberhard Arnold
All that mankind has in common today is suffering. Joy is alive in this suffering only as hope, but nonetheless as joyful faith in a better future. Without this joyful courage there would be no mutual help. The help given by one person to another proves that in spite of everything, faith in future healing cannot die.
- Eberhard Arnold