How glad I am that you are so positively united with me in the experience of peace and of Jesus’ spirit of love! The question is not at all one of our only refusing to do military service, though people always put it in this negative way. This refusal, after all, follows as a matter of course from a positive experience of the Spirit of Christ. When this Spirit, which is expressed so very intensely in the Sermon on the Mount and in Romans 8, penetrates us and glows in us, then we will become victorious people who must work as long as it is daylight—work in the productive, creative work of love.
- Eberhard Arnold
August 21,2026
- Eberhard ArnoldWhen we are no longer able to be there for all men, when we can no longer concern ourselves with the need and suffering of the whole world, our life has no longer any right to exist. As long as I live, I shall protest if people who are fighting for any ideal whatsoever no longer find an understanding among us. People who are fighting with a free and generous spirit for purity, for national unity, for pacifism, for a renewal of national characteristics, who are fighting for any political ideal, for any renewal of society cannot do it just in their own strength. If we were to have an understanding only for Anabaptist thinking, I shall not go along with it. I shall protest against it as long as I live.
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Where God heals and makes well, He grants perfect peace on the basis of faithfulness and of faith. He who follows the Spirit says with the prophet, “As long as I live, peace and faithfulness shall reign.”
- Eberhard Arnold
We are able to cope with the demands of today’s needs only when we have found the inward concentration in God. And this we find only when the lightning of God’s kingdom has fallen down to earth and lit up the whole horizon.
- Eberhard Arnold