Because we ignore the sacrifices that lead to peace, we know nothing of God’s will to unite or of his well-considered thoughts of unity. Peace blooms on the soil of genuine truthfulness that is shown only in a life sacrificed to the utmost and spent in unarmed but all-out combat against any opposition to unity and constructive peace. The heart that makes the perfect sacrifice – the mightiest power of all worlds – is the only strength that can bring peace.
- Eberhard Arnold
February 01,2026
- Eberhard Arnold From a letter, July 1934Not our inadequacy, but God’s perfect will is now the substance of our life and thinking. Therefore, from now on our entire interest goes away from ourselves, toward all people of the earth and of all worlds of God, toward near and far creatures of God; toward those who have died and those unborn. The interest of God’s kingdom embraces the times and spaces of all worlds of God, of the earth as well as of all other worlds with all their spiritual princes and creatures of light. That God’s kingdom may become reality on earth as it is real in heaven—that is what we have to live for. Certainly, for this a turning is necessary.
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It is a simple thing: joy in everything that lives. Anyone who can rejoice in life, in other people, in the fellowship of church community – anyone who feels joy in the mutual relationships of trust and inner fellowship – such a person experiences what love is. Anyone who cannot feel joy cannot live.… Only where there is joy do love and justice dwell. We need the spirit of joy to overcome the gloomy spirit of covetousness, the spirit of unjust mammon and its deadly hate. We can only have such joy if we have faith, and if we believe that the earth has a future.
- Eberhard Arnold
We love the soil because God’s spirit spoke and created the earth, and because he called it out of its uncultivated natural state so that it might be cultivated by the communal work of human beings. We love physical work – the work of muscle and hand – and we love the craftsman’s art, in which the spirit guides the hand. In the way spirit and hand work together and through each other, we see the mystery of community. God – the creative Spirit – has formed nature, and he has entrusted the earth to us, his sons and daughters, as an inheritance but also as a task: our garden must become his garden, and our work must further his kingdom.
- Eberhard Arnold