It is frightening and depressing when religion is misused to enslave and to rob the soul of its every freedom. How often does this happen! Nearly always and everywhere. It is the same with love. The noblest, purest and most divine becomes the lowest and meanest and most perishable, through the demonic powers that are released when this one area becomes a law to itself. God is freedom, deliverance from all slavery. We remain true to this watchword. It becomes ever clearer to me that all unfreedom is of the devil.
- Eberhard Arnold
April 27,2026
- Eberhard Arnold From a letter, May 1920How 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.
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The fact that we experience something is not what matters; whom and what we experience is alone decisive. Who God is and what He wills and does should become so great and exclusive that through it we forget the experience itself, that is, ourselves and our experience, and lose sight of it completely. The greatest experience completely reveals our own insignificance.
- Eberhard Arnold
The light shines on every human being that comes to this world. But only he who accepts it completely, and only as long as he accepts it completely, will receive power, strength and tasks.
- Eberhard Arnold