Eberhard Arnold

Jesus and the Future State

[Arnold, Eberhard and Emmy papers - M.S.]

[Draft Translation by Bruderhof Historical Archive]

EA 19/1

Jesus and the Future State Part 1

(Part I of "Jesus und der Zukunftsstaat")

Again and again Jesus is understood as the denial of the will to live. According to Schopenhauer, the apostolic writings prove that renunciation is the main characteristic of the Christians, even though it is only in later Christianity that this denial of life clearly becomes a negation of the will to live. Consequently he equates the Christian character with his own view: "The New Testament pictures the world as a vale of tears. An instrument of torture is the symbol of Christianity."

In effect, for many seriousminded people who thought of themselves as Christians, life became a longdrawnout hour of death for the sake of their Christianity. Even a preacher of love like Leo Tolstoy is conscious at all times that man should regard every hour of his life as a postponement of death. And even today there are monks who lie daily in the coffin in which they will one day be buried, thus impressing upon themselves most emphatically the memento mori the reminder of their death.

Such a widespread, firmly established point of view prompted Ibsen's Emperor Julian to say about the Christians, "Does it not seem, Maximus, as though men lived but to die? The spirit of the Galilean is in this. If it be true that his father created the world, then the son despises the father's work." The Prince of selfdenial must frighten and terrify Ibsen in the face of such abysmal disparity between the living God and the dying Savior. It strikes at the heart of our life when we hear Jesus' voice in that call which challenges us again and again to selfdestruction. One arrives necessarily at the shattering conclusion which forced itself upon Ibsen: "All that is human becomes unlawful since the day the seer of Galilee took the helm of the world. Life became death through him,"

This remarkable agreement of friends and enemies [of Christianity] explains how it was possible for Nietzsche to fire his devastating accusation against the Christian churches, an accusation meant at last to expose Christianity's deepest root: "The world beyond is the insistent denial of all reality; the cross, the emblem of the most infernal conspiracy ever, against health, beauty, refinement, courage, intellect, goodness of soul, indeed against life itself."

It seemed to Nietzsche that the Christians were full of disgust and weariness of life, and that they invented the hereafter out of hatred for the world and to disparage the here and now. The living, creating God thus becomes the enemy of the life He Himself created, so that one has to arrive at this monstrous inversion of the truth: "Life comes to an end where God's Kingdom begins." Man has degraded God to one who opposes life instead of experiencing in Him the eternal affirmation of life. But on the other hand this same Nietzsche recognized that "Jesus confronted ordinary life with real life, a life lived in the truth." Here he touched on the crucial question, what Jesus meant by the life that He embraced and offered. If we see in Jesus and the early Christians the negation of natural life, then it is imperative to grasp the true life, the substance of His message.

The error which has proved most disastrous for the development of this living message stems from Greek religion and philosophy. Certain tendencies in Platonism contributed most heavily to transform the lifecommunity of the early Christians into a moralistic religion of priests preaching Christianity for the hereafter. What has been called Christianity over the centuries must not be confused with the one root, the Christ, from whom the Christians have their name. It was Plato, not Jesus, who saw the highest good in flight from the world of the senses the physical world. Platonism wants to have as little as possible to do with the body. It was Plato, not Jesus, who called the body a fetter and dungeon for the soul. In Platonism the body became an evil thing, a grave for the higher life. It was Neoplatonism, an antichristian religion, that taught a morality of denial, that desensualized the soul and found this to be the road to goodness and godliness.

Jesus and the early Christians knew nothing of this hostile attitude to life nor of such a way to God. Early Christianity was neither monkish nor was it hostile to nature. Jesus was not a vegetarian, and He never objected to wine; He did not negate the body and the earth; He was no enemy of nature and its joys. So free of asceticism and monkishness was He that His enemies even called Him a glutton and a drinker. He not only proved His love of nature by His actions and through His parables; He even promised all men of His Spirit that they would rule and possess the earth.

Christ wants the body and its desires to be ruled by His Spirit. He wants to penetrate the world with His Spirit. He wants to bring in the new order through His love. Paul, the latest and most theologically minded of the apostles, encouraged his friends to care for their bodies and even advised Timothy to drink wine. What is more, he exalted the human body as a sanctuary of the spirit, as the temple of God. Such expressions should have precluded for all time the illfated distortions which turned the deep reverence and high regard for the body into its mortification, despisal, and destruction.

Certainly, Jesus stressed the decisive importance of man's innermost being, of the incorporeal part of man; but he never lost sight of the goal that includes the whole of man, that is also his physical existence, and all of the world that surrounds us. Jesus' Christianity affirms life; all of it, real life, a life that is not denied or cut in half. The rebirth of the individual means a renovation of his character, but it also means that his body is transformed in new vigor to become useful once more as the temple of the Holy Spirit. Jesus tells us that the ultimate destiny of the physical body of man as also of the planetary body of Earth is not destruction but rebirth: there shall be a spiritbody and a new earth, free from the powers of death and darkness.

Because the Christianity of Jesus was ultimately a very real affirmation of life in the sense of material reality, all deadly powers had to be ruthlessly condemned by it. Here there could be no Nietzschean "unconditional affirmation," no "yes to guilt itself, to all that is questionable and alien." Jesus recognized that the destruction of life consisted in the religious and moral dissolution which we call sin. For this very reason the tremendous message Jesus brought exposed and surmounted this rift between God and man, unmasked and extirpated sin, the negation of life, death itself.

Man's astronomical distance from God is seen by Jesus as the exclusive cause for mankind's sinking depravation, even in the physiological sense. To live means to cast off all those things that want to die. In our sin we are hopelessly sick, sick unto death, unless we can be made free from sin and from evil. Hatred and murder, lying and cowardly evasion, impure greed and perverse corruption of the sensesthese are the forces that destroy life. Slowly but surely they smother the last flicker of real life in us, while dazzling us with the illusion of intense vitality.

Now Jesus, through His life, made us see who God is, God the untrammeled, creative life. Our own descriptions and designations fail totally. Even the feeling of reverence for a holy, spiritual, superior power, and our will to surrender to the truth and faithfulness of this Spirit, who is God, must fall short. Of all men in all parts of the earth, in all centuries, it is alone Jesus whose life reveals God. Of His life we say that it is truthfulness and purity, love and justice, Spirit and person, affirmation and liberation of life. But in the end all we can say is, He shows by His own life what life is. His own lifein the deepest way His deathjudges, condemns, and puts away all the fatal sickness that masquerades as life, yes, death itself.

The hallmark of all living things is organic harmony: oneness of all parts of the living body; consonance of all in the will to live, in the Joy of living, in all the manifestations of life itself; harmony encompassing the totality of life.

All this points to the mystery of that one, unique personality who is God's image and who represents God within the reality of our earth.

God we seek. We long for the strength capable of all things, while our inner dividedness enfeebles us on all sides. And we know with absolute certainty of conscience that God, like Jesus, is Love; that His very nature is overflowing wealth of giving. Jesus calls God, power. His simplest and profoundest apostle confesses that God is Love. God is power in love. His love alone can give us life to the full.

Jesus calls the powers of love pouring out from God to men streams of living water. Anyone who is overpowered by God can have but one answer to the question, "What is hell?" Dostoevsky's answer, "I believe hell is the pain of not being able to love anymore." People who cannot love are torn, devastated beings. Man cannot live without love. There is but one death the soul can die, and that is of suffocation from want of love. Without love the soul is dead, however active it may try to be. "If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal." (1 Cor.13:1. R.S.V.)

He who has no love becomes dead to the roots of his strength, he dies to the living God. The self-living in isolation freezes in the icy night of death. The strength to live is to be found only in the radiation of that love which is God Himself. Love, and only love, impels man to give himself to life.

We do not love; for only whole men are able to love. To love is to give from one's inner riches. Jesus wants to renew life, to strengthen life, and this can come from the Creator of life alone. Jesus brings the unfolding of strength through love, and this can originate in God alone. From the living roots of the deepest divine love, God brings forth fruits which bear ever new life through all man's vital attributes and forces. Insatiable in its desire to give, the soul whose life is in God never tires of seeking His treasures and gems. Rich as light and warmth is this life of love.

That is the life which Jesus lived. Because He lived from God, He had the right to say of Himself: The works which the Father gave to me, so that I should fulfil them, the works themselves which I do, testify that it is the Father who sent me. The deeds of love, of warmth and light, are proof that the God of life and of love is at work in them.

Jesus' love gives us a feeling of abounding life. This love is no coolly weighedup, generally applied justice or humanitarianism, but the warm feeling of an overflowing, loving heart, a love that can even be personal affection. For one of His friends Jesus had an especial love. Lazarus, too, was a friend whom He loved, and He loved the rich, seeking young man as soon as He saw him. This deep feeling came out most strongly when He was in the presence of children; He took them in His arms and kissed them.

Jesus showed us those things which alone are life, and affirmation of life. The feeling that pervaded His whole life was a love which determined His will and His actions; it was surrender of His life unto death. He was not there to be waited on and to pamper Himself, but to serve and to sacrifice His life for the freeing of many other lives. Jesus knew that to love means to affirm life, to give . . . what is one's own for the sake of the whole; He lived for the work of surrendered service. Everything Jesus did was done to portray and proclaim God; thus it all was done for us men and for our earth. His life points us to the road on which we can overcome the great conflict, on which the unity of matter and spirit is found; the way on which we shall come from death into life.

Jesus is the creative Spirit, the great awakener of the spirits of men, who gave the earth back to us. Jesus is the redeeming Spirit, the Spirit of great love and of victory, who restored to the earth her goal and to man his hope. If we accept His message we shall experience His love, a love that embraces the whole man with his earthly soul, because His love takes hold of man's spirit. The way of Jesus leads to man's final destiny; it leads man to the true vocation of his physical dispositions as well as of his spiritual yearning.

This material world is the creation of the Spirit. The universe is designed for unity of spirit and matter. The conflict between the two, which causes spirit to fight matter and matter to struggle against spirit, is an outrage, opposed to the very principle of creation. The cosmos in its entirety must belong to God. It is God's creation. God is the Spirit and the power active in matter. Therefore the day must come when all material things exist for God's purpose alone, free from poisoned life and free from ruinous death.

It was Jesus who upheld this affirmation of life. He declared to us that heaven and earth were created as one and must become one. Jesus affirms man's ageold yearning for oneness and consistency in the whole of life. The conscience of manchild of the earth and of the Spiritagain and again' puts forward the basic claim: heaven and earth must become one, undividedly and indivisibly one.

In teaching these things, Jesus places the Godgiven life right into the midst of everyday existence. He is not concerned with stuffy meetings set aside for pious edification, so remote from the reality of earthly life. He is concerned with real life, daily, hourly existence. The soul is meant, and for this very reason the body is meant as well. We all know how powerful and determining an inner experience can be. Just such experiences will help us to realize the weightiness of material circumstances. It is an innermost necessity that we shape our entire existence, with all outward aspects of life, after God's Spirit. This is the goal for mankind which He places before our eyes; it involves both a spiritual ideal and a practical economic vision for the future.

Man's calling is to the likeness of God. The origin and the destiny of man's spirit lie in the essence of the primordial Spirit. It follows, therefore, that man is called to do the work of the creative spirit, actively engaged in work with matter. Man is destined to be spirit and body, a living organism. His vocation is to be active in the Spirit and in love. He is meant to apply his powers, to do productive work, to be creative. Jesus, then, reshapes human existence; He transforms both our spiritual life and our material existence.

Jesus was the only one who lived this positive will of God to the end; He was the only one who realized God's will in unwavering constancy unto death and beyond death. Jesus wants to give man a new way of thinking; perfect justice and perfect love. The goal He places before mankind is justice for the whole man. He brings a love that stops at nothing, a love that is not discouraged even by insuperable obstacles. Never can this love be satisfied by reassuring itself that suffering is a law of nature. With Jesus true love emerged, that love which never loses faith or gives up hope that suffering must have an end. Jesus was certain that men have to find a new, altogether different existence, both for their physical and for their spiritual and intellectual lives. It is this very certainty that makes Jesus so compelling, so sure of victory.

The will of God took shape in Jesus as the will to that love which stands up for the needs of all men. The earth shall be won for God; this means that men shall be ruled by His Spirit of justice and peace.

From the very beginning, the prophetic movement which arose in Judaism had a clearly audible earthy ring, a distinct earthly coloring.

Man as he was placed in the world, from the very beginning of his life and his history on earth, considered it his task to cultivate and preserve the fertility of the land. This work on earth is man's task: to cultivate the land, striving to achieve the greatest possible yield, and to cultivate the mind and spirit, striving at the same time to preserve the innermost life of his soul. The believers of Old Testament times saw clearly that the Garden of Eden was not preserved; its cultivation was interrupted. The enemy had interfered by sowing weeds. Now the Garden has to be reconquered for God, and human strength cannot accomplish this. God Himself must conquer and rule, and men must become ready to accept God's rule.

The Kingdom of God has the same earthy ring and the same earthcolor as the lost paradise. Sin the destroyer, sin the spoiler of all joy in the earthsin shall be conquered. God's creature, man, is not meant to abandon the earth to find salvation. God's enemy must withdraw from the earth, in order that the earth may belong to God once more. The soil shall be fertile, man's body shall be youthful and serviceable, the Spirit shall rule, and there shall be unity in love. This is to be the future for the earth.

This was the unparalleled experience of the early Christians, that they lived in taut expectation of a goal which was felt to clash most sharply with the entire status quo. God's Kingdom was felt to be imminent. Jesus brought it; it was present in His person, because He felt it as something that was to break in very soon. None of these first Christians could have followed Christ in any other way than by constantly anticipating the total revolution-political, social, religious, and moralby waiting for God's Kingdom to come. It is not a matter of calculating the distance in time but of finding direct spiritual and vital oneness with an actuality which is not tangible, but to which all that exists now stands in glaring opposition. What distinguished Christ's church from the surrounding world is her life in the Spirit, her acting under the power of God's ethical demands, her realization of the invisible, her love that grows from faith.

The future, both morally and socially perfect, is present in the Spirit; thus present, the future overpowers man's conscience so completely that the absolute can no longer make any allowances for existing conditions. The coming order is a challenge to man's conscience here and now. An enormous tension exists between the pureness of the goal and the unpureness of the present state of affairs. From this tension arises immediate personal responsibility; and the call of the prophets and the Messiah is to "Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand!"

[Here occurs a break, because the MS jumps from one draft (the third) to another (the first).]

Through Jesus, mankind becomes one organic body which needs Him to be its head. In Jesus, men experience themselves and one another as a bodyhumanityjoined together in oneness by the one living Spirit. The needs as well as the creative energies of every individual are ruled by the one unifying Spirit who animates each one and in this way vouches for the oneness of this body. The Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

Here the veil is dropped, the mystery is solved. There is no need for a rule of force: the Spirit rules. All our striving in different directions, all our working against one another, all the obstacles that constantly hinder the building up of the new life we long for so much are now removed.

Jesus and the Future State Part 2

The Future State Economics Politics The Kingdom and the Church

To Jesus and to John the Baptist, life renewed on the personal and on the social plane, the new birth of man, is a crucial prerequisite for what is to come. Such a renewal of life means revolutionizing or reviving all forms of life and the whole of existence, including the intellectual, cultural, economic, and political life. Economics cannot be separated from the highest goals of mankind. Man's calling to be in the likeness of God implies that he must care for the body and for the land, as well as for the spirit and the soul. A just and loving life is a life of working for the freedom and dignity of all men, working for their physical as well as their spiritual existence.

Therefore, Jesus repeatedly challenges us to work while it is still day. He compares His Kingdom to labor in a vineyard, to the working investment of moneys entrusted to one, to the good use of all one's talents. If God's Kingdom is to transform the "vale of tears" into a realm of joy, then it must be a kingdom of work. Work alone befits the destiny of man's spirit.

Man's essential nature calls him to a life of productive labor. A healthy joy in life will be his only by joining in the work of untainted fellowship in love. It is a lie of the mammon spirit that man takes no pleasure in work without the inducement of profit to reward his efforts. In reality, what makes an active person truly happy is his deepest vocation to work, the urge to get the job done, to do something worthwhile, to give practical help; it is never the motivation of making money. A healthy eagerness to use his strength productively and joy in the success of his labor are a man's true natural happiness. Certainly, if there is to be happiness in work, each one has to find that activity which suits him, which gladdens him because it corresponds to his gifts, interests, and inclinations.

It is commonly argued that this is "utopia," that no one would do menial tasks unless he were compelled; but this reasoning is based on the false premise of presentday humanity in its moral decline. Nowadays most people lack the spirit that makes the simplest and lowest job a joy and delight. Yet we all know this spirit. The difference between respectable and degrading work, between clean and dirty work, disappears when we have to nurse or simply care for a loved one. Love overcomes that difference, and whatever we do for the beloved person seems good to us.

An unhealthy symptom of our civilization is the fact that many think of physical labor as an inferior kind of work which they could never enjoy. In reality man is not at all meant to concern himself continually or exclusively with lofty ideals and spiritual matters. Bitter penalty will have to be paid for any attempts at pure erudition or spirituality, namely to be thrown back into the ugly world of reality. When a man is healthy, he longs to exercise his body, to do simple farm work, to enjoy the sun and the light, to make friends with woods and mountains, to know the touch of plants and animals, of fields and garden soil.

This natural longing may recede before the pressures of our big cities with their hypercivilization; in the end it will have to break through all the more forcefully and indomitably. That man has become sick who feels estranged from nature and its cultivation.

True, a person's intellectual life needs to be stimulated and deepened, if he is to become a man. But only when he knows the natural pleasure of physical labor as well, will he experience a healthy joy of being, joy in God and in His creation. Tolstoy's descriptions of Russian peasants often surprise us by this primitive sense of human bliss which consists in possessing a sound body and being able to work with healthy arms.

The uniting spirit of loving dedication bestows a profound consciousness of fellowship upon this experience with nature. Then the simplest physical activity becomes the source of bounteous joy in life, such as cannot even be imagined by the depraved hedonist of our sham civilization.

Men will never be able to give up their longing for a life in fellowship in a new and plentiful paradise, close to nature and true to it. To take pleasure in nature, to work with nature, to protect and deepen the intellectual life, to be creative in works of lovethese things are the immediate objects of man's longing. It is not in keeping with God's creatorwill to oppose or disparage these natural ends. On the contrary, it should be quite clear that no man on his own is able to reach this very simple and selfevident human objective; it can only be given him by God.

Throughout history, man's natural longing to become true man breaks through again and again in the ideals of world peace and social justice. We all know that the early Christians, too, were quite determined in reaching out toward these goals. They expected sin and suffering to be overcome for all men; they expected men to be freed from world guilt and world suffering; and this expectation included mankind's liberation from all injustice, the abolition of war and bloodshed, and the conquest of the earth. They expected the transformation of this earth in politics and economics, resulting in new relationships of unalloyed justice and love.

Thus it is correct, to a certain extent and with definite reserves, to compare socialist expectation of a new future state to the early Christian hope for God's future Kingdom. The idea of a socialist future state arises from a purely economic concept of history. This stands in sharp contrast to the basic truth of Christianity: the highest and greatest manifestation of life is the spirit which rules over matter. But it is in God's relationship to His creation that His Spirit lives. God is a God of Life. He encompasses and commands all life even in its primitive and degenerate forms, right down into the lowest regions.

The world of material things is not foreign to God's Spirit. Matter is not outside His life sphere. A false Christianity with its perverted idealism teaches that the world of matter, the world of the senses, and all earthly things are unspiritual and antiidealistic and must therefore be despised. So it was understandable to see in socialism an idealistic revolt in the name of materialism. Here materialism opposes an idealism which sees in the world of material things and the demands arising from it nothing related to the Spirit. Here it is just materialism that represents the ethical demands of the spirit within the material sphere and seeks to fulfill them in this sphere, even though leaving aside the Spirit itself. The materialistic interpretation of history outstrips a false Christian spirituality that has lost all touch with reality. The general run of Christians simply settled down to the injustice, to the disgrace that the majority of men are kept away from the better opportunities of life. This fact shows such Christian idealism to be unideal and un-Christian.

Continual efforts to put off suffering mankind, groaning under rank injustice, with promises of a life beyond, revealed that there was neither Spirit nor love nor power. That was not the divine message; it was human, all too human. Against this spiritless "spirit", against this powerless "power", materialism rose up in place of the Spirit, and economic materialism took the place of idealism. This spiritual insurrection proved the world of material things, the world of economics, to be inseparably bound to the Spirit. The revolt of materialism in the name of matter was the penalty for the despisal of materiality by unhealthy otherworldliness. Revolutionary materialism now makes claims in its own right, now makes demands on purely materialistic grounds which should long have been fought for and won by the spiritual and intellectual camp.

From this point of view it was possible to see the materialistic claims made by the socialist movement as the economic substructure of Christianity. What was proclaimed by a living Christianity to be the moral manifestation of God's love is here (in Socialism) preached as man's economic demands, as the sociopolitical overturning of the status quo. This kind of revolutionary movement, this socialism, can never be confused with a Christian movement of awakening. One need not even point to the sewers of human weakness, the whirlpools of animal bloodthirst, the bottomless abyss of petty egoism, and the demonic thirst for power present in the socialist wave. All these things can be found among people who call themselves Christians as well. The reasons why such a movement can never be, like early Christianity, a renewal of man's inner life lie deeper.

And yet no one can deny that in connection with these revolutionary movements the spirit of man has been aroused by a tremendous shaking of his conscience. It cannot find peace unless that rousing call touches everybody's life. The attack undertaken by socialism and communism against the present social order is a challenge to our consciencesthose of us who have taken the name Christians-reminding us more strongly than any sermon of our task to live a life of active protest against all those things in the world that are opposed to God's will. So little have we Christians done to fulfill this task that the crucial question must be asked: are we really Christians?

We are blind and insensitive to the injustice of presentday class differences. We have lost the sense of proportion which would enable us to see the basic difference between God's Spirit and the Mammon spirit. We do not even suspect that this difference is absolute. In the battle cry of the socialist movement against capitalism the world's conscience echoes the decisive yet completely forgotten rousing call of Jesus: You cannot serve God and Mammon

God and Mammon are the gods of mankind, each claiming the whole man. The influence of money is the greatest world power, the power of Mammon. A tremendous spiritual force dominates man in all areas, even though it has no divine being. Mankind is haunted by an antidivine god of this world.

The socialist movement remained under the spell of that spirit in spite of its protest and its struggle. That it was so, is proved not so much by the ruthless egotism of highly placed representatives of the working classes, who enrich themselves in a truly mammonistic fashion, as by the seed of class hatred and murderous spirit of which no revolutionary mass movement is free. This latter, this most evil seed and the defamation of the opponents of their cause, which the socialists have in common with all other party fighters, stem from the father of lies and the murderer from the beginning just as much as the justly condemned class structure, exploitation, and warfare of the opposing camp. Furthermore, frequent association with impure spirits and their evident unscrupulousness and licentiousness in free love is no more accidental among revolutionary socialists than it is among the bon vivants of the upper classes.

The Christian church as such is not called to abolish the existing state order. The power of the state and its juridical order are to Christian eyes instruments of God's feet, needed to hold murder and hatred, lying and deceit, injustice and impurity at bay. Because of this the church, while she herself cannot possibly call upon or resort to law or to the power of the state, should never refuse to respect and submit to the state and the government. To obey God more than men is not an empty phrase. Such an attitude presupposes obedience in its rightful place. But a determined Christian cannot be undiscriminating in dealing with the state. His conscience rises up against the state that regrades itself by relinquishing its appointed task of checking disorder and confusion to act as executioner for the rich and oppressor of the workers; and it protests just as much when the government prods the mammonism of the proletariat to a rapacious egoism.

In the conflict between the will of the individual and collective will, between individuality and communality, the Christian takes the side of the social spirit of fellowship, the principle of community. But the will of the national or proletarian collective soul can never be to him the supreme will; and neither can a onesided and therefore unjust concept of rights and justice. At all times the Christian sees in the state God's purpose to check and restrain evil, injustice, and wrongdoing.

Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel held the task of the state to be that of realizing justice and virtue. But one thing they do not see: in moral questions just as in the deepest questions force and violence must ultimately fail. And the state lives exclusively in the sphere of force. With this insufficient toolforceit fights for a legal order, for justice, security, and freedom. The state exists for the poor and needythe debtors, just as much as for the privileged and rich-the claimants; for it is meant to look after the intellectual, emotional or physical necessities of all its citizens to the same degree.

The existence of the state and of state power is warranted exclusively by the just ordering of all conditions. The dedicated church has nothing to do with the power of the state; she represents one thing alone, the allsustaining power of love. Yet the innermost meaning of the state is a concern of the church. It is her task to exert her influence on the political life for the sake of social justice and peace, for the sake of encompassing love. Unlimited possibilities of spiritual influence and help are latent in the Spirit which animates the church. The life of the whole body of active Christians shall hold up the one moral goal which is meant for the state as well. Such a life must be lived in social responsibility and sincere dedication, where love decides all things even in dealing with enemies of every kind.

Nowhere is the spirit of fellowship and unity so real as in the true Christian church. Only in that spirit does the church exist, for she knows no other methods of organizing. The Spirit of Christ, which is truth and love, and in whom alone this unity is assured, urges to truthfulness and faithfulness. For this reason, an insight into the basic moral requirements of political life is always alive in the church. Just as the familyprime cell and foundation in the stateso the state, too, exists only in the spirit of fellowship, only in dependability and faithfulness. Just as in the "communalism" of the family, so in that of the state, too, there is one basic moral requirement for true community life, and one alone, which calls us to complete dedication: "All for one, and one for all." No political thinking can do without this demand. No form of government can claim it for its own. The socialist state of the future intends to make greater use of this fundamental concept of a communalist state. What socialists fought against in the old state organization was never the idea of the state itself, but the unjust preponderance of capitalists and their moneypower, and the abuse of militaristic statepower by the ruling classes to their own advantage.

Socialism preaches the turning away from the mammonistic abuses of militarism in the old state. Yet socialism, with its rigorous organization of the masses and strictly applied discipline, is simply another form of the same totalitarian state and its militarism. Marxism, too, has to compensate for the absent Spirit by applying coercive measures. This is not the way to win the paradise of work and felicity. Any sociopolitical reordering has to postulate the absolute power of the state and is nevertheless incapable of abolishing the power of egoism. To master the mammon spirit and its murderous character, spiritual forces are needed that cannot be mustered by the efforts of economic politics. There is no other hope to achieve unity and at the same time freedom among men, than the one spirit who is the Spirit of God, the event of a new day of creation dawning over the earth.