Inner life

Review: Working from the Inside Out

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Working from the Inside Out, Jeff Haanen. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, (Forthcoming December 12) 2023.

Summary: In a disintegrating world, outlines how five dimensions of inner transfornation can, in turn, transform our outer world of work and our life in society.

It is hard to read a book in recent year that doesn’t speak to personal struggles with despair, the divisions of our public lives, and the fragmentation and disintegration so many of us feel. Work often feels that way. We are urged to “bring our best selves” to our work. But how is that even possible? Jeff Haanan, who founded the Denver Institute for Faith and Work believes that a faith that transforms us from the inside out offers hope for the reintegration of our work life and life in society.

He believes transformation is grounded in five principles:

  1. Seek deep spiritual health: Haanan invites us to become self-aware, to understand the desires that motivate us, and to cultivate consistently the spiritual practices that nourish our delight in God.
  2. Think theologically: He treats theology as the story that frames our lives and appeals for a commitment to taking time to think well and clearly, no matter what job we are in.
  3. Embrace relationships: Healthy relationships involve the ability to differentiate while staying connected. We can grow relationally through feedback like 360 reviews. In our Zoom age, Haanan stresses the importance of face to face meetings and paying attention to each other.
  4. Create good work: Good work recognizes that we long to create as those in the image of the Creator, stewards gifts well, including workplace conflict, and practices sabbath, setting limits on our work.
  5. Serve others sacrificially: Reconciling all things including redemption with God, our lives, our relationships, our systems and structures, and our created world.

Haanan devotes a chapter of the book to each principle, illustrating each with workplace stories.

The final chapters develop how this plays out in work and life. Haanan explores how change happens and how the various factors of suffering, community, feedback, and our spiritual disciplines all work together. He tackles the subject of translating faith into the workplace, and how the life of love weaves through and requires the five principles.

One of the things I like the most of the book is the sidebars on professional versus working class perspective. So often, this is lacking in faith-at-work discussions. For example, early in the book he contrasts the workplace identity that is so important in the professional class with the communal identity focusing on family among working class, who view a focus on workplace identity as narcissism. He also draws on the work of Tracy Matthews who founded Attune with its focus on both self-understanding and spiritually attuned workteams. Having gone through Attune training this spring with Matthews, I would affirm the value of this work in pursuing shared spiritual health in teams. Even good teams can get better.

The subtitle of this book, “a brief guide to inner work that transforms our outer world” is so accurate in summarizing this book. Haanan offers a brief and memorable rubric that business leaders can use in their personal contexts. The numerous stories show the connection of inner and outer in practice and how the life that integrates faith and one’s daily work is possible, even in our fragmented, divisive world.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: The Conscience

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

conscienceen

The Conscience (Inner Land, Volume 2), Eberhard Arnold. Walden: NY: Plough Publishing, 2019 (first published in German in 1936).

Summary: A short treatise on the conscience, what it is, what it’s witness is, how it functions apart from God, and how it may be restored.

Conscience. It strikes me that growing up, and in my early Christian journey, I heard much of conscience. These days, not so much. So I was intrigued to receive this little book, only 76 pages, part of a longer series called “Inner Land,” by German philosopher, writer, and founder of the Bruderhof movement.

It is a profound study in part because of where it was written, Nazi Germany, and when it was published, in 1936, shortly after Arnold’s death in 1935. While the work is not openly critical of Hitler, Arnold notes the corrosive effects upon conscience of a society without God, where conscience is formed in a spiritual vacuum.

The book consists of two parts. The first focuses on the conscience and its witness, the focus of which is to serve as a watchman, warning us of all the things detrimental to the inner life of the spirit. It exposes our selfishness and calls us into community. Under God, it brings us great joy. Under sin, it torments and calls us to repentance. It calls us to integrity and justice. Apart from God the conscience is unreliable, finding its bearings only in our rebirth. Christ is the one who restores and purifies through his sacrifice and his Spirit. This opens the way for our consciences to reflect the image of God as we continue to gaze intently on Christ.

The second part considers the restored conscience and the outworking of this in one’s life. At the beginning of this section he sketches the contours of the restored conscience:

   The conscience craves for the very essence of truth. It demands an ultimate, indisputable goal. Strength of conscience, a growing certainty and clarity, is to be found only where peace rules as unity, only where justice rules as brotherliness, only where joy rules as pure and all-inclusive love.

He speaks trenchantly here about the redemption of our sexuality as one expression of good conscience–neither suppression nor unbridled lust but Christian marriages marked by union, self-giving, and the blessing of children. All areas of life come under the purified conscience–our possessions, our business dealings, our approach to conflict, our politics. Christians are people of the conscience set free.

He comes closest here to addressing the issue of Germany under Hitler, not by attacking Hitler but by discussing the choices of conscience one faces in such times. He writes:

Jesus Christ is the only leader [Führer] who leads to freedom. He does not bring a disguised bondage. He does nothing against the free will of the human spirit. He rouses the free will to do that (and only that) which every truth-loving conscience must urge it to do. “The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” Freedom is the free power for free action. 

Anyone who wants to hand over the responsibility for his own actions to a leader [Führer]–anyone who wants to be a human leader–has betrayed freedom. He has become the slave of a human being. His enslaved conscience will be brought to utter ruin if this mis-leader calls to a freedom that is no freedom. All leaders whose authority is merely human ruin people’s consciences.

The book raises the critical issue for me that something will form the conscience of each of us–either in purity, justice, and freedom, or in slavery, impurity, and unreliability. Arnold suggests that it is either Christ or culture that will form us, the former leading us into freedom, the latter ultimately mis-leading us. Arnold recognized how even religious people might be misled, when they seek in human leaders what may only be found in Christ. It raises the question of whether we might be doing the same in looking to a succession of political saviors of the left or right, that ultimately will mis-lead us. Might it not be that the formation of the consciences of a citizenry might prove to be far more important than electing the “right” person to the integrity of both the church, and the country?

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via LibraryThing. The opinions I have expressed are my own.