Faith & Spirit Quote by Johann Arndt

Arndt’s sentence is a theological pin aimed at a very specific balloon: the smugness that can grow in the wake of religious achievement. He’s not warning against pride in the vague, self-help sense. He’s targeting “spiritual pride,” the most treacherous form precisely because it can masquerade as holiness. In a world where “greater gifts, and endowments” could mean learning, eloquence, social standing, or visible piety, Arndt insists those distinctions don’t translate into a higher rank “before God.” The line is a quiet coup against religious meritocracy.

The rhetoric works because it concedes what it needs to concede. Arndt allows that some people really are “adorned” with more talent or virtue; he doesn’t flatten human difference. Then he breaks the common inference that difference equals divine preference. That pivot is the remedy: it interrupts the internal accounting that turns devotion into a scoreboard. The subtext is pastoral and political at once. Pastoral, because it aims to cure the soul of a corrosive comparison habit. Political, because it undermines the social uses of religion that justify hierarchy by claiming spiritual superiority.

Context matters. Writing in the post-Reformation climate, Arndt is part of a Protestant tradition anxious about external religiosity hardening into a new kind of works-righteousness: not buying indulgences, perhaps, but buying status through correct doctrine, conspicuous discipline, or moral severity. His “truth” is a leveling doctrine meant to protect humility from becoming just another costume for power.