Excerpt from Casper Schwenkfeld

Among all the reformers of the sixteenth century who worked at the immense task of recovering, purifying, and restating the Christian faith, no one was nobler in life and personality, and no one was more uncompromisingly dedicated to the mission of bringing into the life of the people a type of Christianity winnowed clean from the husks of superstition and tradition, and grounded in ethical and spiritual reality than was Casper Schwenkfeld the Salesian noble.

“. . . They saw with their inner spirits that the real healing of the human soul and the eternal destiny of man were indissolubly bound up with the person of Christ. He emphasizes the inwardness of true religion and the importance of the personal experience of the living, creative, and divine word. He called attention to the superficiality of the change which was taking place in men’s lives as the result of the Reformation. He pleads for a faith in Christ and an appreciation of Him that shall, ‘. . . reach the deep regions of the spirit, renew the heart, and produce a new man in the believer.’

‘Christ is the first born of this new creation. He is the first new Adam, who, by His triumphant life and victorious resurrection, has become forever a life-giving Spirit––the creative principle of a new humanity in Christ. The Word of God, the actual divine seed of God, became flesh, entered into our human nature, and penetrated it with Spirit and Life, conquered its stubborn bent towards sin, and transfigured and transformed this human flesh into a divine and heavenly substance. Christ glorified human flesh and exalted it from flesh to Spirit and in His resurrected, heavenly life He is able to unite Himself inwardly with the souls of believers, so that His spiritual, resurrected flesh and blood can be their food and drink, and He can become the life-giving source of a new order of humanity, the spiritual head of a new race. The process, for it is a vital process, it is from beginning to end in the realm of experience. By the exercise of faith in the crucified, risen, and glorified God-man as the life-giving Spirit, real power from a higher world streams into the soul. Something pneumatic, something which belongs pathologically to a higher spiritual world order comes into the person as a divinely bestowed germ plasm with living, renewing and organizing power. The recreative energy which pours in transforms both soul and body. The inner, internal Word of God, Who became flesh, acts upon the inner nature of man, so the believing man is changed into something spiritual, divine and heavenly, and like Christ, the incarnated Word of God. Thus this Word, which is the same life-giving Spirit that became flesh in Christ and that produces the new creation in man, becomes a perpetual, inward teacher in those who are reborn.

It is, in fact, God Himself, operating as life and spirit and light upon the spiritual substance of the human soul, first, as the life-seed which forms the new creation in man and afterwards as the permanent, nourishing and tutoring spirit who leads the obedient soul on into all the truth and perfects it into the likeness stature of Christ. Schwenkfeld always insists that written words, however inspired, are still external to the soul. The Bible leads to Christ and it bears witness of Him as no other book does, But it is not Christ. If these spiritual realities are to become real and effective to us, it must be through the direct relation of the human spirit with the divine Spirit, the inward spiritual Word of God.’

Schwenkfeld’s views of the process of salvation and the permanent illumination of the reborn soul by a real incoming divine substance, whether called word or seed, is the dynamic feature of his Christianity. It was a necessity, he felt to discover some way by which man could be actually renewed, transformed, recreated, and made righteous. “Justification,” he once wrote, “is not only forgiveness of sins, but it is more. It is the actual healing and renewing of inward man. It must involve a real and radical transformation of man’s nature.” The passion for goodness, in Schwenkfeld’s view, is created through the vision of the God-man who suffered and died on the cross for us and has been glorified in absolute newness of life; and the power of more holiness is supplied to the soul by the direct inflowing of divine-life-streams from this new Adam, who is hence forth the head of the spiritual order of humanity, the life-giving Spirit, who renews all who receive him in faith.

“Faith,” he says, “is the penetrating stream of light flowing out from the central, divine light and fire, which is God himself, into our hearts, by which we are inflamed with love for God and for our neighbor, and which we see what we lack in ourselves and what can abundantly supply our lack, so that we may be ready for the Kingdom of God, and be prepared to become children of God. Real faith is the gracious and gratuitous gift of God through the Holy Spirit. It is an emanation from the eternal life of God, and it is the same essence and substance as God Himself. It is, in fact, the eternal Word of God become vocal and vital within the inner region of our own selves. Each soul that enters the kingdom of experience through the work of the life-giving Spirit is builded into this invisible, expanding Church of the ages, and is endowed with some gift to become an organ of the divine Head. Christian baptism is therefore not with water but with Christ. It is the immersion of the soul in the life-giving streams of Christ’s spiritual presence. Through the exercise of faith in the person of the crucified, risen, and glorified Christ, the created Adam, incorruptible life-giving substance comes into the soul and transfigures it. Something from the divine and heavenly world, something from the spiritualized and glorified nature of Christ becomes the actual food of man’s spirit, so that through it he partakes of the same nature as that of the God-man. Not once or twice, but as a continuous experience, the soul may share this glorious meal of spiritual renewal, the eating and drinking of Christ.