He sojourned for longer or shorter periods in Strasbourg, Augsburg, Ulm, and other cities, but nowhere was he safe from his enemies, and he always faced the prospect of banishment even from his place of temporary sojourn. {69} Furious declarations were passed against him by the Schmalkald League in 1540, for to his anti-Lutheran views on the sacraments he had now added teachings on the nature of Christ which the theologians pronounced unorthodox. Three years later he sent a messenger to Luther in hope of a friendly understanding. Luther's answer was brief and final: "The stupid fool, possessed by the devil, understands nothing. He does not know what he is babbling. But if he won't stop his drivel, let him at least not bother me with the booklets which the devil spues out of him."[11] At the ministerial Council of Protestant States in 1556 Schwenckfeld was denounced in the most vituperous language of the period, and the civil authorities were urged to proceed against him as a dangerous heretic. He always had, notwithstanding this pursuit of theological hate, many powerful friends, and a large number of brave and devoted followers who were glad to risk goods, home, and life for the sake of what was to them the living Word of God. He died—or as his friends preferred to say, he had a quiet and peaceful "home passage"—at Ulm in 1561. Of the purity, the brave sincerity, the nobility, the outward and inward consistency of his life there is no question. His enemies had no word to say which reflected upon the motives of his heart or upon the genuine piety of his life. His religion cost him all that he held dear in the outer world—he had not taken "the cross at the softest spot"—and he practised his faith as the most precious thing a man could possess in this world or in any other.
We must now turn to a study of his type of Christianity, which will be presented here not in the order of its historical development, but as it appears in perspective in his life and writings. He does not ground his conception of salvation, his idea of religion überhaupt, as the humanistic Reformers, Denck, Bünderlin, Entfelder, and Franck, do, on the essentially divine nature of the {70} soul in its deepest reality,[12] nor again as the medieval mystics do, on the substantial presence within the soul of a divine soul-centre, an unlost and inalienable Spark or Image of God which can turn back home and unite itself with its Source, the Godhead. He begins, as Luther does, with man "fallen," "dead in sin," by nature "blind and deaf" to divine realities. For him, as for Luther, there exists no natural freedom of the will, by which a person can spontaneously and of his own initiative rise up, shake off the shackles of sin, and go to living as a son of God. This stupendous event, this absolute shift of the life-level, comes, and can come, he thinks, only through an act of God, directly, immediately wrought upon the soul. Salvation must be a supernatural event. Through this act of God from above there results within the soul an experience which in every respect is a new creation. It is a cataclysmic event of the same order as the fiat lux of cosmic creation, a rebirth through which the man who has it once again comes into the condition Adam was in before he fell.
Everything which has to do with salvation in Schwenckfeld's Christianity goes back to the historical Christ.[13] 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 for ever "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 with Life, conquered its stubborn bent toward sin, and transfigured and transformed this human flesh into a divine and heavenly substance. By obedience to the complete will of God, even to the extreme depths of suffering, sacrifice, and death on the Cross for {71} the love of men, Christ glorified human flesh, 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. "If the soul of man," he wrote, "is to be truly nourished, vitally fed and watered, so that it comes into possession of Eternal Life, it must die to its fleshly life and receive into itself a divine and spiritual Life, having its source in the Being of God and mediated to the soul by the living, inward-working Flesh and Blood of Jesus Christ," through which mediation we come into spiritual union and vital fellowship with God who is Spirit.[14]
Salvation for Schwenckfeld, therefore, is participation in the life of this new creation, this new world-order. To become a Christian, in his sense of the word, is to pass over one of the most decisive watersheds in the universe, to go from one kingdom to another kingdom of a higher rank. The process—for it is a vital process—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 ontologically to a higher spiritual world-order, comes into the person as a divinely bestowed germ-plasm, with living, renewing, organizing power. As with Irenaeus, so with Schwenckfeld, salvation is "real redemption," the "deification" of mortal man, the actual formation of an immortal nature, the restoration of humanity to what it originally was, through the in-streaming life-energy of a mystical Adam-Christ, the Founder and Head of a new spiritual race.[15]
By this incoming spiritual power and life-substance the entire personality of the recipient is affected. The {72} recreative energy which pours in transforms both soul and body. The inner eternal Word of God, who became flesh, acts upon the inner nature of man, so that the believing man is changed into something spiritual, divine and heavenly, and like Jesus Christ, the incarnated Word of God.[16] There comes, with this epoch-making experience, a sense of freedom not known before, a power of control over the body and its appetites, an illumination of the intellect, a new sensitiveness of conscience to the meaning of sin, an extraordinary expansion of the vision of the goal of life—which is a full-grown man in Christ,—and an apprehension of the gift of the Spirit sufficient for the achievement of that goal. Not least among the signs of transfiguration and of heightened life is the attainment of a joy which spreads through the inward spirit and shines on the face—a joy which can turn hard exile into a Ruheschloss, "a castle of peace."
Those who have experienced this dynamic transfiguration gain thereby gifts, capacities, and powers to hear the Word of God within their own souls, and 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. "Precious gifts of the Holy Ghost flow from the essential Being of God into the heart of the believer." There is, Schwenckfeld holds, a double revelation of God. The primary Word of God is eternal, spiritual, inward. "The Word, when spiritual messengers preach or teach, is of two kinds with a decided difference in their manner of working. One is of God, even is God, and lives and works in the heart of the messenger. This is the inner Word, and is in reality nothing else than the continued manifestation of Christ. He is inwardly revealed, and heard with the inward ears of the heart."[17] 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 {73} nourishing and tutoring Spirit who leads the obedient soul on into all the Truth, and perfects it into the likeness and stature of Christ. "There is a living, inner Scripture, written in the believer's heart by the finger of God." "This inner Scripture has an active creative power of holiness, and makes holy, living, righteous and saved all those in whose hearts it is written."
The divine word in the secondary sense is the outward word—the word of Scripture. "The other word which serves the inner Word with voice, sound, and expression is the external word, and is heard by the external man with his ears of sense, and is written and read in letters. He who has read and heard only that, and not the inner Word, has not heard the Gospel of Christ, the Gospel of Grace, nor has he received or understood it."[18] It is at best only the witness or testimony which assists the soul to find the real life-giving Word. Cut apart from the inner spiritual Word, the word of the letter is "dead," as the body would be if sundered from the spirit. "It paints truth powerfully for the eye, but it cannot bring it into the heart."[19] "The Scriptures cannot bring to the soul that of which they speak. This must be sought directly from God Himself."[20] In his practical use of Scripture and in his estimate of its importance he is hardly behind Luther himself. "There is," he says, "no writing on earth like the Holy Scriptures."[21] His Christianity is penetrated and illuminated at every point by the profound spiritual experiences of the saints of the Bible, and still more by the vivid portraits of Christ in the Gospels, by the words from His lips recorded there, and by the experiences of the apostles and the development of the primitive Church. He never doubts or questions the inspiration of the Scriptures; quite the contrary, he holds that Scripture is "given by God" and is an inexhaustible well of inspired truth from which the soul can endlessly draw. The actual content of Christian faith is supplied by the historical revelation; {74} but Schwenckfeld always insists that written words, however inspired, are still external to the soul, and merely record historical events which have happened to others in other ages. "If man," he writes, "is to understand spiritual things and is to know and judge rightly, he must bring the divine Light to the Scriptures, the Spirit to the letter, the Truth to the picture, and the Master to His created work. . . . In a word, to understand the Scriptures a man must become a new man, a man of God; he must be in Christ who gave forth the Scriptures."[2] That which is to change the inner nature of a man must be something personally experienced and not external to him; must be in its own nature as spiritual as the soul itself is and not material, as written words are. "The pen cannot completely bring the heart to the paper, nor can the mouth entirely express the well of living water within itself."[23] The Bible leads to Christ and bears witness of Him as no other book does, but it is not Christ. And even the Bible remains a closed book until Christ opens it.[24] The Scriptures tell, as no other writings do, of the Word of God and its life-operations in the world, but they are still not the Word of God. The spiritual realities of life cannot be settled by laboriously piling up texts of Scripture, by subtle theological dialectic, or by learned exegesis of sacred words. 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.[25] "He who will see the truth must have God for eyes."[26]
Schwenckfeld's view 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. He is endeavouring to find a foundation for a religious energism that will avoid the dangers which beset Luther's principle {75} of "justification by faith." From the inception of the Reformation movement there had appeared a tendency to regard the exercise of "faith" as all that was required for human salvation. Luther did not mean it so, but it was the easy line of least resistance to hold that "faith" had a magic effect in the invisible realm, that is to say: As soon as a person exercised "faith," God counted the "faith" for righteousness, and regarded that person as "justified." The important operation was thus in a region outside the soul. The momentous shift was not in the personal character of the individual, but in the way the individual was regarded and valued in the heavenly estimates. It was the discovery of the prevalence of this crude and magical reliance on "faith" which first drove Schwenckfeld to a deeper study of the problems of religion. It was the necessity that he felt to discover some way by which man himself could be actually renewed, transformed, recreated, and made righteous—rather than merely counted or reckoned righteous by some magical transaction—that made him an independent reformer and set him on his solitary way.
To this deep and central question of religion, How is a human soul saved? there were in Schwenckfeld's day four well-known answers:
(1) There was the answer of the Church in which he was born. Salvation is by Grace, mediated through the sacramental channels of the mysterious and divinely founded Church. Man's part consists in the performance of the "works" which the Church requires of him and the proper use of the sacramental means of Grace. Through these sacramental channels actual Grace, substantial divine help, comes into man and works the miracle of salvation in him.