Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th CenturiesJones, Rufus M. (Rufus Matthew)
Religion
Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries
Jones, Rufus M. (Rufus Matthew)
Mysticism; Reformers
Franck thus differs in a vital point from Schwenckfeld. The latter
starts with man as utterly lost and devoid of any inherent goodness. By
a sudden, supernatural event, at a temporal moment, divine forces break
into the soul from without and supply it with a revitalizing energy.
Man--lost, fallen, sin-blasted and utterly helpless--is by a divine and
heavenly creative movement _made_ a new Adam. For Franck, the soul has
never lost the divine Image, the pearl of supreme price, the original
element which is God Himself in the soul. We are all, in the deepest
centre of our being, like Adam, possessed of a substantial essence, not
of earth, not of time and space, not of the shadow but of the eternal,
spiritual, and heavenly type. It may become overlaid with the rubbish of
earth, it may long lie buried in the field of the human heart, it may
remain concealed, like the grain of radium in a mass of dark pitchblende,
and be forgotten, but we have only to return home within ourselves to
find the God who has never been sundered from us and who could not leave
us without leaving Himself. We do not need to cross the sea to find Him,
we do not need to climb the heavens to reach Him--the Word is nigh thee,
the Image is in thy heart, turn home and thou shalt find Him.[16]
The bottomless and abysmal nature of the human soul comes first into
clear revelation in the Person of Christ, who is, Franck declares, truly
and essentially both God and Man. In Christ the invisible, eternal, {55}
self-existent God has clothed Himself with flesh and become Man, has made
Himself visible and vocal to our spiritual eyes and ears, and in Christ
God has given us an adequate goal and norm of life, a perfect pattern
("Muster") to walk by and to live by. Here we can see both the character
of God and the measure of His expectation for us. But we must not stop
with the Christ after the flesh, the Christ without. He first becomes
our life and salvation when He is born within us and is revealed in our
hearts, and has become the Life of our lives. We must eat His body,
drink His blood until our nature is one with His nature and our spirit
one in will and purpose with His spirit.[17]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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