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