Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 29, 2025
'You will be soon weary of all contentious books, he wrote to CASPER LINDERN, 'if you entertain and get The Threefold Life of Man into your mind and heart. 'The subject of regeneration, says Christopher Walton, 'is the pith and drift of all Behmen's writings, and the student may here be directed to begin his course of study by mastering the first eight chapters of The Threefold Life, which appear to have been in great favour with Mr.
Behmen's Eternal Nature must never be taken for the Eternal GOD. The Divine Nature, the Eternal Godhead, exists in the Father, in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost; and then, after the Eternal Generation of the Son, and the Eternal Procession of the Holy Ghost, there comes up in order of existence Eternal Nature.
Behmen's philosophical, theological, and experimental doctrine of sin also, with one example, must be wholly passed by. 'If all trees were clerks, he exclaims in one place, 'and all their branches pens, and all the hills books, and all the water ink, yet all would not sufficiently declare the evil that sin hath done.
By this attitude of his to the affections of the human heart, Behmen's doctrine of the Trinity is in close coherence with the Reformation, and with its evangelical churches. . . . Behmen is anxious to state a conception of GOD that will fill the hiatus between the theological and anthropological sides of the dogmatical development which was bequeathed by the Reformation; he seeks to unite the theological and the anthropological. . . . From careful study of Behmen's theology, continues Bishop Martensen, 'one gains a prevailing impression that Behmen's GOD is, in His inmost Being, most kindred to man, even as man in his inmost being is still kindred to GOD. And, besides, we recognise in Behmen throughout the pulse-beat of a believing man, who is in all his books supremely anxious about his own salvation and that of his fellow-men. Now, it is just this super-confessional element in Behmen, both on his speculative and on his practical side, taken along with the immediate and intensely practical bearing of all his speculations, it is just this that is Behmen's true and genuine distinction, his shining and unshared glory.
ASAPH'S experiences, so powerfully set before us in the seventy-third Psalm, will best convey, to those who do not know Behmen, what Behmen also passed through before he drew near to GOD. Like that so thoughtful Psalmist, Behmen's steps had well-nigh slipped when he saw the prosperity of the wicked, and when he saw how waters of a full cup were so often wrung out to the people of GOD. The mystery of life, the sin and misery of life, cast Behmen into a deep and inconsolable melancholy.
'Which things are an allegory, says the Apostle, after a passing reference to Sarah and Hagar and Isaac and Ishmael; but if you would see actually every syllable of Genesis allegorised, spiritualised, interpreted of CHRIST, and of the New Testament, from the first verse of its first chapter to the last verse of its last chapter, like the nobleman of Silesia, when you have leisure, read Behmen's deep Mysterium Magnum.
Law. Behmen's next book was a very extraordinary piece of work, and it had a very extraordinary origin. A certain BALTHAZAR WALTER, who seems to have been a second Paracelsus in his love of knowledge and in his lifelong pursuit of knowledge, had, like Paracelsus, travelled east, and west, and north, and south in search of that ancient and occult wisdom of which so many men in that day dreamed.
But, that no man may boast, He sometimes makes use of very mean men to make known His truth, that it may be seen and acknowledged to come from His own hand alone. It is told that when Charles the First read the English translation of Behmen's answers to the Forty Questions, he wrote to the publisher that if Jacob Behmen was no scholar, then the Holy Ghost was still with men; and, if he was a learned man, then his book was one of the best inventions that had ever been written.
As the English reader is carried on through the fourth tract, The Supersensual Life, he experiences a new and an increasing sense of ease and pleasure, combined with a mystic height and depth and inwardness all but new to him even in Behmen's books.
Behmen's greatest disciple has assimilated his master's teaching in this matter of complexion also, and has given it out again in his own clear, plain, powerful, classical manner, especially in his treatise on Christian Regeneration.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking