The Way to Christ

Preface. 10

Who can judge divine matters if the Spirit of the Lord is not within them? The Spirit of the Lord alone judges and examines all things: For to Him alone all things are known and manifest. Human reason, however, judges from the outside, and one person's reason always judges according to another’s: the small according to the great, the layman according to the doctor original: Doctor. In Böhme’s time, this specifically referred to a highly educated academic or a Doctor of Divinity.. Thus, no one grasps the truth or the Lord’s mind except for the Spirit of God, which judges within the human being and is no respecter of persons a biblical phrase meaning God does not show favoritism based on social status or rank: to Him, the layman is the same as the doctor.

But because the children of God have such a variety of gifts for writing, speaking, and judging, and do not all follow the same style, one’s own reason thereafter sucks out its own profit and creates a Babel Böhme uses "Babel" to represent the confusion, sectarianism, and prideful intellectualism of the organized church of his day.. From this, so many different opinions have arisen, as people have devised their own views and "ways to God" out of those holy writings—insisting on which paths one ought to walk. Thus, such a quarrel has arisen that, at present, man looks only upon the dispute, seeing who can overcome the other through an exchange of letters original: Buchstaben-Wechseln. This refers to pedantic arguments over the literal text of scripture or academic definitions rather than spiritual experience.. That is all Babel, a mother of spiritual harlotry a common 17th-century metaphor for the corruption of the church through human pride and false doctrines, where reason does not enter through the door of Christ, through Christ’s Spirit into the