Reflections on Esaias Stiefel's Booklet: On the Threefold State of Man and His New Birth

becomes strong in God's will / it vanishes / when the soul surrenders itself entirely into it / so the outer is held captive: For the inner always kills the outer with God's love and gentleness / so that the outer cannot introduce its earthly poisonous evil craving and will, infected by the devil, to the soul-fire.

52. But the outer cannot be entirely killed / until its breaking: For if the outer man were to be entirely killed / the realm of this world would have to break off from him: so the outer also cannot be entirely placed into the renovation / for the devil's craving sticks in it; but the outer must be placed back into the mysterium the hidden divine root / and be led through the eternal fire on the Last Day / where then the evil craving / the turba the destructive/discordant force / is swallowed in the fire / and the mysterium appears again with its wonders on the noble image.

53. Therefore I cannot say with any ground of my outer flesh and blood / that it is Christ's flesh / and besides entirely holy and without blemish: Only of the inner man born out of God / can I say with truth / that he is conceived in God's essence / as in the Word of life / which was promised again to Adam in paradise / which opened itself in the goal in the highly blessed Virgin mirror / as in the Divine virginity / in our essence enclosed in death.

54. For in the same conception is the kingdom of heaven / or the heart of God / the man for the seed that is sown; And the woman's seed / understand the seed enclosed in death of the soul and the noble image / is the matrix womb/receptacle / which takes God's seed into itself in an essential way: So that God and man become One Person / according to the shape of the three worlds / as they stand in one another / and none is the other: For none possesses the other / but each dwells in itself; So that / even if God is born in Christ / in us / we can by no means say yet / when we speak of the whole man / I am Christ / for the outer is not Christ; But thus we can say with ground / I am in Christ / and Christ has become man in me.

55. But His human realm is not of this world / and I with my New man in Christ am not of this world / for St. Paul said also thus / that our conversation is in