come into spiritual union and vital fellowship with
God who is Spirit.[14]

Salvation for Schwenckfeld, therefore, is participation in the life of
this new creation, this new world-order. To become a Christian, in his
sense of the word, is to pass over one of the most decisive watersheds
in the universe, to go from one kingdom to another kingdom of a higher
rank. The _process_--for it is a vital process--is from beginning to
end in the realm of experience. By the exercise of faith in the
crucified, risen, and glorified God-Man, as the life-giving Spirit,
real power from a higher world streams into the soul. Something
"pneumatic," something which belongs ontologically to a higher
spiritual world-order, comes into the person as a divinely bestowed
germ-plasm, with living, renewing, organizing power. As with Irenaeus,
so with Schwenckfeld, salvation is "real redemption," the "deification"
of mortal man, the actual formation of an immortal nature, the
restoration of humanity to what it originally was, through the
in-streaming life-energy of a mystical Adam-Christ, the Founder and
Head of a new spiritual race.[15]

By this incoming spiritual power and life-substance the entire
personality of the recipient is affected. The {72} recreative energy
which pours in transforms both soul and body. The inner eternal Word
of God, who became flesh, acts upon the inner nature of man, so that
the believing man is changed into something spiritual, divine and
heavenly, and like Jesus Christ, the incarnated Word of God.[16] There
comes, with this epoch-making experience, a sense of freedom not known
before, a power of control over the body and its appetites, an
illumination of the intellect, a new sensitiveness of conscience to the
meaning of sin, an extraordinary expansion of the vision of the goal of
life--which is a full-grown man in Christ,--and an apprehension of the
gift of the Spirit sufficient for the achievement of that goal. Not
least among the signs of transfiguration and of heightened life is the
attainment of a joy which spreads through the inward spirit and shines
on the face--a joy which can turn hard exile into a _Ruheschloss_, "a
castle of peace."

Those who have experienced this dynamic transfiguration gain thereby
gifts, capacities, and powers to hear the Word of God within their own
souls, and thus this Word, which is the same life-giving Spirit that
became flesh in Christ and that produces the new creation i