o forensic adjustment,
no change of reckoning in the heavenly ledgers. "Justification," he
once wrote, "is not only forgiveness of sins, but it is more, it is the
actual healing and renewing of the inward man."[27] It must involve a
real and radical transformation of man's nature--man must cease from
sin and the love of it, he must receive from beyond himself a passion
for goodness and a power to enable him to achieve it. The _passion_
for goodness, in Schwenckfeld's view, is created through the vision of
the God-Man who has suffered and died on the Cross for us, and has been
glorified in absolute newness of life; and the _power_ for moral
holiness is supplied to the soul by the direct inflowing of divine
Life-streams from this new Adam, who is henceforth the Head of the
spiritual order of humanity, the Life-giving Spirit who renews all who
receive Him in faith. "Faith," he says, "is a penetrating stream of
light flowing out from the central divine Light and Fire, which is God
Himself, into our hearts by which we are inflamed with love for God and
for our neighbour, and by which we see both what we lack in ourselves
and what can abundantly supply our lack, so that we may be made ready
for the Kingdom of God and be prepared to become children of God."[28]
"Real faith," he elsewhere says, "that is to say, justifying faith, can
come from nothing {78} external. It is a gracious and gratuitous gift
of God through the Holy Spirit. It is an emanation ["Troepflein"] from
the eternal Life of God, and is of the same essence and substance as
God Himself."[29] It is, in fact, the Eternal Word of God become vocal
and vital within the inner region of our own lives.[30]

The Church, in Schwenckfeld's conception, is this complete spiritual
community of which Christ is the Head. "We maintain," he wrote in the
early period of his mission, and it remained the settled view of his
life, "that the Christian Church according to the usage of the
Scripture is the congregation or assembly of all or of many who with
heart and soul are believers in Christ, whose Head is Christ our Lord,
as St. Paul writes to the Ephesians and elsewhere, and who are born of
God's Word alone, and are nourished and ruled by God's Word."[31] "The
Christian Church," he elsewhere says, "is the entire community of the
children of God. It is the actual Body of Christ, the Seed of Abraham,
the House of the living God, the Temple of the Holy Spirit. It has its
li