ng Christ," he wrote, "is all in
all. He saves thee. He is thy peace and thy comfort. The outward
Christ, the Christ in the flesh, and according to the flesh, cannot
save thee in an external way. He must be in thee and thou must abide
in Him. Why then did He become man and suffer on the Cross? There are
many reasons why, but it was especially that God by the death and
suffering of Christ might take the wrath and hostility out of _our_
hearts, on account of which we falsely conceive of God as a wrathful
enemy to us. He had to deal that way with poor blind men like us and
so reconcile us with Himself. {142} There was no need of it on His
part. He was always Love and He always loved us, even when we were
enemies to Him, but we should never have known it if God had not
condescended to show Himself to us in His Son and had not suffered for
us."[9]

Weigel everywhere maintains Christ's double identity--an identity with
God, so that in Christ we see God; and an equal identity with man, so
that Christ is man revealed in his fulfilled possibilities. In Him God
and man are _one_. In this deep-lying and fundamental idea of his
entire Christianity he was undoubtedly influenced, profoundly
influenced, by Schwenckfeld. He presents in chapter i. of his _Life of
Christ_ the Schwenckfeldian view that Christ is God and Man in _one_.
But He is Man not in the crass, crude and earthly form: He is not
composed of mortal and earthly substance as our "Adamical bodies" are.
He is wholly and absolutely composed of heavenly, spiritual, divine
substance. His flesh and blood are as divine and spiritual in origin
as is His spirit, so that His resurrection and ascension are the normal
outcome of His nature. It was as natural for Him to rise into life and
to ascend into glory as it is for heavy things to fall. But that
divine, spiritual, heavenly nature, which appeared in Him, is the true,
original, consummate nature of Man. Man, as we know him, is cloudy, or
even muddy, with a vesture of decay, but that is not a feature of his
_real_ nature--either in its original or its potential form--and all
who "put on Christ," all who have "Christ in them," become one flesh
with Him and gain an indestructible and permanent inward substance like
His.

Consistently with this view, Weigel declares that here lies the
significance of Christ's saying, "I am Bread"; "I am Meat and Drink."
The only adequate Supper of the Lord, he says, is real feeding