nd now
become in the inward spiritual man Christ's members and the Temple of
God who dwells in us. No one has a right to comfort himself with
Christ's merits unless he desires wholly to put on Christ in himself.
He is not a Christian until he has put Him on by true repentance and
conversion to Him with absolute resignation and self-denial, so that
Christ espouseth and betrotheth Himself with him. . . . For a
Christian must be born of Christ and must die to the will of Adam. He
must have Christ in him and be a member of His Life according to the
spiritual man."[31]

Faith, which is always the key-word in any person's interpretation of
Christianity, is for Boehme a dynamic process of appropriating Christ,
and of re-living Him. "Faith," he writes in his treatise on _The
Incarnation_, {196} "is not historical knowledge for a man to make
articles of it and to depend on them, but faith is one spirit with God,
it is the activity of God; it is free, but only for the right and for
pure Love, in which it draws the breath of its power and strength. It
is, finally, itself the substance."[32] Faith is, thus, not knowledge,
it is not believing facts of history, it is not accepting metaphysical
dogma. It is, as he is never weary of saying, "strong earnestness of
spirit," the earnest will to live in the inward and eternal, passionate
hunger and thirst for God, and finally the act of receiving Christ into
the soul as a present power and spirit to live by. "I must die," he
wrote, "with my outward man [the man of self-centred will] in Christ's
death and arise and live anew in Him. Therefore I live now by the will
of faith in the spirit of Christ and receive Christ with His humanity
into my will. He makes through me a manifestation of the spiritual
world and introduces the true Love-sound into the harp-strings of my
life. He became that which I am, and now He has made me that which He
is!"[33]

Another word for this efficacious and dynamic Faith is "Birth" or
"innermost Birth," by which Boehme means the act of discovering the
Gate to the Heart and Love and Light of God, and of entering it. "The
Son of God, the Eternal Word of the Father, the Glance and Brightness
and Power of Eternal Light must become man and _be born in you_;
otherwise you are in the dark stable and go about groping."[34] "If
thou art born of God, then within the circle of thy own life is the
whole undivided Heart of God."[35] It is a transforming event by