The Way to Christ

Der Weg zu Christo (The Way to Christ) is a collection of nine short devotional treatises by Jakob Böhme, the shoemaker of Görlitz in Upper Lusatia, written between 1622 and 1624 and gathered under a single title. It belongs to the last years of his life, after his first book, Aurora, had brought him into conflict with the Lutheran pastor Gregorius Richter, who denounced him from the pulpit in 1613 and secured a ban on his writing. Böhme kept silent for several years, then resumed writing in 1618. These treatises, which include the prayer-books on repentance, resignation, and rebirth, are shorter and more practical than the cosmological writings that made him notorious, and they were addressed to ordinary Christians who wanted to know how to turn toward God in the midst of a church divided by confessional strife.

The work's central claim is that the Christian life is not a matter of correct opinion or outward observance but of an inward turning of the will. Böhme describes the soul as caught between two orientations: self-will, which clings to its own desire and imagines itself the center of things, and the surrender of that will into God. Repentance, for him, is less a catalogue of sins than the recognition that the self has been living from the wrong ground. The path he lays out moves through contrition, prayer, the yielding of one's own will (Gelassenheit, a term inherited from the German mystical tradition), and finally the new birth in which Christ is formed within the believer. He insists that this is not a human achievement but the work of God meeting a will that has been emptied of its own pretensions. Much of the book is written as prayer, so that the reader is led into the movements it describes rather than merely instructed about them. Böhme is also candid that scholarly learning is no prerequisite, and he is impatient with the polemics of his age, arguing that a person who loves God from the heart belongs to Christ whatever party he follows.

The book has endured because it carries the intensity of the mystical tradition in a form that a lay reader can actually use. It was widely read among Pietists and later shaped the devotional life of figures in the English-speaking world, notably William Law, who drew deeply on Böhme. Its call to die to self-will and to find life in Christ speaks directly to anyone weary of religion as performance or controversy.

Who should read this: readers drawn to the contemplative and mystical strand of Protestant spirituality, and those who want a primary voice from the German tradition that stands behind Pietism and Law. It suits those willing to read slowly and to pray the text rather than analyze it. It is not for readers seeking a systematic theology or a clear doctrinal argument, nor for those who want Böhme's speculative cosmology, which belongs to his other books. Its language is of its century and its images can be strange, so it rewards patience over speed.