The Incarnation of Jesus Christ

Von der Menschwerdung Jesu Christi (On the Incarnation of Jesus Christ) was written in 1620 by Jakob Böhme, the shoemaker of Görlitz in Silesia whose visionary writings had made him a controversial figure in the Lutheran town. His first book, Aurora, circulated in manuscript in 1612 and brought him into conflict with Gregorius Richter, the chief pastor of Görlitz, who had it denounced to the town council; Böhme was ordered to stop writing and complied for several years. He resumed around 1618, and the incarnation treatise belongs to the first fruits of that second period. It is a lay theologian's attempt to say, in his own idiom, how God became human, written against a Lutheran culture that had grown fierce in defending doctrine and, in Böhme's judgment, was often content to defend it without being changed by it.

The treatise is divided into three parts. Böhme argues that the incarnation cannot be understood as a legal arrangement, with Christ stepping in to satisfy a debt on humanity's behalf. It is for him a real event in the substance of human nature. Adam, created in the image of God, lost his heavenly purity in the fall and took on an earthly, corrupted existence. Christ enters this fallen humanity so as to restore what was lost from within. Böhme gives particular weight to the person of Mary, through whom the heavenly life is said to be rekindled in human flesh, and to the idea that redemption is a rebirth in which the believer is drawn into Christ's own life and not merely credited with his righteousness. Much of the text is given to this conviction that salvation must be inwardly experienced and cannot simply be assented to. The language is dense and often strange, built on a vocabulary of fire, light, tincture and the eternal Word that Böhme coins as he goes, and it requires patience before its main line of argument becomes visible.

The work has mattered because it records one of the most distinctive voices in the Protestant mystical tradition at the moment it found its mature theme. Böhme's writings were read and revered by later Pietists and by thinkers well beyond the church, including Gottfried Arnold, William Law, who prepared an English edition of his works, and German Romantic and Idealist philosophers. The incarnation treatise is a good place to see what drew them: an insistence that Christ's coming changes the inner constitution of the person who receives him.

Who should read this: readers who already have some footing in the Christian mystical tradition, or in Lutheran and Pietist history, and who are willing to work through an unfamiliar and deliberately private vocabulary. It suits those interested in how incarnation and new birth were joined in early modern Protestant thought. It is not for anyone looking for a clear systematic account of the doctrine, nor for readers who want a first introduction to Böhme, for whom a shorter and more accessible entry point would serve better.