The Inward Christ

The following is from "The historical and inward Christ" by Rufus Jones:

"'The Lord is the Spirit,' cries Paul when, with unveiled face, he discovers that he is being transformed into His image from glory to glory.  'Joined to the Lord in one Spirit,' is another testimony of the same sort.

"Unfortunately the doctrine of the Christ within--'the real presence'--has generally been held vaguely, and it has easily run into error and even fanaticism.  The most common error has come from the prevalent view that when the Spirit--the inward Christ--comes in, the man goes out. It has been supposed that the finite is suppressed and the infinite supplants it and operates instead of it.  This view is not only contrary to Scripture, but also contrary to psychological possibility.

"What really happens is that the human spirit  through its awakened appreciation appropriates into its own life the divine Life which was always near and was always meant for it.

"The true view has been well put by August Sabatier:  'It is not enough to represent the Spirit of God as coming to the help of man's spirit, supplying strength which it lacks, an associate or juxtaposed force, a supernatural auxiliary . . . The Spirit of God identifies itself [sic] with the human me into which it [sic] enters and whose life it [sic] becomes.  If we may so speak, it [sic] is individualized in the new moral personality which it [sic] creates.  A sort of metamorphosis, a transubstantiation, if the word may be permitted, takes place in the human being.  Having been carnal it becomes spiritual.  A 'new man' arises from the old man by the creative act of the spirit of God . . . Supernatural gifts become natural, or rather, at this mystical height, the antithesis created by scholastic rationalism becomes meaningless and is obliterated.'

"That is precisely my view and if I had not found it here so well said I should have put the same idea into my own words.

"There are no known limits to the possible translation of the Spirit of god [sic] --the eternal Christ--into human personality.  There are all degrees and varieties of it [sic] as there are all degrees and varieties of physical life.

"One stands looking at a century-old oak tree and he wonders how this marvelous thing ever rose out of the dead earth where its roots are.  As a matter of fact it did not.  A tree is largely transformed sunlight.  There is from first to last an earth element to be sure, but the tree is forever drawing upon the streams of sunlight which flood it and builds the intangible light energy into leaf and blossom and fibre until there stands the old monarch, actually living on sunshine!

"But the little daisy at its feet, modest and delicate, is equally consolidated sunshine, though it pushes its face hardly six inches from the soil in which it was born.

"So one spirit differs from another spirit in glory.  Some have but feebly drawn upon the Spiritual Light out of which strong lives are builded, others have raised the unveiled face to the supreme Light and have translated it into a life of spiritual beauty and moral fibre.

"Thus the revelation of God in the flesh goes on from age to age.  The Christ-life propagates itself [sic] like all life-types--the last Adam proves to be a life-giving spirit.  He is the first born among many brethren.  The actual re-creation, the genuine identification of self with Christ may go on until a man may even say--'Christ lives in me;' 'I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus;' 'It has pleased God to reveal His son in me.'"