the mystical theology of valentin weigel - DataSpace at Princeton ...

impossible that God’s law be present in man without Christ also being there, since God
cannot be split up into his various attributes. 347 Either one has God or one does not, full
stop.
As such, Weigel came to understand the Church as a purely spiritual community
of true believers, rejecting entirely the idea that salvation is dependent on Church
membership because the activities that are normally performed in the Christian religious
community (listening to sermons, reading the Bible, performing the liturgy) cannot of
themselves bring about salvation. Unbaptized children, Muslims, and heathens are all
potentially saved, provided they accessed the salvation they carried around with them by
their very nature, in the ground of their souls. They do not need to listen to sermons, to
receive baptism or communion, or even to read the Bible. 348 If grace, for Luther, is extra
nos, Weigel objects that Christ will remain external unless He is already inside, or, more
precisely, unless Christ had never been absent from the soul at all.
Weigel’s use of Gelassenheit and his concomitant ambivalence about the Church
was seized upon by Weigel’s critics. 349 These more orthodox critics wrote as clergy
charged with pastoral care and the running of day-to-day church life, for whom theology
was certainly no abstract matter. When they imagined a Church built on the basis of
God’s word indwelling in man, they feared chaos and anarchy. For instance, Andreas
Merck’s Trewhertzige Warnung fürm Weigelianismo groups Weigel with the false
prophets that have threatened the Church from its very beginning by substituting
347 This unity of God’s attributes plays a significant role in Weigel’s theology, and will be discussed more
fully in Chapter 4.
348 Valentin Weigel, Zwene nützliche Tractate, 31.
349 Weeks, 180.
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