Jakob Boehme – A Christian Prophet Persecuted By Christians – No Surprises Here!

Jakob Böhme was born in Germany of peasant stock and lived from 1575 to 1624. He was a Christian mystic and theologian. In contemporary English his name may be spelled Jacob Boehme; in seventeenth-century England it was also spelled Behmen, approximating the contemporary English pronunciation of the German Böhme.

He did not seem to be very strong constitutionally and not suited for husbandry and so, was apprenticed as a cobbler (shoemaker). He married and had a family. Like most mystics, at one point in his life he had mystical experiences that inspired him to put his visions to paper. At first he did not act on his experiences and later began to write down his visions for himself. He lent his writing to a friend who began copying it and circulating it. Noblemen and others began reading his work and encouraged him to write more.

When the local Lutheran minister read what Boehme had written it really “hit the fan.”

He said of Boehme:

“There are as many blasphemies in this shoemaker’s book as there are lines; it smells of shoemaker’s pitch and filthy blacking. May this insufferable stench be far from us. The Arian poison was not so deadly as this shoemaker’s poison,”— Gregorius Richter following the publication of Aurora

This is mild compared to other comments Richter would make. Clearly if a simple writing can insight a cleric with a reputation as a drunk to such vitriol; he must have un resolved “issues.”

It must have been interesting or, at least shocking to Jakob Boehme and, others like him, who are able to write within the context of Biblical script, while being considered outside of accepted Biblical teaching by clerics having very little understanding outside of the scope of what they had been taught. One would think that the broadening of the scope of Biblical teachings without actually changing them would be welcome to a cleric that had dedicated their entire life to the “Bible.” Clerics and other theologians are only rarely inspired to think as deeply as Boehme. Equally interesting is what possesses some of the clerics contemporary to Boehme’s time to attack him so vehemently. Clearly, they are not capable of his vision, so what gives? Are they jealous? Are they possessed? Probably all of the above would be true.

As in the New Revelation of Jakob Lorber, Jakob Boehme describes some beautiful spiritual concepts that do not challenge any of the Biblical script. For instance, Boehme describes the Holy Spirit, as the continual interaction of the Father and Son through time – the Holy Spirit being the effect or result of their interaction. This is profound – even if theologians cannot grasp it. The Lord, through Jakob Lorber, says the same thing.

The main theme of Jakob Boehme’s work is best described as Christian Mysticism. He describes concepts of the Kabbalistic world, God, the nature of sin, evil and redemption. Boehme expands these thoughts into theoretical frameworks encompassing virtually every aspect of the Christian mystical experience, covering everything from Sacred Geometry to the book of Genesis to the nature of Satan, the angels and the Antichrist.

The basic premise of creation underlies all of Böehme’s writing. He then addresses the details, integrating concepts from the Kabbalah and alchemy, laying a foundation for the scientific and philosophical thought that exerted a wide-ranging influence on the elite minds of the Enlightenment (even though the controversial nature of his concepts often kept that influence below the radar). Boehme’s work presented such a wide and diverse range of spiritual concepts that his work contains concepts from other beliefs without ever having had any previous exposure to them. Some of Boehme’s concepts became the foundation for several proposed scientific theories in physics, chaos theory and genetic sequencing.

Scholars, in their usual “over analysis” attribute Boehme’s insights to his exposure to Neoplatonists, Alchemists, Rosicrucians and so on rather than his own inner visions and talents. They give his work various labels, yet it is very likely that Boehme himself would likely not have attributed to himself what they have ascribed to him.

The works of Jakob Boehme seem to be hard to come by. The works below are all we could find in Amazon.