Boehme’s doctrine of God and the world resembles that of other speculative mystics, but he contributes a new element in the great stress which he lays on antithesis as a law of being.  “In Yes and No all things consist,” he says.  No philosopher since Heraclitus and Empedocles had asserted so strongly that “Strife is the father of all things.”  Even in the hidden life of the unmanifested Godhead he finds the play of Attraction and Diffusion, the resultant of which is a Desire for manifestation felt in the Godhead.  As feeling this desire, the Godhead becomes “Darkness”; the light which illumines the darkness is the Son.  The resultant is the Holy Spirit, in whom arise the archetypes of creation.  So he explains Body, Soul, and Spirit as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; and the same formula serves to explain Good, Evil, and Free Will; Angels, Devils, and the World.  His view of Evil is not very consistent; but his final doctrine is that the object of the cosmic process is to exhibit the victory of Good over Evil, of Love over Hatred.[351] He at least has the merit of showing that strife is so inwoven with our lives here that we cannot possibly soar above the conflict between Good and Evil.  It must be observed that Boehme repudiated the doctrine that there is any evolution of God in time.  “I say not that Nature is God,” he says:  “He Himself is all, and communicates His power to all His works.”  But the creation of the archetypes was not a temporal act.

Like other Protestant mystics, he lays great stress on the indwelling presence of Christ.  And, consistently with this belief, he revolts against the Calvinistic doctrine of imputed righteousness, very much as did the Cambridge Platonists a little later.  “That man is no Christian,” he says, “who doth merely comfort himself with the suffering, death, and satisfaction of Christ, and doth impute it to himself as a gift of favour, remaining himself still a wild beast and unregenerate....  If this said sacrifice is to avail for me, it must be wrought in me.  The Father must beget His Son in my desire of faith, that my faith’s hunger may apprehend Him in His word of promise.  Then I put Him on, in His entire process of justification, in my inward ground; and straightway there begins in me the killing of the wrath of the devil, death, and hell, from the inward power of Christ’s death.  I am inwardly dead, and He is my life; I live in Him, and not in my selfhood.  I am an instrument of God, wherewith He doeth what He will.”  To the same effect William Law says, “Christ given for us is neither more nor less than Christ given into us.  He is in no other sense our full, perfect, and sufficient Atonement, than as His nature and spirit are born and formed in us.”  Law also insists that the Atonement was the effect, not of the wrath, but of the love of God.  “Neither reason nor scripture,” he says, “will allow us to bring wrath into God Himself, as a temper of His mind, who is only infinite, unalterable, overflowing Love.”  “Wrath is atoned when sin is extinguished.”  This revolt against the forensic theory of the Atonement is very characteristic of Protestant Mysticism.[352]