Fallen and Flawed

That’s interesting, I’d never heard of him.
At about 5,000 members worldwide (according to the wikipedia page), you’d have to be lucky to find one.

At about 5,000 members worldwide (according to the wikipedia page), you’d have to be lucky to find one.

^
I’d suppose that most cultists would prefer to be known by a monicker with fewer syllables-per-word; easier to pronounce…

James, they do seem to be pretty rare…

Hey Demian, I am a practicing Swedenborgian, and have reached this point after studying many religions and worldviews.

Not to be persnickety or anything but a couple of your facts aren’t really facts, first of all, calling him the founder of the religion isn’t quite accurate… okay, okay, this is a little persnickety, I admit it… he never intended for a new religion to be formed, he merely wished his ideas to permeate the existing Christian infrastructure, it was readers of his writings after his death that decided to form a new structure.

Another is, there are a number of different church organizations that adhere to Swedenborg’s writings, and the age restrictions on membership vary according to the different organizations, most notably are the General Church of the New Jerusalem, and the Swedenborgian Church of North America in the U.S. and in Britain, the General Conference of the New Church. In the largest of the groups, the General Church, the usual age of joining the church is 20 for both sexes, but individuals are not disallowed from joining earlier if they make that choice. I’m not sure where the 18 and 21 thing came from. I’m a twenty-four year old who has yet to do any official joining of any group, and probably shall continue to abstain from doing so.

Number 9 is pretty much totally wrong, Swedenborgians reject the three in one god-head idea, instead they believe that Jesus Christ is God, as in, He’s exactly the same thing as God the Father, absolutely no distinction between the two and the same goes for the Holy Spirit. That’s a pretty key doctrinal point in Swedenborgianism, along with the idea that men aren’t saved by faith but rather by their loves, so those who love evil will be drawn to hell, and those who love what is good will be drawn towards heaven, in essence, this means that any person from any faith is capable of salvation. It’s actually one of the most religiously permissive faiths I’ve run across, which is important to me, seeing that I believe in an inherently merciful, loving, and wise God who would never damn anyone who just hadn’t had the luck to run across the right book. So, to sum up, it’s the innermost intentions that dictate one’s eternal fate, not acts or a specific belief.

But, as with all religions, it’s a complicated one, and made even more complicated by the abundance of Swedenborg’s texts, which I really only recommend to those who are capable of digesting pretty heavy philosophical ideas and lingo (yep, this is a church consisting heavily of intellectuals…), which are, unfortunately, often even more obscured by outdated translations from the the original Latin. There are some newer translations which are much easier to handle, offered for sale by the Swedenborg Foundation, which is dedicated to the translation of Swedenborg’s writings. The Rev. Grant Schnarr has authored a very easy to read and interesting introduction to Swedenborgian ideas called You Can Believe! that I recommend most highly, if you’re interested in learning more about this funny little religion.

Some links you may find interesting:

The three main organizations:
http://www.newchurch.org/
http://www.swedenborg.org/
http://www.generalconference.org.uk/

Searchable online databases of Swedenborg’s religious works:
http://baltimorenewchurch.org/search/index.cfm?action=search.searchwritings
http://heavenlydoctrines.org/

Swedenborg Foundation Publishers:
http://www.swedenborg.com/

Grant Schnarr’s site, where you can purchase You Can Believe! And more of his books that bring spirituality into everyday life:
http://www.grantschnarr.com/books.htm

Hope that was helpful, and not just an unnecessary deluge of information. Whatever you seek, I hope you find.

Becky

Becky…you rock! Thanks for taking the time to share and correct. That’s what I’m always looking for. And thank you for the links, too. And to tell you the truth, anything that smacks of intellectualism has a special place in my heart.
But help me out here…you said, “I believe in an inherently merciful, loving, and wise God who would never damn anyone who just hadn’t had the luck to run across the right book.” That sounds so…not grounded in objectivity or Truth with a capital “T”. Thoughts?

The intellectual founding of Swedenborg is interesting.

Becky –
“men aren’t saved by faith but rather by their loves, so those who love evil will be drawn to hell, and those who love what is good will be drawn towards heaven, in essence, this means that any person from any faith is capable of salvation.”
How does Swedenborg defend that from the gospels? I am curious about his reasoning there.

I second Demian’s reply – thanks for stopping in and explaining further. This is all new to me.

Hello,

Becky has given a good but incomplete correction.

Swedenborg never wanted a church to be formed around him.
His writings are essentially The Third Testament.
His writings actually influenced Kant not the other way around.
Swedenborg explains that faith alone is not enough to enter heaven and that charity is also required.
This was removed from the original church by the Catholics who started to sell people salvation.
A person could buy admonishment even on their death bed regardless of the way they had lived their life.
Essentially a persons motives are all that count.
For example, an evil selfish person can go through life doing outwardly good things solely for the purpose of self gain,i.e, reputation, honours and even the idea of buying a ticket to heaven. A good person could appear to have done some evil things however their intent was good. Choosing the lesser of two evils with the thought in mind that at least some good will come out of it.
No good is recognised unless the good act was done with no expectation whatsoever of receiving a reward. Good must be done for the love of good, always recognising that good come directly from God.
The external life of man is not what is taken with the man upon his death. It is his internal self.Only we know what our real intentions are.
Swedenborg has been supressed by the Catholic, Protestent, and Jewish faiths for an awfully long time. Just try getting a copy of any of his works in a library. Yet he has influenced many of the great minds.
I hope this helps.

Damien,

Another Swedenborgian here. Unlike Becky, I grew up in the religion.

To your question for clarification, I think we need to dispense with some connotations associated with words and concepts commonly used in religion. We need to let go of our preconceptions for “saved”, “reward”, heaven and hell as places that you “go to”, idea that God (or Jesus) will sit in judgment of one’s life, and others. Swedenborg writes quite a bit about Heaven and Hell and his main message is that a person through active life in this world BECOMES a person of Heaven or BECOMES a person of Hell. Such a person is either heavenly or hellish as a result of their “ruling loves” — those loves (desires, longings, or activities, people, or things that cause joy) that drive one’s decisions. A person chooses good or evil in every moment of life. And as someone said, it is not good to seek to do something that outwardly appears good when the motive is for honor or gain.

Truth helps a person make the right choices. Particularly, Divine Truth from the Word helps a person understand good and evil and to “shun evils as sins against God” (which is a fancy way of saying that the truth helps you reject or resist or stop doing the wrong thing). By making the choice to shun evils (reject them in each moment), the person opens a spiritual path to the Lord God allowing His love and goodness to flow into that person’s mind. In this state of selflessness, the good a person does is really good from the Lord. These “works” do not merit any salvation. They don’t get the person anything. (No rewards!) But, they are the RESULT of the person shunning evils as sins. These works are the “fruits” of the person who has been Heavenly (if only for a moment).

The Lord’s Divine Providence seeks to bend each of us slowly towards Him. The goal is a Heaven made up of all of us humans. Of course, not all of us desire that. Some of us have evil “ruling loves”. These people do not desire to shun evils as sins, but rather desire to do evil things. Maybe they desire to defraud others or swindle them out of money or defame them to raise themselves up for power. Their ruling loves are love of power, love of fame and adulation, love of wealth and money, etc. — Swedenborg calls these loves collectively the love of self (and the similar love of the material world). These people lead hellish lives.

After death, our external facades are slowly removed and we are all left with just our ruling loves. We quickly see who we are and what we can be comfortable with. Those who are predominantly good, with good ruling loves, are brought into a state of heaven where these people seek to do good for their neighbor and love the Lord. Those who are predominantly evil see their good loves slowly removed and are brought into a state of hell, where they cannot do harm to others. (That is actually the “hell” of hell — you cannot realize your desires because to realize them would cause harm to another, which the Lord cannot permit. So hell is all fantasy.)

Interestingly, devils of hell cannot abide heaven. It is of such a nature that it is suffocating to them. I think of this like a group of people I just cannot hang with — being around them makes me bored, ill, etc.

So, unlike other religions where it is the Truth that judges, Swedenborg’s revelation shows us that it is our loves that are really acting and that the Lord’s Divine Love is pulling all of us in. It is our self loves that block that action from happening and leave us out in the cold of hell.

So, in Swedenborg’s theology, there is no grand judgment, no council of saints reviewing your life like a Supreme Court, referring to a book of Truth, no “reward” for the “worthy” and no “punishment” for the “unworthy”.

In this theology, the Lord brings each one of us into a life that we are happiest in. A true devil is happiest when he/she can contemplate, plan, fantasize about doing evil. Such people cannot be happy in the least way in a heavenly sphere. That is the mercy of the Lord, that He loves each of us so much that He creates a way for us to each be happy.

(Now hell is full of punishment which the devils bring upon themselves when they try to inflict harm on another. But that is another story!)

Dear Born-Swedenborgian,

Thank you for your comment.
It far out weighs my attempt to put the record straight.

In my opinion you have given a very good explanation.

It is a pity that Swedenborgians are not more active in this world. I accept that it is a difficult thing to explain in a quickfire manner but the world needs to hear and understand the writings of Swedenborg. Without proactive effort there seems little chance that more than a few thousand Swedenborgians can affect the sad state of affairs we all find ourselves in.
Thank you again for taking the time to make your comment.

Hello everyone, just thought that I would share.

I discovered the writings of Swedenborg 6 years back, after a long spiritual crisis. Mainstream Christianity never made much sense to me, and seemed to emphasize the New Testament in a way that I felt was abstracted from many of the underlying precepts of the Bible. After much soul searching and studying of religious world-views, I stumbled across one of his books in a used bookstore. I am now a confirmed Swedenborgian and have devoted years to studying this system of theology, something that I find infinitely complex and yet decidedly simple. It can perhaps be summarized [if any such thing is possible] that “You are what you love.”
One of the important components of Swedenborgianism is the idea of “Correspondences.” Correspondences, Swedenborg taught, is the idea that spiritual things correspond to natural things in accordance with the premise that being precedes existing and exists because of it, not apart from it. This holds true for the Word [we believe} that there are three senses to the Word, the natural, the spiritual, and the celestial. We believe that all doctrine should be derived from the natural sense of the Word, or from the plain sentence nature of the Bible. The 'spiritual sense' is the spiritual signification of each particular [that the entire Holy Scripture has meaning, in places in every single word] and that the [revelation] of the spiritual sense of the Word was what was meant by the Second Coming. For instance it says that the Lord will come on “clouds of glory” which Swedenborg interpreted as the natural sense of the word giving forth the spiritual sense. I.E>clouds correspond to the natural sense of the Word. Think of it as a complex system of encryption of spiritual truths. The Celestial sense is not obtainable in the human. In my opinion, this view of Christianity and of the Bible in particular, makes the Word even more important and significant to the way that we live our daily lives.
We believe that we are part of the Church of the New Jerusalem described in Daniel and in Revelations, and that admittance into this Church is dependent upon that:
1)You approach the Lord alone as the God of Heaven.
2) That you repent of sins
3) That you conjoin faith in the Lord with Charity towards the neighbor. [not good works, rather the embodiment of the love of the neighbor.]
We believe that Jesus Christ was in fact Yahweh in the human form, and that he died in order to subdue the hell in man, reigning over temptation and spiritual death in order to make salvation possible. Without Him there could be no salvation.

I feel that I have come closer to God and am living a much more spiritual life after making these ideas my primary understanding of Christianity. It is important to remember that Swedenborgians do not believe that Jesus was sent by God as a prophet, rather that he was the embodiment of Yahweh Himself. It is often written that Swedenborgians deny the divinity of Christ. Nothing could be further from the truth!

We are a very “low pressure” lot and despise control mechanisms, which sets us apart from many cults. In the words of Swedenborg;
“Religion consists not in thinking this or that [thing] rather it consists in doing and willing that which is thought, for no religion can exist where thinking is separated from willing and doing; remove these things and see if there is any religion left in man…”

Thank you for letting me post, I hope that this is somewhat informative to someone somewhere!

Another Swedenborgian here! Some of the other interesting and very different beliefs the Swedenborgians have compared to other religions is our beliefs on what happens to you after you die.
If you where a woman when you died you will be a woman in Heaven. If you die and are old you become young again. There is Marriage in Heaven. Marriage is eternal.
That in Heaven you work and are useful member of society.
If a child dies he/she goes and lives with Angel Mothers and Fathers and grows up to adulthood and gets married. These are just some of the beautiful teachings that we Swedenborgians believe.

It is irrelevant how you feel or rationalize concerning the beliefs and opinions of a man, however “smart” he may be. Timothy clearly defines the importance of rightly dividing the Word of Truth. In the Greek, it means to be concise, exact, precise. Wonderful theories are still interpretation. Visions, dreams, and intellectual rationalization are vanity. A real realationship with Jesus Christ is much more important than subjective meanderings for “alternative” points of view. Proverbs 14:12 clearly reveals, “There is a way that seemeth right, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”

what a waste of time,that’s what happens when man puts his two cents into everything the world needs to end soon before anymore crazy ideas come about. but Jesus loves You

Swedenborg was a man of Truth…He never wrote any unwanted truth to the generations.. he interpreted what bible says and revealing the inner meaning of the sacred Scriptures…

Demian, I’m curious – why do you consider Swedenborgians, or the New Church, a “cult”? What’s your definition? I wouldn’t think of Swedenborg as a “cult founder”, as you refer to him. My understanding is that his intention was no such thing – he felt he was guided to share new information on Christianity as it existed at the time. Perhaps you use the word cult to describe all religious sects? I’ve only just stumbled across your blog. I appreciate what I’ve read so far.

I just chanced upon this website when I was curious to see how Swedenborg could be referred to as ‘cult leader’. Great to see other Swedenborgians around and I’d like to echo Jason’s sentiments above that it’s sad to see that such a powerful and important message with such significant ramifications for all humans can’t be heard by so many more people. Swedenborg’s writings just make so much sense. The feeling of peace I get from reading what he shares is very deep and profound. We have a merciful Creator wanting us to draw near to Him, no matter what religion or belief system we adhere to.
I pray for further dissemination of the real Truth into people’s lives. We all need a life of Love guided by Truth and purpose connected to the One who gives us life each and every moment.

“Swedenborg rejected the books of Paul, Peter, James, Jude and Hebrews…”

You either believe the bible as a whole or you don’t. Are you going to bet your eternity on the belief of one man (Swedenborg) or one book (the bible). How does Swedenborg get the authority to discount Paul’s inspired writings. Now I have a choice, Swedenborg or Paul. I choose Paul!