Swedenborg: Harbinger of the New Age of the Christian Church. Benjamin Worcester

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       Benjamin Worcester

      Swedenborg: Harbinger of the New Age of the Christian Church

      Published by Good Press, 2021

       [email protected]

      EAN 4064066443610

Table of Contents

       The Consummation of the Age

       Emanuel Swedenborg: Parentage and Early Life

       Scientific Pursuits at Home

       Further Studies and Publications Abroad

       Continued Study of the Body in Search of the Soul

       Continued Study of the Animal Kingdom: Spiritual Experience

       Opening of Spiritual Sight: Unfolding of the Word

       "The Apocalypse Explained" and Other Works

       Manner of Life in Later Period

       Later Period of Life: Conclusion

       Index

      The Consummation of the Age

       Table of Contents

      The Christian Church recognizes that it is entering upon a new stage of life, with promise of a freer, more spiritual, and more beneficent existence than it has yet known. Of the immediate cause of this new development, and of its place in fulfilment of the predictions of our Lord, the Church at large has little or nothing to say. Only in the inner content of these predictions, as unfolded by Swedenborg, is the light now breaking from the east even unto the west plainly seen to be that of the Lord's Second Coming, with His Holy Spirit, calling all things to our remembrance whatsoever He has said unto us and guiding us into all truth. For clearer apprehension of this epoch in men's spiritual development let us take a rapid glance, approximately from ​Swedenborg's own point of view, over the course of this development from its inception.

      Our highest conception of the Creator is of Infinite Love, Infinite Wisdom, Infinite Power. Man's creation into the Divine image and likeness means therefore the form and capacity with which he is endowed to receive and live his measure of this Love, Wisdom, and Power. For the basis of his existence he has a material, animal nature, with its instincts and inflow of life from the Only Life. For development into the image and likeness of the Creator he has an inner organism, consisting of heart to receive and give forth love and of understanding to receive and utter wisdom, with liberty and power to act therefrom. The handmaid of the understanding is observation, the master of the house is reason—the power of collating ideas and drawing conclusions. To the handmaid the universe unfolds itself in which as in a mirror may be seen the Divine purpose, creating an infinity of organisms for mutual ever-ascending service, with man himself at the head, anointed with the high mission to aspire to the Divine image, and to accept the Divine will for his own. But the fulfilling of this ​mission depends on his accepting with heart and reason the Divine guidance, which at all times and under all conditions is provided in such form as can be in freedom accepted—in the "still small voice," in inspired words, or in portentous signs.

      It is the accumulation of these revealings of the Divine will that has come down to us in our Holy Scriptures, in which we recognize the Purpose or Word of God in adaptation to the various states and conditions of men. This Word, or revelation of the Divine will, is given in man's own language and form of thought, even as our Lord Himself gave it to the people in parable. But in coming forth through heaven into man's thought and speech, the Word does not lose its Divine content. It simply embodies this in corresponding forms of lower degree. Thus this written Word is the foot of a ladder on which man and angel may ascend in thought into the presence of its Giver. Under this recognition of the spiritual and Divine content of the Scriptures incongruities in the letter are easily referable to human crudities of thought. Within, all is compatible with the infinite wisdom and love of Him whose will it reveals, full of instruction for angels and men.

      ​The first chapter of the Book of Genesis sets forth in terms a child may in his manner apprehend the order of the Divine process of creation. Of this order the first element is the outgoing of the Divine life through successive degrees of spiritual and material substance that it creates, of less and less, even to least life. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. In the outmost, least living substance created there is yet a certain power of reaction, born of its very inertness. And the second element of the Divine order of creation is that out of this first, simple, least-living recipient through its reaction are evolved by regular—we say natural—process higher, more complex, and more living recipients, to receive higher or inner degrees of life from the One Source. The third element of this order is that this advance is made stage by stage, day after day, evening being the womb of the new morning. Evening was and morning was one day. This involves the decline of each successive stage after serving its purpose and maturing the germ for a new stage. Thus one generation of life gives way to its successor. The corn of wheat falls to the ground and dies in bringing forth a new ​plant, in which in new form its life is continued. The leaf falls after having formed in its axil the bud for a new shoot, and in decaying furnishes food for the new growth. Last in order, we learn that man in the image and likeness of his Creator is the first and final purpose in all creation.

      How beautifully this order was followed in the creation of the earth and its inhabitants is known to the geologist, even as summarized in the record of Genesis up to the first presentation of man in the Divine image and likeness. And a deeper, higher fulfilment of the same order is found by Swedenborg in the evolution of the spiritual man into this image and likeness, out of the mind formless and void of the mere animal man—represented by the formless and empty earth enshrouded in darkness. And again in the same record is found the order of evolution of the spiritual man out of the natural to all time.

      Of the primeval man we can know little. He left no records, no tradition. Of the regenerated heavenly but infantile race represented by Adam and Eve, first reproducing in infantile manner the Divine image and implanting in the inmost consciousness of mankind a foregleam of the ​condition to which it should in the end attain, Swedenborg learned much in the other world, quite in accordance with our traditions of the Golden Age. With this called by him the Most Ancient Church the history of man begins, though in scarce other than mythical form. Of the immediate revelation to it of the Divine will we have intimation in the voice of the Lord God heard by Adam. Of its duration we know nothing, but may conjecture it to have equalled all recorded time. Of its decline, due to the growing child desire to taste and choose for himself what to call good, we have symbolized record in the following of the serpent's counsel and in the decadent generations of Adam. The moral and spiritual desolation at the end of this first church swamped by accumulating falsities is represented by the flood, out of which was Divinely rescued the germ for a new development under the name of Noah [Rest].

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