by the Rev. Lee Woofenden
Lectures delivered atFryeburg New Church AssemblyFryeburg, Maine
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This morning I am going to rush in where angels fear to tread, and let you draw your own conclusions about the wisdom or folly involved. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that I am going to rush in where angels wouldn't waste their time treading, since angels are primarily interested in the spiritual side of things, while I plan to plunge into the worldly side of this "Second Coming" business. During this hour, we will look at some of the material-world things that we Swedenborgians like to think of as manifestations of the Second Coming.
Specifically, the questions we'll address--and perhaps not answer to anyone's satisfaction--are: What part did Swedenborg the man play in the Second Coming? What part did, and do, Swedenborg's theological writings play in the Second Coming? And what part does the institutional New Church play in the Second Coming?
These are issues we Swedenborgians tend to fight with each other about. They have played a prominent part in the schisms that have taken place in the New Church in North America. And so before I enter that fray with opinions flying, let's pause to recall that we Swedenborgians--or New Church people, as some prefer--have a great deal in common with each other. We all accept the idea that there is one God, not three, and not many, and we see that God as a divinely human being, who came to us as a person, Jesus Christ. We all believe that the Word of God is a divinely inspired book, with a deeper, spiritual meaning that speaks of our own regeneration, or spiritual growth as human beings. And we all believe that people of every religion can be saved if they have faith in God as they understand God, and live a life of kindness toward others according to their own spiritual beliefs.
These things we have in common with each other are, in fact, the core principles of this religion that we call the Church of the New Jerusalem. I would suggest that one reason our struggles with each other are at times so sharp and painful is that we are so close to each other. We belong to the same family--and family struggles are almost always the deepest and most difficult ones. In our family struggles, we face the things that make us who we are--both the good and the bad parts. In family struggles, we face the core issues of our identity, our worth as human beings, our relationships with those we love, and ultimately, our relationship with God. When we deal with others who look to the same spiritual roots as we do, and yet have gone in a different direction from those roots, we have to face at a very deep level why we went the direction we did from our common roots.
And so it may be useful to look at some of those common roots, and come to some awareness of what our own attitudes toward them are, and where and why we may differ from others. As we do this, we can keep in mind that one benefit of having others who have come to different conclusions than we have is that this causes us to think more deeply about our own conclusions. It helps us to build our faith on considered choices, instead of simply falling into a particular belief because "that's what my family has always believed," or "that's just how we think of things in our church." Whatever conclusions we may come to, it strengthens our faith if we have chosen this belief after considering other possibilities. Then we know that our faith has deep roots, and is a faith that is right for us--while those who have made a different choice, we can presume, have come to a faith that is right for them.
What I would like to present to you this morning, then, are some of my own still developing attitudes and conclusions about some of the common roots we share with other Swedenborgians, namely, Swedenborg, his theological writings, and the organized New Church. And it is only fair to say that although my views draw to some extent on views held in other bodies of the New Church, they fit most comfortably within the denomination in which I grew up and which I now serve: the General Convention of the New Jerusalem.
Now that I have spent about a quarter of my time just introducing the topic, it's about time to deliver!
Emanuel Swedenborg. For us, that name calls up all sorts of ideas and associations that have ingrained themselves in our consciousness. For the vast bulk of the earth's population, it calls up on associations at all. For all of his astounding claims to be the bearer of good news about the Second Coming right fresh from heaven, there is really a rather select group of people on this earth who have even a passing familiarity with who he was and what he wrote in those thirty plus volumes of spiritual teachings and information.
The number of people who consider themselves to be followers of those teachings is even smaller. An optimistic estimate would be that there are perhaps fifty thousand professed Swedenborgians worldwide out of, what, five billion or more people now living on earth. Even this optimistic estimate would mean that only one one hundred thousandth of the earth's population consciously consider themselves to be a part of the new church that Swedenborg said the Lord was setting up on earth. Let's keep those figures in the back of our minds as we consider Swedenborg, his theological writings, and the organized New Church.
Swedenborg said more than that the Lord was setting up a new church on the earth. He said that he, Swedenborg, himself, had an important part to play in the Lord's plan. In the heading to True Christian Religion #779 he wrote:
This, the Lord's second coming, is taking place by means of a man, to whom he has shown himself in person, and whom he has filled with his spirit, so that he may teach the doctrines of the new church which come from the Lord through the Word.
Then, explaining this statement, he continued:
Since the Lord cannot show himself in person, as has just been shown, and yet he predicted that he would come and found a new church, which is the New Jerusalem, it follows that he will do this by means of a man, who can not only receive intellectually the doctrines of this church, but also publish them in print. I bear true witness that the Lord has shown himself in the presence of me, his servant, and sent me to perform this task. After this he opened the sight of my spirit, thus admitting me to the spiritual world, and allowing me to see the heavens and the hells, and also to talk with angels and spirits; and this I have now been doing for many years continuously. Equally I assert that from the first day of my calling I have not received any instruction concerning the doctrines of that church from any angel, but only from the Lord, while I was reading the Word.
This was Swedenborg's grand commission as he himself saw it: to be the human being chosen by God to bring to the earth the teachings that would constitute the Lord's second coming, and the foundation of the New Jerusalem Church. All of us who belong to one or another of the branches of the organized New Church, or who grew up in it, or have otherwise been influenced by it, are living with the legacy of that commission. If it were not for that commission, this Assembly would not exist, and we would not be here together today.
And yet, as clear as Swedenborg's statement seems, it has been interpreted differently by different people and by different organizations that call themselves New Church or Swedenborgian. These differences of interpretation form a range of opinion that could be conceptualized as a rather fuzzy ellipse, with Swedenborg the man at one of its focal points, and Swedenborg's theological writings at the other focal point. Because our attitudes toward both of these are so closely interlinked, I would like to consider them together.
When Swedenborg's writings first came out, those who accepted them as true were so excited by the brilliant light that they shed on God, the Bible, and the human situation that they did not pause to argue about the exact nature of the vessel that carried those truths. They simply rejoiced in their newfound insight, and went about the business of publicizing them to everyone they could possibly interest. Although they did read statements in Swedenborg's own writings that this new church would at first be among a few due to the resistance of the previous Christian church (as in Apocalypse Revealed #546, 547), to many of them these new truths seemed so self-evident that they could hardly believe it would be long before this new church gained a broad following.
But the resistance from the previous Christian church was far more pervasive than these early New Church people realized at first. And one of the areas where I suspect they were rather oblivious to its presence was in their own hearts and minds. For these early New Church people had themselves grown up in what they might now call the "Old Church." And even though their minds had seen a brilliant new light, both common sense and the teachings of our church say that we human beings do not become fully transformed into something different overnight. We carry along deep within us the characteristics that have been ingrained in us from our heredity and environment, and these can only be changed gradually, through a great deal of conscious effort.
As a result of this, one of the realities of the fledgling New Church and its people was that they were heavily influenced by the traditional Christian churches that they came from. Both as individuals and as an organization, they had many of the same issues to deal with as did the churches they came from and the people among whom they were born and bred.
And so my first conclusion should not come as much of a surprise: As people and as organizations, we Swedenborgians are really not all that different from other Christians. If we look at the issues that separate us from other Swedenborgians and those that bring us together, we can find the very same issues in the Christian world around us. And this brings us back to our consideration of our attitude toward Swedenborg and his writings.
There is a wide range of opinion about Swedenborg and his writings among various New Church people and organizations. At one end of the spectrum are people who think Swedenborg was a Pretty Neat Guy who had a lot of good things to say. At the other end of the spectrum are those who consider Swedenborg's theological writings to be the Third Testament of God's Word, inspired by God in every word in a very literal sense. In between, there is a whole range of opinion and interpretation.
Are we Swedenborgians unique in this? Of course not. The very same arguments we engage in among ourselves about Swedenborg's writings, traditional Christians engage in among themselves about the Bible. At one end of the spectrum, we might find the Unitarians, who retain some historical ties with Christianity, but as a whole, basically consider the Bible to be one among many books that contain spiritual wisdom. At the other end of the spectrum are the Christian Fundamentalists, who believe in a very literal divine inspiration of the Bible. Their view is neatly summed up in the slogan, "The Bible said it, I believe it, and that's that."
It is rather ironic that Swedenborg, who spent so much time and energy struggling against Biblical literalism and pointing to a deeper meaning and inspiration in the scriptures, should have his own books turned into literal authority in some quarters. And yet, we are cut from the same cloth as traditional Christians; we can expect that the types of religious faith that are appropriate to those outside our organizations will likely be reflected within our organizations. The need for a literal form of authority is very real for many people--and, I would say, for almost all of us at some points in our spiritual life.
Convention has carved out a less literalistic and more interpretive niche for itself in the spectrum of Swedenborgian beliefs. And so, before moving on to a consideration of the place of the organized New Church in the Second Coming, I would like to present what might be considered a fairly strong Convention style position on who Swedenborg was, and on the nature of his religious writings.
In the passage quoted above from True Christian Religion, Swedenborg stated, "I have not received any instruction concerning the doctrines of that church from any angel, but only from the Lord, while I was reading the Word." A "Swedenborgian literalist" might say that this settles the question, and that Swedenborg's writings are clearly inspired directly by the Lord. However, in his Invitation to the New Church, #52, Swedenborg gives some more detail on how this inspiration took place:
The manifestation of the Lord and being let into the spiritual world surpasses all miracles. This has not been given to anyone since creation in the same way as it has been given to me. The people of the Golden Age did speak with angels, but they were not allowed to be in any other light than material light. But I have been allowed to be in both spiritual and material light at the same time. In this way I have been given to see the wonders of heaven, to be among the angels as one of them, and at the same time to absorb truths in the light, and in this way to perceive and teach them--and so to be led by the Lord.
This is a very different process than what happened with the prophets of the Bible, whom Swedenborg said (in Heaven and Hell #254) were inspired by the Lord "not by an inflow, but by dictation." Swedenborg, in contrast, was allowed into the spiritual world to see what was there, "to absorb truths in the light, and in this way to perceive and teach them."
A Convention viewpoint on Swedenborg and his writings, then, is that Swedenborg was allowed to experience the spiritual world, and to gain direct insight from the Lord while reading the Bible, in a way that no other human being before him had ever been allowed. And he was chosen for this task because he had a mind--and a heart--that was able to grasp what the Lord wanted communicated to people on earth, and the ability to write these things down and publish them by means of the press. In a nutshell, the Lord spoke to Swedenborg, and Swedenborg did his best to put it into words for us.
For some, this viewpoint is not as satisfying as the idea that the Lord dictated divine truth to Swedenborg, who transcribed the words the Lord gave him. Nevertheless, that is not how Swedenborg describes his own process. There are a few brief statements that seem to say that the books were written by the Lord through Swedenborg, but they are so brief and cryptic in the Latin that their translation says as much about the views of the translator as about what Swedenborg intended to say. Meanwhile Swedenborg's longer statements make it clear that there was no such word-for-word inspiration as with the Biblical prophets.
Where, then, does this leave us? If Swedenborg did his best to express to us the enlightenment and inspiration that the Lord gave to him, our reading of his writings takes on a different cast. While the spiritual content comes from the Lord, their expression comes from the mind of Swedenborg, and the culture in which that mind was formed.
This gives us both more responsibility and more freedom in our reading of Swedenborg. We have the responsibility of evaluating what he wrote with our own best-informed understanding, and of digging out the spiritual content within what we might call the "literal sense" of Swedenborg. At the same time, we have more freedom to take the spiritual principles we find there and adapt them to our own times and culture. Swedenborg expressed the truth that the Lord showed him in terms of his culture; it is both our task and our privilege to see how those same spiritual principles work out in our own culture and our own lives.
This general attitude toward Swedenborg and his religious writing does lead to certain characteristics of Convention as a Swedenborgian denomination. Since we, for the most part, believe that Swedenborg's writings are subject to cultural influence and need some interpretation and adaptation just as the Old and New Testaments do, we also tend to feel that we can take the ideas in Swedenborg and try to work out their meaning in the society in which we live, rather than insulating ourselves from those aspects of our current society that have departed very far from the culture of Swedenborg's day.
As a result, we have historically been a church that valued engagement and involvement with the larger society more than distinctness and separation from it. Our members live dispersed among the people of the communities where our churches are, and participate in the same community institutions. And our churches tend to be involved in local ecumenical and interfaith activities, and also participate in community and social action projects intended to serve the people of the communities in which they are situated.
All of this says something about our attitude toward the Second Coming, and our denomination's place in it. We, like all New Church people, hold the writings of Swedenborg dear--and especially the new spiritual light that they shed on our world and on our lives. Yet we tend to be rather humble about the place of our denomination in the Lord's larger scheme. If anything, we hope that we may take some small part in the unfolding of the Lord's second coming here on earth--that we as conscious receivers of the spiritual principles that form that Second Coming may help to leaven the loaf of human society with those principles, and the life of service that they teach.
Perhaps this is not as grand as some visions of the organized New Church as the brilliant point of light from which the Lord reaches out to all the world. But I believe it is a more realistic, and a more humble, vision of who we are and what our place is in the Lord's second coming.
We are, for the most part, rather ordinary people who have been blessed with an extraordinarily rich source of spiritual enlightenment. It is no particular virtue of our own that we have received this blessing. Perhaps we were born into it; perhaps we came across it in some providential way; perhaps we searched and searched, and finally found what we were looking for in the teachings contained in Swedenborg's writings.
This is a gift that the Lord is offering, not just to us, but to the whole world. And I believe that the Lord is doing this in many ways and by many channels. As we open our eyes to what is going on in the world around us, we find that so many of the spiritual principles that we hold dear are known and loved by multitudes of others, only without the "Swedenborg" brand name printed on them. Some of this did originally come from Swedenborg through many well-known thinkers and writers who read Swedenborg and adopted some of his ideas into their own systems. Yet the Lord's hand is not short; he can inspire human beings with new truth from other sources as well--and there is no particular need for us to trace every true idea we find in this world back by some circuitous route to Swedenborg--as fun as that often is to do.
It is sufficient that the Lord is coming again into our world, in greater knowledge, understanding, and wisdom that is gradually--and sometimes not so gradually--spreading to everyone on this earth. And it is enough for us as individuals and as a church to provide whatever service we can to the Lord in helping that process along.
