The New Church (Swedenborgianism)

Denomination·Founded 1787 CE·The organised New Church has never been large — the two North American bodies together count in the thousands, with additional congregations in Britain, Ghana, South Africa, Korea and Japan; growth is African rather than Western. No consolidated figure is published. Swedenborg's readership has always vastly exceeded the church's membership, which is the movement's standing peculiarity.

Judaism → Christianity → Catholicism → Protestantism → The New Church (Swedenborgianism)

The General Church of the New JerusalemThe Swedenborg Foundation

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History & overview

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The Last Judgment already happened, in 1757, in the spiritual world — and nobody down here noticed.

The church organised from the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish mining engineer, anatomist and member of the House of Nobles who from 1743 said he was permitted to see heaven and hell daily for twenty-seven years and to speak with angels. He taught that every word of Scripture has an internal sense keyed by correspondences, that God is one person and Jesus is that person, that marriage continues after death, and that the Second Coming had occurred as a revelation rather than an appearance.

Why it is filed this way

Whether the New Church is a Protestant denomination or a distinct revealed religion is its oldest internal argument. The General Church of the New Jerusalem holds the Writings to be divine revelation on a level with Scripture, which makes the body a new dispensation; the Swedenborgian Church of North America treats them as authoritative theological exposition, which keeps it Protestant. The two have never resolved it.

DeitiesOne God in one divine person. The Trinity is real but is a trinity of soul, body and operation within Jesus Christ, not three persons; Swedenborg regarded a Trinity of persons as three gods held under one name, and said so at length.
Founded1787 CE · London
FounderEmanuel Swedenborg, whose readers organised the church after his death
AfterlifeEveryone wakes in the world of spirits, is gradually shown what they actually love, and freely goes to the heaven or the hell of people who love the same thing; nobody is sent
TextsThe Bible, read for its internal sense · Arcana Caelestia (1749-56) · Heaven and Hell (1758)

The map

The New Church (Swedenborgianism)’s corner of it — solid lines are descent; dotted lines are resemblance only, ideas held in common across unrelated faiths. Click a node to recenter; ✕ returns here. All 171 faiths →
c. 1000 BCE Judaism 30 CE Christianity 1517 CE Protestantism 1787 CE The New Church (Swedenborgianism)

Core Tenets

2 — a sample of the center, never the sum Enter →
God is one person, and that person is Jesus Christ. Swedenborg held that a Trinity of three persons is three gods however carefully worded, and that the trinity is of soul, body and proceeding operation within the one divine human. It is the doctrine that put the New Church permanently outside orthodox Christianity while sounding, to a casual visitor, entirely churchlike. Go deeper — context →
Every word of Scripture has an internal sense, and it is systematic. Correspondence is not metaphor: a horse in the Word always signifies the understanding, a stone always truth, water always truth in its natural form. Twelve volumes of the Arcana Caelestia go through Genesis and Exodus verse by verse on this basis, and the church regards the key as given rather than devised. Go deeper — context →

Figures

who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle Enter →
E Emanuel Swedenborg — the mining assessor who took notes in the afterlife. Before 1745 he published on algebra, cosmology, metallurgy, the brain and the localisation of cerebral function — real science, some of it ahead of its time. After 1745 he wrote thirty volumes of theology in Latin, anonymously, describing daily conversations with angels and spirits, and kept his seat in the House of Nobles throughout. Domain The internal sense of Scripture, the structure of heaven and hell, correspondencesStanding A servant given sight, not an object of devotion — the church prays to the Lord and reads Swedenborg Meet them — context →

Rites & Ritual

what its people do — and when Enter →
The Word is carried in, and it stays open. New Church worship centres physically on the open Word on the altar, brought in at the start of the service and left open. The sermon then usually moves from the letter of the passage to its internal sense, which means the congregation is being taught a reading method every week. When Weekly — Sunday worship, opening with the Word carried to the altarWho The congregation Go deeper — context →

Where next

the museum exit — every door leads deeper in
Judaism — 11 shared ideas, a different faith Christianity — 11 shared ideas, a different faith The Bahá'í Faith — 11 shared ideas, a different faith Islam — 10 shared ideas, a different faith Branch The New Church (Swedenborgianism) — inherit everything, change what you must The library of ideas — what The New Church (Swedenborgianism) shares with every other faith A faith at random — somewhere you have never been

Numbers count Panfaith activity only — never real-world adherence.

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