History & overview · every faith gets one
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.
The founding
Swedenborg was fifty-five and Sweden's leading mineralogist when, on his own account, his spiritual sight was opened in London in April 1745 and he was called to explain the Word. He resigned from active service on the Board of Mines, spent twenty-seven years publishing theology anonymously in Latin at his own expense, and died in London on 29 March 1772. He founded nothing. In 1787 readers in London formed a separate church, and the first General Conference met in Great East Cheap in April 1789 — fifteen years after his death and against his apparent expectation that the New Church would grow inside the existing ones.
Its founding is bound to Emanuel Swedenborg, whose readers organised the church after his death — 1787 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Two worlds in constant correspondence — every natural thing is the outward form of a spiritual cause, and Scripture is written in that code throughout.
The divine. One 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..
Death and after. Everyone 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.