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)

Branch

Figures

who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle All 1 →
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 →

Core Tenets

2 — a sample of the center, never the sum All 2 →
The shared center — held across the tradition
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 →

Cosmos & Afterlife

how reality is built, and what follows death
The nature of 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

After death

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

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