The Gist of Swedenborg E-Book

Emanuel Swedenborg

• Herausgeber: Emanuel Swedenborg
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
THE GIST OF SWEDENBORG
GOD THE LORD
MAN
THE WARFARE OF REGENERATION
MARRIAGE
THE SACRED SCRIPTURES
THE LIFE OF CHARITY AND FAITH
THE DIVINE PROVIDENCE
DEATH AND THE RESURRECTION
THE FIRST THREE STATES AFTER DEATH
HEAVEN
HELL
COMMUNICATION WITH THE SPIRITUAL WORLD
THE CHURCH
MEMORABLE SAYINGS
 

Leseprobe

Emanuel Swedenborg

The Gist of Swedenborg

FIrst digital edition 2017 by Anna Ruggieri

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

GOD THE LORD

MAN

THE WARFARE OF REGENERATION

MARRIAGE

THE SACRED SCRIPTURES

THE LIFE OF CHARITY AND FAITH

THE DIVINE PROVIDENCE

DEATH AND THE RESURRECTION

THE FIRST THREE STATES AFTER DEATH

HEAVEN

HELL

COMMUNICATION WITH THE SPIRITUAL WORLD

THE CHURCH

MEMORABLE SAYINGS

FOREWORD

The reason for a compilation such as is here presented should be obvious. Swedenborg's theological writingscomprise some thirty or more substantial volumes, the result of the most concentrated labor extending over a period of twenty-seven years. To study these writings in their whole extent, to see them in their minute unfoldment out of the Word of God, is a work of years. It is doubtful if there is a phase of man's religious experience for which an interpretation is not here to be found. Notwithstanding this immense sweep of doctrine there are certain vital, fundamental truths on which it all rests:—the Christ-God, Man a spiritual being, the warfare of Regeneration, Marriage, the Sacred Scriptures, the Life of Charity and Faith, the Divine Providence, Death and the Future Life, the Church. We have endeavored to press within the small compass of this book passages which give the gist of Swedenborg's teachings on these subjects.

The compilers would gladly have made room for the interpretative and philosophical teachings which contribute so much to the content and form of Swedenborg's theology; but they have confined their effort to setting forth briefly and clearly the positive spiritual teachings, where these seemed most packed with religious meaning and moment.

The translation of the passages here brought together has been carefully revised.

JULIAN K. SMYTH.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Emanuel Swedenborg was born at Stockholm, January 29, 1688.

A devout home (the father was a Lutheran clergyman, andafterwards Bishop of Skara) stimulated in the boy the nature whichwas to become so active in his culminating life-work. A universityeducation at Upsala, however, and studies for five years inEngland, France, Holland and Germany, brought other interests intoplay first. The earliest of these were mathematics and astronomy,in the pursuit of which he met Flamsteed and Halley. His gift forthe detection and practical employment of general laws soon carriedhim much farther afield in the sciences. Metallurgy, geology, avaried field of invention, chemistry, as well as his duties as anAssessor on the Board of Mines and of a legislator in the Diet, allengaged him, with an immediate outcome in his work, and often withresults in contributions to human knowledge which are gainingrecognition only now. ThePrincipiaand two companion volumes,dedicated to his patron, the Duke of Brunswick, crowned hisversatile productions in the physical sciences. Academiesofscience, at home and abroad, were electing him to membership.

Conspicuous in Swedenborg's thought all along was the premisethat there is a God and the presupposition of that whole element inlife which we call the spiritual. As he pushed his studies into thefields of physiology and psychology, this premised realm of thespirit became the express goal of his researches. Some of his mostvaluable and most startling discoveries came in these fields.Outstanding are a work onThe Brainand two on theAnimalKingdom(kingdom of theanima, or soul). As his gaze sought the soul,however, in the light in which he had more and more successfullybeheld all his subjects for fifty-five years, she eluded directknowledge. He was increasingly baffled, until a new light broke inon him. Then he was borne along, in a profound humiliation of hisintellectual ambitions, by another way. For when the new lightsteadied, he had undergone a personal religious experience, therich journals of which he himself never published.But what was ofpublic concern, his consciousness was opened into the world of thespirit, so that he could observe its facts and laws as, for solong, he had observed those of the material world, and in its ownworld could receive a revelation of the doctrines of man'sspiritual life.

It was now, for the first time, too, that he gave a deepconsideration to the condition of the Christian Church, revealed inotherworld judgment to be one of spiritual devastation andimpotency. To serve in the revelation of"doctrine for a New Church"became his Divinely appointed work. He forwent his reputation as aman of science, gave up his assessorship, cleared his desk ofeverything but the Scriptures. He beheld in the Word of God aspiritual meaning, as he did a spiritual world in the world ofphenomena. In revealing both of these the Lord, he said, made HisSecond Coming. For the rest of his long life Swedenborg gavehimself with unremitting labor but with a saving calm to thiscommanding cause, publishing his great Latin volumes of Scriptureinterpretation and of theological teaching at Amsterdam or London,at first anonymously, and distributing them to clergy anduniversities. The titles of his principal theological works appearin the following compilation from them. Upon his death-bed thisherald of a new day for Christianity solemnly affirmed the realityof his experience and the reception by him of his teaching from theLord.

Swedenborg died in London, March 29, 1772. In 1908 his remainswere removed from the Swedish Church in that city to the cathedralat Upsala, where they lie in a monument erected to his memory bythe Swedish Parliament.

WILLIAM F. WUNSCH.

Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Swedenborg(3vols.) 1875-1877, R.L. Tafel, is the main collection ofbiographical material;The Life and Mission of Emanuel Swedenborg,1883, Benjamin Worcester, andEmanuel Swedenborg, His Life,Teachings and Influence, 1907, George Trobridge, are two of thebetter known biographies.

GOD THE LORD

"Believe in God: believe also in Me."

John,XIV, 1

"My Lord, and my God!"

John,XX, 28

ONE AND INFINITE

God is One, and Infinite. The true quality of the Infinite does not appear; for the human mind, however highly analytical and exalted, is itself finite, and the finiteness in it cannot be laid aside. It is not fitted, therefore, to see the Infinity of God, and thus God, as He is in Himself, but can see God from behind in shadow; as it is said of Moses, when he asked to see God, that he was placed in a cleft of the rock, and saw His hinder side. It is enough to acknowledge God from things finite, that is, created, in which He is infinitely.

—True Christian Religion, n.28

"INTO HIS MARVELLOUS LIGHT"

We read in the Word that Jehovah God dwells in light inaccessible. Who, then, could approach Him, unless He had come to dwell in accessible light, that is, unless He had descended and assumed aHumanity and in it had become the Light of the world? Who cannot see that to approach Jehovah the Father in His light is as impossible as to take the wings of the morning and to fly with them to the sun?

—True Christian Religion, n.176

THE CHRIST-GOD

We ought to have faith in God the Saviour, Jesus Christ, because that is faith in the visible God in Whom is the Invisible; and faith in the visible God, Who is at once Man and God, enters into man. For while faith is spiritual in essence it is natural in form, for everything spiritual, in order to be anything with a man, is received by him in what is natural.

—True Christian Religion, n.339

Man's conjunction with the Lord is not with His supreme Divine Being itself, but with His Divine Humanity, and by this with the supreme [...]