1. Survey of Teachings of the New Church Meant by the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation

[Author’s Preface]

AFTER publishing, within the span of a few years, several larger and smaller works on the New Jerusalem (which means the new church that the Lord is going to establish), and after unveiling the Book of Revelation, I resolved to publish and bring to light the teachings of the [new] church in their fullness, and thus to present a body of teaching that was whole. But because this work was going to take several years, I developed a plan to publish an outline of it, to give people an initial, general picture of this church and its teachings. When a general overview precedes, all the details that follow, of however wide a range, stand forth in a clear light, because they each have their own place within the overall structure alongside things of the same type.

This briefing does not include detailed argumentation; it is shared as advance notice, because the points it contains will be fully demonstrated in the work itself.

First, however, I must present the teachings concerning justification as they exist today, in order to highlight the differences between the tenets of today’s church and those of the new church.

89. The exact meaning of the pit of the abyss is “dragon faith” — that is, faith that originates in the idea of three gods, lacks any notion that Christ’s human nature was divine, and is hailed as the faith that alone justifies us, regenerates us, brings us to life, sanctifies us, and saves us. To convince me completely of this to the point of absolute certainty, I have been allowed to look down into that abyss and talk to the people who are there. I have also seen the locusts that come out of that pit. From this eyewitness experience I have given a description in Revelation Unveiled of the pit and the abyss. Because nothing is better for establishing certainty than an eyewitness account, I will copy my account of that experience here, as follows.

The pit, which is like the opening to a furnace, is found in the southern region. The abyss below it stretches far toward the east. There is light in the pit and the abyss, but if light from heaven is let into them, they become very dark. For this reason the pit is closed at the top.

In the abyss you see temporary housing that looks as if it is made of brick, with holes in the walls. It is divided into many little cells. Each cell contains a table with paper and some books on it, and a person sitting at it. All of these are people who, in the world, had become adamant supporters of justification and salvation by faith alone. They characterized goodwill as an act of mere earthly morality, and good works as just things we do in our civic lives to earn ourselves rewards in the world. If people do them for the sake of their salvation, however, these writers condemn that, some of them very harshly, on the grounds that such actions are tainted with human reason and will.

All the people in the abyss were learned and well-educated when they were in the world. Some are theoretical philosophers and Scholastic philosophers; these are the ones accorded the highest esteem by others in the abyss.

What happens to them over time is as follows. When they are first sent there, they sit in the little cells at the front. As they lend reinforcement to faith and exclude works of goodwill they leave the first locations and move to cells that are farther east. This relocating happens again and again until they reach the end, where people use the Word to support those teachings. Because by that point they cannot help but falsify the Word, their housing disappears and they find themselves in a desert.

There is another abyss below the first. It contains people who had become similarly adamant about justification and salvation by faith alone, but who in their spirits had also denied the existence of God and at heart had laughed at the holy teachings and practices of the church. The only things people do there are argue, tear each other’s clothes, climb on tables, kick at each other, and attack each other with insults. Because they are forbidden to harm each other, they hurl threats and shake their fists at each other.

20. Brief Analysis

Although scarcely anyone has realized it, on these four points Protestants agree with Roman Catholics so closely that there is hardly any meaningful difference between them, except that Catholics unite faith to goodwill but Protestants separate the two. In fact, the agreement between them is so little known that even theology professors are going to be astounded by this statement.

The reason why this is unknown is that Roman Catholics rarely turn to God our Savior; they turn instead to the pope as Christ’s vicar, and also to the saints. Therefore they have let their tenets regarding the assigning of Christ’s merit and our being justified by faith lie dormant. Nevertheless, the points above in §§3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 taken from the Council of Trent (which were ratified by Pope Pius IV, as shown in §2) make it abundantly clear that these are among the tenets that are received and acknowledged by Catholics. Compare these with the tenets from the Augsburg Confession and the Formula of Concord in §§9, 10, 11, and 12, and you can see that the distinctions between them are not substantial; they are merely verbal. By reading and carefully comparing the quotations earlier in this work, the church’s theology professors will indeed be able to see (although not fully) the agreement between the Protestant and the Catholic views on these points. Some further illustrations of the agreement will be given in the following sections, so that theology professors, and also less highly educated clergy and lay people, will be able to see it.