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.

103. Brief Analysis

The reason why there is no way to simultaneously hold the views of the new church and the views of the former church (that is, the modern-day church) regarding faith is that the two positions do not overlap by a third or even a tenth.

In Revelation 12 the faith of the former church is portrayed as a dragon (see §§87– 90 above) and the faith of the new church is portrayed as a woman clothed with the sun, who had a crown of twelve stars on her head. The dragon persecuted her and spewed water like a flood at her in an effort to carry her away by it. These two views cannot coexist in the same city, much less in the same household or the same mind. If they were to come together, the only possible outcome would be that the woman would be constantly exposed to rage and insanity from the dragon, and would constantly fear that the dragon would devour her son. After all, we read in Revelation 12 that the dragon stood before the woman, when she was about to give birth, in order to devour her child. After the woman gave birth, she fled into the wilderness (Revelation 12:1, 4, 6, 14– 17).

The faith held by the former church is a faith of the night; human reason has no experience of it at all. This is why we are told that we are to hold our intellect under obedience to faith. In fact, we do not even know whether it is within us or outside of us. The human will and human reason have nothing to do with it.

For that matter, goodwill, good works, repentance, the law of the Ten Commandments, and a number of other things that actually exist in the human mind have nothing to do with it (see §§79, 80, 96, 97, 98). The faith of the new church, however, forms a partnership and a marriage covenant with all the things just mentioned. As a result, this faith lives in the warmth of heaven; and because it does, it also lives in heaven’s light. It is a faith of the light.

A faith of the night and a faith of the light cannot live together any more than an owl and a dove can live together in one nest. The owl would lay its eggs there, and the dove would lay its eggs. After incubation, both sets of chicks would hatch, and then the owl would tear apart the dove’s chicks and feed them to its chicks. (Owls are voracious.)

The faith of the former church cannot live with the faith of the new church because the two are completely incompatible. The faith of the former church is descended from the idea that there are three gods (see §§30– 38 above); the faith of the new church, though, is descended from the idea that there is one God. And because the two are completely incompatible as a result, it is inevitable that if they lived together in us they would collide and cause so much conflict that everything related to the church would be destroyed in us. We would fall into such a state of spiritual madness or else spiritual unconsciousness that we would hardly know what the church was or whether such a thing even existed.

Consequently, people who are deeply committed to the faith of the old church are incapable of embracing the faith of the new church without endangering their own spiritual lives, unless they have first rejected the teachings of the former faith one by one and have uprooted that former faith along with all its live offspring and unhatched eggs (meaning tenets). What these tenets are like has been shown earlier in this work, especially in §§64– 69.

109. The notion that Christ’s righteousness or merit is assigned to us permeates the entire theological system in today’s Protestant Christian world. It is because of this assigning that our faith (which Protestant Christianity takes to be the sole means of being saved) can be referred to as our righteousness before God; see §11 d. The assigning that happens as a result of our faith clothes us with the gifts of righteousness, much as a newly crowned monarch is adorned with royal insignia.

In reality, however, this assigning accomplishes nothing if all it involves is that we are called righteous. It does no work within us; it only flows into our ears, unless this assigning of righteousness includes an actual transfer of righteousness to us through some process of its being shared with us and incorporated into us. This conclusion follows from the list of things that are claimed to be the effects of this assigning: our sins are forgiven, and we are regenerated, renewed, sanctified, and therefore saved. This claim is clearer still from the fact that Christ is said to dwell in us and the Holy Spirit is said to work in us as a result of that faith; and therefore we are not only considered to be righteous but actually are righteous. It is not just the gifts of God that reside in the reborn, but because of their faith, Christ too and in fact the entire holy Trinity dwells in them as his temple; see §15 l. Both we as people and the works we do should be called, and should be, completely righteous; see §14 e.

From these points it undoubtedly follows that “the assigning of Christ’s righteousness” must mean an actual transfer of righteousness to us through some process of its being incorporated into us, through which we become a partaker in it.

Now, because this concept of assigning is the root, the start, and the foundation of faith and of all the work faith does for our salvation, and because it is therefore the sanctuary and shrine at the center of all Christian church buildings today, it is important to add as an appendix [to this work] an examination of this notion of assigning, presented point by point as follows.

1. After we die we are all assigned either blame for the evil or else credit for the goodness to which we have devoted ourselves.

2. It is impossible to incorporate one person’s goodness into another person.

3. Given that this is impossible, it is an imaginary faith to believe that Christ’s righteousness or merit is assigned to or transferred into us.