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.

92. Brief Analysis

“Cutting those days short” means bringing the modern-day church to an end and establishing a new church. As mentioned before, Matthew 24 is about the successive states of decline and corruption within the Christian church leading up to its close and end, and about the Lord’s Coming, which happens after that.

The reason why no flesh would be saved if those days were not cut short is that the faith of the modern-day church is based on the idea of three gods, and no one who has that idea can get into heaven. Therefore no one with that faith can get into heaven either, because the idea of three gods is present in every detail of it. For another thing, that faith contains within itself no life from acts of goodwill. As I have shown in §§47– 50 above, it is incapable of being united to goodwill or producing any fruit in the form of good works.

There are two things that build a heaven within us: truths that lead to faith and good actions that come from goodwill. Truths that lead to faith bring us the presence of the Lord and show us the way to heaven. Good actions that come from goodwill give us a partnership with the Lord and bring us into heaven. There we are each brought into a light that accords with how much desire we have for what is true, and into a warmth that accords with how much desire we have for what is good. Faith in its essence is a desire for what is true, and goodwill in its essence is a desire for what is good. The church is a marriage between faith and goodwill; see §48 above. And heaven and the church are united. Faith, goodwill, and heaven (as I have demonstrated fully in the preceding pages) do not exist in the churches that are built on faith alone.

96. Brief Analysis

The scriptural quotation just above is what the one who sat on the throne, that is, the Lord, said to John when John saw the New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven. (The New Jerusalem means the new church, as the next point will demonstrate [§§99– 101].)

The reason why the falsities in the tenets of faith of the modern-day church have to be examined and rejected first before the truths in the tenets of the new church are revealed and accepted is that the two systems do not agree at any point or at any time. The tenets of the modern-day church are built on faith as their foundation, and yet no one knows whether anything essential to the church lies within that faith or not. The essential elements of the church, which are things that unite themselves to a faith in one God, are goodwill, good works, repentance, and a life in accordance with divine laws. Because these four, together with faith, affect and move both our will and our thoughts, they unite us to the Lord and the Lord to us. Since none of these essential elements plays any part in the faith espoused by the modern-day church at the moment when that faith comes into us — the moment referred to as “the act of justification” — it is completely impossible to know whether that faith is in us or not. Therefore it cannot even be known whether that faith is anything real or is just an idea. We are told that in the moment [of acquiring faith] we are like a stone or a block of wood and that when it comes to receiving faith, we are entirely unable to will, think, cooperate, or adapt or accommodate ourselves to it; see §15 c, d. None of us can even guess, then, let alone know, whether that faith exists within us or not. We do not know whether it is like a flower in a painting we own or like a flower in a field inside us. We do not know whether it is like a bird flying past us or like a bird nesting in us. We ask what signs and indications might lead us to the answers to these questions. The reply is that we may know this from the goodwill, good works, repentance, and following of the law that occur in us once we have faith. We have nevertheless also been told that there is no bond whatever between faith and these things. I leave it to the wise to investigate whether a lack of a bond can be a sign that testifies to anything! For example, our faith (we are told) is not preserved or maintained by the actions just listed; see §12 l, m.

The conclusion to be drawn is that nothing of the church has anything to do with the modern-day faith. Therefore the modern-day faith is not indeed anything; it is just a notion that there is such a thing. Given that this is the nature of that faith, it deserves to be rejected; in fact, since it contains not a single attribute of a church, it rejects itself.