16. Sketch of the Teachings of the New Church

WHAT follows here is a survey of the teachings of the new church meant by the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21 and 22. In the work itself, these teachings, which concern not only what to believe but also how to live, will be broken into three parts.

Part 1 will present teachings on the following topics:

1. The Lord God the Savior, and the Divine Trinity within Him

2. Sacred Scripture; Its Two Meanings, Earthly and Spiritual; and Its Resulting Holiness

3. Love for God, Love for Our Neighbor, and the Harmony between Them

4. Faith, and Its Partnership with Those Two Types of Love

5. Teachings about Life Drawn from the Ten Commandments

6. Reformation and Regeneration

7. Free Choice, and Our Cooperation with the Lord by Means of It

8. Baptism

9. The Holy Supper

10. Heaven and Hell

11. Our Partnership with Heaven or Hell, and How Our State of Life after Death Depends on That Partnership

12. Eternal Life

Part 2 will discuss the following topics:

1. The Close of the Age, the End of the Church in Existence Today

2. The Coming of the Lord

3. The Last Judgment

4. The New Church, Which Is the New Jerusalem

Part 3 will demonstrate the discordance between the tenets of the church in existence today and those of the new church.

In the present volume, too, we will spend a little time on these points of discordance, because both clergy and lay people in the church of today believe that their church is walking in the very light of the gospel and in truths that cannot be weakened, uprooted, or assailed, even by an angel, if one should come down from heaven. The church today cannot see otherwise, because it has withdrawn the intellect from matters of faith, and has supported its tenets through a kind of sight that exists beneath the intellect. That level [of the mind] is able to provide argumentation to support falsities so effectively that they appear to be truths. Once falsities have been reinforced on that level, they gain a deceptive kind of light. Where light of that kind exists, the light of truths looks like thick darkness.

For this reason we will spend a little time presenting points of discordance, and noting a few things about them by way of illustration, so that people whose intellects have not been closed off by blind faith will be able to see the differences, first as in twilight, then as in morning light, and eventually (when the work itself appears) as in the full light of day.

In general, the points of discordance are the following.

37. The concept of a trinity of gods also goes against enlightened reason, as many arguments are capable of establishing. What person of sound reason would be open to hearing that three gods created the world? Or that creating and preserving, redeeming and saving, and reforming and regenerating are tasks undertaken by three gods, not one God? On the other hand, what person of sound reason would not be open to hearing that the same God who created us also redeems, regenerates, and saves us? Since the latter thoughts are reasonable, but the former are not, every group of religious and reasonable people on the face of this earth acknowledges that there is one God.

As we all know, Muslims and some of the peoples in Asia and Africa detest Christianity because they believe it entails the worship of three gods. When Christians are rebuked on this account, they have only one response: that the three persons share one essence, and therefore constitute one God.

I can attest that the reasoning power granted me allows me to see that no world, no angelic heaven, no church, and nothing within any of them could have come into existence or could continue to exist if there were not one God.