60. 14 The teachings of faith of the modern-day church attribute to God qualities that are merely human: they say, for example, that God looked at the human race with anger; that he needed to be reconciled to us; that he was in fact reconciled through his love for his Son and through the Son’s intercession; that he needed to be appeased by seeing his Son’s wretched suffering, and this brought him back into a merciful attitude; that he assigns the Son’s justice to unjust people who beg him for it on the basis of their faith alone, and turns them from enemies into friends and from children of wrath into children of grace.

85. Experiences in the spiritual world have made it very plain to me that “the goats” mean precisely people like these. In the spiritual world we see the same things that exist in the physical world. We see houses and mansions. We see parks and gardens — the gardens contain trees of all different kinds. We see fields of crops and fields that have recently been plowed. We see meadows and lawns. We also see flocks and herds. All these things are the same there as they are here on the physical planet Earth. The only difference is that the things on Earth have a physical origin but the things in the spiritual world have a spiritual origin.

In that world I have often seen sheep and goats. I have seen them battling with each other, much like the battle described in Daniel 8. I have seen goats with horns that curved forward and that curved backward. I have seen goats furiously charging at sheep. I have seen goats with two horns, and goats with four horns, violently butting sheep with them. When I have looked around to see what this meant, I have seen people arguing with each other about whether faith is united to goodwill or is entirely separate from it.

These experiences have made it clear to me that the modern-day view that faith is what justifies us (which is a faith that is by definition completely separate from goodwill) is a goat; and faith that is united to goodwill is a sheep.