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.

62. There were theologians who assigned to God attributes that are merely human and unworthy of God. Their purpose in doing so was to preserve the integrity of the doctrine of justification, once it was established, and dress it up in some plausible fashion. They said that anger, revenge, damnation, and other things of the kind were traits possessed by God’s justice, and this is why such things are mentioned so many times in the Word and are (seemingly) attributed to God.

Mention of “the anger of God” in the Word actually refers to that which is evil in us. Because this evil goes against God it is called the anger of God. This expression does not mean that God is angry at us but that our own evil makes us angry at God. Because evil carries its own punishment with it (just as goodness carries its own reward), when evil brings punishment on us it looks as though God is punishing us.

This is the same, though, as criminals blaming the law for their own punishment, or our blaming the fire for burning us when we put our hand in it, or our blaming the drawn sword in the guard’s hand when we hurl ourselves onto the tip of it. This is the nature of God’s justice. (For more on these points, see Revelation Unveiled. On the justice and judgment that exist in God and come from God, see §668 there; on the Word attributing anger to God, see §§635, 658; on the Word attributing revenge to God, see §806.)

These are features of the Word’s literal meaning. They occur because the literal meaning is written in correspondences and in expressions of an appearance. These features do not appear in the Word’s spiritual meaning, however; in this meaning the truth stands forth in its own light.

I can attest that when angels hear anyone saying God was angry and locked the whole human race into damnation, or was reconciled from being our enemy through the Son as a second God born from the first God, they become like people who are about to vomit because their stomachs and internal organs have been violently heaved this way and that. The angels say, “What more insane thing could anyone possibly say about God?”