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.
