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.

20. Brief Analysis

Although scarcely anyone has realized it, on these four points Protestants agree with Roman Catholics so closely that there is hardly any meaningful difference between them, except that Catholics unite faith to goodwill but Protestants separate the two. In fact, the agreement between them is so little known that even theology professors are going to be astounded by this statement.

The reason why this is unknown is that Roman Catholics rarely turn to God our Savior; they turn instead to the pope as Christ’s vicar, and also to the saints. Therefore they have let their tenets regarding the assigning of Christ’s merit and our being justified by faith lie dormant. Nevertheless, the points above in §§3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 taken from the Council of Trent (which were ratified by Pope Pius IV, as shown in §2) make it abundantly clear that these are among the tenets that are received and acknowledged by Catholics. Compare these with the tenets from the Augsburg Confession and the Formula of Concord in §§9, 10, 11, and 12, and you can see that the distinctions between them are not substantial; they are merely verbal. By reading and carefully comparing the quotations earlier in this work, the church’s theology professors will indeed be able to see (although not fully) the agreement between the Protestant and the Catholic views on these points. Some further illustrations of the agreement will be given in the following sections, so that theology professors, and also less highly educated clergy and lay people, will be able to see it.

7. The teachings of the Roman Catholics on justification, as gathered from the decrees of the Council of Trent, can be linked together and summed up as follows:

The sin of Adam was transfused into the entire human race. As a result, the state of the human race and of every individual within it was ruined and alienated from God. People became enemies [of God] and children of wrath. Therefore God the Father as an act of grace sent his Son to reconcile, ritually purge, appease, make satisfaction, and thereby redeem; and to do so by becoming justice.

Christ carried out and fulfilled this task by offering himself to God the Father as a sacrifice on the wood of the cross, that is, through his own suffering and his own blood. Christ alone earned merit. God the Father through the agency of the Holy Spirit assigns, attributes, applies, and transfers this merit of Christ’s to receptive individuals as an act of grace. In this way the sin of Adam is removed from them, although cravings do nonetheless remain and entice them to sin.

Justification is the forgiving of sins, which leads to a renewal of the inner self, by which we turn from an enemy [of God] into a friend and from a child of wrath into a child of grace. This brings us into a union with Christ. We are reborn as a living part of his body.