1. True Christianity

Containing a Comprehensive Theology of the New Heaven and the New Church

The Faith of the New Heaven and the New Church

THE faith of the new heaven and the new church is stated here in both universal and specific forms to serve as the face of the work that follows, the doorway that allows entry into the temple, and the summary that in one way or another contains all the details to follow. I say "the faith of the new heaven and the new church" because heaven, where there are angels, and the church, in which there are people, act together like the inner and the outer levels in a human being. People in the church who love what is good because they believe what is true and who believe what is true because they love what is good are angels of heaven with regard to the inner levels of their minds. After death they come into heaven, and enjoy happiness there according to the relationship between their love and their faith. It is important to know that the new heaven that the Lord is establishing today has this faith as its face, doorway, and summary.

9. 3. As a result, every nation in the whole world that possesses religion and sound reason acknowledges that God exists and that there is one God. From the divine inflow into human souls, discussed just above, it follows that in everyone there is an inner voice saying that God exists and that there is one God. Nevertheless there are people who deny God, people who worship nature as God, people who worship many gods, and people who worship idols as gods. The reason for this is that they have let worldly and bodily perspectives block off the inner reaches of their reason or intellect and obliterate their first childhood idea of God; they have rejected religion from their heart and have put it behind them.

The Christian confessional creed shows that Christians acknowledge one God and shows how they view the unity of God:

The catholic faith is this, that we venerate one God in a trinity, and the Trinity in unity. There are three divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and yet there are not three gods; there is one God. The Father is a person, the Son another, and the Holy Spirit another, and yet they have one divinity, equal glory, and coeternal majesty. The Father, then, is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God; but just as Christian truth compels us to confess each person individually as God and Lord, so the catholic religion forbids us to say that there are three gods or three lords.

This is the Christian faith regarding the unity of God. (In the chapter that discusses the divine Trinity [163-184] you will see that the trinity of God and the unity of God presented in this confession are incompatible.)

[2] The other nations in the world that possess religion and sound reason agree that there is one God: all Muslims in their countries; the Africans in the many countries on their continent; and the Asians as well, in the many countries on theirs. So too do modern-day Jews. In the Golden Age, the most ancient people who were religious worshiped one God, whom they named Jehovah. So did the ancient people in the following age, up to the time when monarchies were created. In the time of the monarchies, upper levels of the intellect that had previously been open, and had been like sanctuaries and temples of worship to the one God, were increasingly closed off by worldly loves, and then by bodily loves. The Lord God, in order to unblock those upper levels of the intellect and restore worship of one God, instituted a church among the descendants of Jacob and set the following precept above all the other precepts in their religion: "There is to be no other God before my face" (Exodus 20:3).

[3] "Jehovah," which he named himself anew for the Jews, means the highest and only Being, and the origin of everything that exists and occurs in the universe. People in the preclassical period acknowledged Jove as the highest God (perhaps so named from Jehovah), and deified many others who made up his court. In the age that followed, however, sages like Plato and Aristotle admitted that the other [Olympians] were not gods but different properties, qualities, and attributes of the one God, called gods because there was divinity in each of them.

380. (b) Illegitimate faith is all faith that departs from the one and only true faith. Illegitimate faith exists in people who climb up some other way and view the Lord not as God but only as a human being. All faith that departs from the one true faith is illegitimate. This is self-evident. Given that only one faith is true, it follows that any faith that departs from it is not true. The marriage between the Lord and the church generates everything that is good and that is true in the church. Everything that is essentially goodwill and essentially faith comes from that marriage. Any goodwill and faith that are not from that marriage come from an illegitimate bed, not a legitimate one. They come from either a polygamous marriage bed or an adulterous one. Every faith that acknowledges the Lord and yet adopts false and heretical beliefs comes from a polygamous bed.

A faith that acknowledges three lords over one church comes from an adulterous bed. It is like a single woman who is promiscuous; or like a married woman who has a husband but rents herself out overnight to two other men, and when she sleeps with them she calls each of them her husband. Therefore these types of faith are called illegitimate.

In many passages the Lord calls people with these types of belief "adulterers. " He also means people like this when he mentions thieves and robbers in John:

Truly I say to you, those who do not enter through the door to the sheepfold but instead climb up some other way are thieves and robbers. I am the door. Anyone who enters through me will be saved. (John 10:1, 9)

Coming into "the sheepfold" is coming into the church and also coming into heaven. It means coming into heaven because heaven and the church are one. Nothing else constitutes heaven except the church in the spiritual world. Therefore just as the Lord is the bridegroom and husband of the church, he is also the bridegroom and husband of heaven.

[2] To test and find out whether a given faith is a legitimate or an illegitimate offspring, one can use the three indications presented just above: acknowledgment that the Lord is the Son of God; acknowledgment that he is the God of heaven and earth; and acknowledgment that he is one with the Father. The more a given faith departs from these essentials, the more illegitimate it is.

People who view the Lord not as God but only as a human being have a faith that is both illegitimate and adulterous. This is obvious from two atrocious heresies, the Arian heresy and the Socinian heresy, which have been anathematized by and cut off from the Christian church because they deny the Lord's divinity and climb up another way. I am afraid that these abominations lie hidden in the general spirit of people in the church.

Astounding to say, the more that people believe they have better scholarship and judgment than others, the more readily they latch onto, and adopt as their own, ideas that the Lord is human but not divine and that because he is human he could not be divine. When people adopt these ideas as their own, they join the club of Arians and Socinians who in the spiritual world are in hell.

[3] The reason for this general spirit among people in the church today is that all of us have a spirit who is allied with us. Without that spirit we could not think analytically, rationally, or spiritually. Without those types of thinking we would be brute animals, not human beings. We all invite to ourselves a spirit who is similar to the desire in our will and the consequent perception in our intellect. If we develop good desires through truths from the Word and through living by those truths, we connect an angel from heaven to ourselves. On the other hand, if we develop evil desires through convincing ourselves of false beliefs and through living an evil life, we connect spirits from hell to ourselves. Once these evil spirits are connected to us, we increasingly develop a kind of sibling relationship with satans. Then we become more and more convinced of falsities that are against the truths in the Word and more and more hardened in an Arian and Socinian loathing for the Lord, because no satan can stand to hear any truth from the Word or to say the name Jesus. If satans hear these things, they turn into furies running around and uttering blasphemy. Then if light from heaven flows in they throw themselves headfirst into caves, into their own pitch darkness. In those places they have a light like that of night birds in the dark or like that of cats in basements when they are chasing mice. This is how all people who deny the Lord's divinity and the Word's holiness in their heart and in their faith turn out after death. Their inner self has this nature no matter how well their outer self does impressions and pretends to be Christian. I know this is true, because I have seen it and heard it.

[4] There are people who honor the Lord as their Redeemer and Savior with their mouth and lips alone but view him in their heart and spirit as a mere human being. In every case, when these people speak and teach, their mouth is like a jar full of honey but their heart is like a jar full of bile. Their words are like pastries but their thoughts are like poisoned wine. They themselves are like cake rolls with little worms inside. If they are priests, they are like pirates at sea who fly the flag of a peaceful country, but when a nearby ship signals to them as allies, they replace that flag with a pirate flag and capture the ship and its passengers.

They are also like serpents of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil who approach you as if they were angels of light. They hold apples in their hand from that tree that have been painted with deep red colors as if they were plucked from the tree of life. They offer them and say, "God knows that on the day you eat these, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:5). When you eat, you follow the serpent into some underworld and you make your home with it. All around that underworld there are satans who ate the apples of Arius and Socinus.

People like this are also meant by the person who came [to the wedding] but was not dressed in a wedding garment and was thrown into outer darkness (Matthew 22:11-13). The wedding garment is faith that the Lord is the Son of God, is the God of heaven and earth, and is one with the Father.

People who honor the Lord with only their mouth and their lips, while in heart and spirit they regard him as a mere human being, and who reveal their thoughts and convince others to believe those thoughts are spiritual murderers. The worst of them are spiritual cannibals. Human life comes from love and faith in the Lord. If this essential ingredient of faith and love is removed - the recognition that the Lord is the human God and the divine Human - our life becomes death; its removal kills and devours us the way a wolf kills and devours a lamb.