180. It is even clearer that there are levels of love and wisdom if we compare angels' love and wisdom with our love and wisdom. It is generally acknowledged that the wisdom of angels is unutterable, relatively speaking. You will see later [267, 416] that it is also incomprehensible to us when we are wrapped up in our earthly love. The reason it seems unutterable and incomprehensible is that it is on a higher level.

796. Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin in the Spiritual World

I have often had conversations with these three leading reformers of the Christian church. I have learned what the state of their life has been from the beginning up to the present day.

As for Luther, from the moment he arrived in the spiritual world he was an ardent evangelist for and defender of his own theological teachings. As the number of people from earth who agreed and favored his position grew, his impassioned championing of those teachings only increased.

He was given a home like the one he had had in the world, at Eisleben. In the middle of that home he set up a chair on a low platform. He would sit there, and his door was open to people who came to hear him. He would line them up in rows, placing those who were most favorable to his views closest to himself and situating the less favorable behind them. Then he would follow a routine of holding forth for a while, and breaking now and then for questions, but always with a view to using the questions as a way to get back to the main point of his lecture.

[2] Over time, because of the widespread approval he was receiving he adopted a particular style of persuasive speaking that is so effective in the spiritual world that no one can resist it or take up a contrary position to what is being said. Because this technique was in fact a type of incantation that had been practiced in ancient times, however, he was strictly forbidden to use it. He went back to appealing to people's memory and understanding instead.

The type of persuasion (actually a form of incantation) that he had been practicing draws its power from self-love. Eventually that self-love leads the style of discourse to become such that when anyone contradicts what you are saying, you attack not only the point being made but also the person who is making it.

[3] This was the state of Luther's life all the way up to the time of the Last Judgment, which occurred in the spiritual world in 1757. Then a year after that, Luther was relocated from that first house of his to another; at the same time he was brought into a different state of life as well.

He came to hear about my situation - that although I was still in the physical world, I was having conversations with people in the spiritual world. Therefore he (and many others) sought me out. After a lot of questions and answers back and forth with me, he came to understand that this day is the end of the former church, and the beginning of the new church that Daniel had foretold and that the Lord himself prophesied in the Gospels. Luther also understood the idea that this new church is what is meant by the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation and by the everlasting gospel proclaimed by the angel, flying in the midst of heaven, to the people who dwell on the earth (Revelation 14:6).

At that point in the conversation, though, he became extremely upset and protested loudly against what I was saying. Nevertheless, as he gradually came to see that the new church has been and is being constituted of people who acknowledge the Lord alone as the God of heaven and earth (as the Lord himself says in Matthew 28:18), and as he noticed that the group that gathered around him daily was becoming smaller, his protestations came to an end.

We then developed a closer relationship and he began confiding in me. Once he had become thoroughly convinced that he had based his central doctrine of justification by faith alone on his own ideas and not on the Word, he allowed himself to be taught about the Lord, goodwill, true faith, free choice, and even redemption; and all this teaching was based exclusively on the Word.

[4] After being convinced, he began to prefer the truths that are foundational to the new church, and to become stronger in them. During this period he was spending time with me every day. Then whenever these truths would come to his mind, he would start to laugh at his own prior teachings, because they went directly against what the Word says.

I once heard him saying, "It is not all that surprising, though, that I latched onto faith alone as what justifies us, and cut goodwill off from its own spiritual essence, and took away the notion of any human free choice in spiritual things, not to mention the many other things that faith alone, once that is accepted, leads to, like one link after another in a chain. It was all because my goal was to separate from the Roman Catholics, and the notion of faith alone was the only way to pursue and achieve that. Therefore I am not surprised that I wandered off into error. But I am surprised that one deranged person can produce so many other deranged people. " Luther then looked over in the direction of some famous theological authors who were much read in their day, who were loyal adherents to his teachings.

"It does surprise me," he continued, "that people like these did not notice the statements in Sacred Scripture that contradict my teachings, even though such statements are standing there in plain sight. "

[5] The angels who examine people informed me that this leader, more than many others who had convinced themselves that we are justified by faith alone, was in a state of openness to change, because since his youth, before he ever began the Protestant Reformation, he had taken to heart the teaching that goodwill has the highest priority; this is why in both his writings and his sermons he had taught so beautifully about goodwill.

It became clear from this that the idea of justification by faith alone had taken root in his outer, earthly self, but not in his inner, spiritual self. The outcome is very different for people who become convinced in their youth that goodwill is not spiritual; this spontaneously occurs in listeners when a teacher uses supporting evidence to establish that we are justified by faith alone.

[6] I have had a conversation with the person who was the prince of Saxony when Luther was in the world. He told me that he had often raised objections to Luther, particularly on the point that Luther had separated goodwill from faith and declared that faith contributes to our salvation but goodwill does not, even though Sacred Scripture not only unites these two as the universal means of salvation, but Paul actually gives precedence to goodwill over faith when he says, "There are three things: faith, hope, and goodwill. The greatest of these is goodwill" (1 Corinthians 13:13). The prince noted, however, that Luther would give the same response every time - that he had no choice but to do so, because of the Roman Catholics. This prince is among the blessed.

267, 2. Evil people misuse these abilities to validate things that are evil and false, while good people use them to validate things that are good and true. The mental ability we call rationality and the volitional ability we call freedom afford us the possibility of validating anything we please. As earthly-minded people, we can raise our discernment to a higher light as far as we want to; but if we are bent on evil and the distortions it causes, we raise it no higher than the upper levels of the earthly mind, rarely to the region of the spiritual mind. This is because we are caught up in the pleasures of our earthly mind's love. If we do rise above that level, the pleasures of its love die away. If we rise even higher and see true things that are contrary to the pleasures of our life or the basic premises of the intellect that we claim as our own, then we either distort them or ignore them, dismissing them as worthless, or we hold them in our memory so that they may be of use as tools to our life's love or our pride in our own intelligence.

It is obvious from the abundance of heresies in Christendom (each one validated by its adherents) that earthly-minded people can validate whatever they please. Can anyone miss the fact that all kinds of evil and false notions can be validated? We can "prove" (and inwardly, evil people do "prove") that God does not exist and that nature is all there is, having created itself; that religion is only a device for holding the minds of the simple in bondage; that our own prudence accomplishes everything; and that divine providence does nothing but maintain the universe in the pattern in which it was created; and even, according to Machiavelli and his followers, that there is nothing wrong with murder, adultery, theft, deception, and revenge.

Earthly-minded people can justify a host of things like this, can fill books with "proofs;" and once they have been justified, we see these false notions in their own illusory light, and true ideas are in such darkness that they are virtually invisible, like ghosts in the night. In brief, take the falsest notion you can think of, frame it as a proposition, and tell someone clever to prove it, and you will find it "proved" to the absolute stifling of any true light. But then step back from those proofs and take a second look at the same proposition from your own rationality, and you will see how grotesquely false it is.

This shows that we are able to misuse the two abilities the Lord instills in us to validate all kinds of evil and false notions. No animal can do this because animals do not enjoy these abilities. So unlike us, animals are born into the complete pattern of their lives, with all the knowledge necessary for their earthly love.