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.

493. Every Spiritual Gift the Church Has to Offer That Comes to Us in Freedom and That We Freely Accept Stays with Us; What Comes to Us in Other Ways Does Not

What we accept in freedom stays with us, because freedom relates to our will; and since freedom relates to our will it also relates to our love. The will is a vessel for love, as I have shown elsewhere [39, 263, ].

Freedom is a characteristic of everything that belongs to love and everything that belongs to our will. Anyone can see this from the statement "I want to do this because I love it," and the other way around, "because I love this I also want to do it. " Nevertheless, the will we have is dual. We have an inner will and an outer will; our inner self has a will and so does our outer self. This is what makes it possible for con artists to act and speak one way before the world and another way with their close friends. Before the world they act and speak from the will of their outer self, but with friends, from the will within, and here I mean the will of the inner self where their dominant love resides.

Just from these few points we can see that our inner will is our true self. It is the location of the underlying reality and essence of our life. Our intellect is the form of that inner self. Through our intellect our will makes its love visible. Our freedom is a matter of everything we love and everything love leads us to want. Whatever comes forth from the love in our inner will is the delight of our life. And because the love in our inner will is the underlying reality of our life, it also truly belongs to us.

This is why something that the freedom of this will leads us to accept stays with us; it adds itself to what is our own. The opposite occurs if something is brought in apart from our freedom; that something is not accepted in the same way. But this is to be taken up in the ensuing discussion [496, 500].

372. (d) This reciprocal partnership between the Lord and us comes about through goodwill and faith. Today people know that the church constitutes the body of Christ. People also know that everyone who has the church inside is in some part of that body, as Paul says (Ephesians 1:23; 1 Corinthians 12:27; Romans 12:4-5). Is the body of Christ anything except divine goodness and divine truth? This is what the Lord's words in John mean: "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood live in me and I in them" (John 6:56). "The Lord's flesh" means divine goodness, as does "bread. " "The Lord's blood" means divine truth, as does "wine. " Below in the chapter on the Holy Supper you will see that these are their true meanings [702-709].

It follows that the more involved we are in acts of goodwill and in truths that relate to faith, the more we are in the Lord and the Lord is in us. Our partnership with the Lord is a spiritual partnership, and spiritual partnerships take place only through goodwill and faith.

I have shown in the chapter on Sacred Scripture that a partnership between the Lord and the church and thus a partnership between goodness and truth exists in every detail of the Word, 248-253. Because goodwill is goodness and faith is truth, there is also a partnership between goodwill and faith throughout the Word.

From all this it now follows that the Lord is goodwill and faith within us, and we are goodwill and faith within the Lord. The Lord is spiritual goodwill and faith in our earthly goodwill and faith; and we are earthly goodwill and faith from the Lord's spiritual goodwill and faith. As the two types of goodwill and faith forge a partnership, they become a goodwill and a faith that are spiritual-and-earthly.