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.

273. 14. If the Word Did Not Exist, No One Would Know about God, Heaven, Hell, or Life after Death, Still Less about the Lord

There are people who put forward the idea (something they have become inwardly adamant about) that without the Word people would still know of the existence of God and of heaven and hell, as well as the other things the Word teaches about. You cannot deal with such people on the basis of the Word; you have to use the earthly light of reason, because they believe in themselves, not the Word.

Investigate by using the light of your reason and you will find that there are two faculties of life in us. They are called the intellect and the will. The intellect is subject to the will, but the will is not subject to the intellect. The intellect only teaches and points out what we should be wanting and doing. As a result, many people have sharp minds and understand life's morality better than others, and yet do not live by it. Things would be different if these people wanted to be moral. Investigate further and you will find that we identify with our will. From the day we are born, our will is evil, and that produces falsity in our intellect.

When you have found this out, you will see another thing: left on our own, we do not want to understand anything that does not come from the self that we experience in our own will. And if there were no other source of knowledge, we would have no desire to understand anything unrelated to ourselves or our world; everything beyond our world would be in pitch darkness. For example, when we saw the sun, the moon, and the stars, if we happened to think about their origin, we could not help thinking they originated from us. This thinking is no deeper than that of scholars in our world who acknowledge the existence of nature alone even though they know from the Word that all things were created by God. What would they be thinking if they had known nothing from the Word?

Did the classical philosophers such as Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and the others, who wrote about God and the immortality of the soul, originally derive those concepts from their own intellects? No, they derived them from others who passed them on from still others who first learned them from the ancient Word that we mentioned earlier [264-266]. The writers of natural theology, too, derive none of this type of thought from themselves; they merely use their rationality to establish concepts they learned from their church, which has the Word. There may even be some among them who defend spiritual concepts and yet do not believe them themselves.

657. As everyone can see on the basis of reason, it is impossible for both evil and a faith in the one only true God to coexist in us. Evil is opposed to God, and faith is in favor of God. Evil belongs to our will and faith belongs to our thoughts. The will flows into the intellect and causes it to think. There is no flow in the other direction; the intellect merely teaches what should be willed and done.

Therefore the good things an evil person does are intrinsically evil. They are like a shiny piece of bone with a rotten marrow. They are like an actor on a stage impersonating an important dignitary. They are like an attractive face on a worn-out prostitute. They are like a moth with silver wings that lays its eggs on the leaves of a good kind of tree, destroying its fruit. They are like fragrant smoke from a poisonous plant. In fact, they are like robbers who espouse morality, and con artists who are devout.

Therefore the goodness such people practice, which is actually intrinsically evil, is in the back bedroom, so to speak; their faith is pacing and pontificating in the front hall, but it is really just a fairy tale, a ghost, a bubble.

This makes evident the truth of the proposition stated in the heading, that our faith receives its verdict based on whether goodness or evil is united to it.