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.

170. 3. This Trinity did not exist before the world was created. It developed after the world was created, when God became flesh. It came into existence in the Lord God the Redeemer and Savior Jesus Christ. Nowadays the Christian church asserts that the divine Trinity came into existence before the world was created: Before time, Jehovah God bore a Son. Then the Holy Spirit went out from them both. Each of the three is a God all by himself, in that each is a single self-sufficient person.

Because this concept does not square with any type of reasoning, it is called a mystery. The only way to grasp the concept is to think that the three share one divine essence - an essential eternity, immensity, and omnipotence and therefore equal divinity, glory, and majesty.

I will show in the sections to come, however, that such a concept becomes a trinity of gods and is therefore not a divine Trinity. On the other hand, from everything I have already said it is evident that a trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that developed after God became flesh, and therefore after the world was created, is a real divine trinity because it is a trinity in one God. This divine trinity exists in the Lord God the Redeemer and Savior Jesus Christ because the three essential components of the one God that go together to form one essence exist within him.

Paul's point that all the fullness of divinity dwells in Christ is clearly paralleled in the Lord's own statements that all things belonging to the Father are his and that the Holy Spirit speaks from him, not on its own. Furthermore, when the Lord rose from the tomb, he took along his entire human body, including its flesh and bones (Matthew 28:18; Mark 16:5-6; Luke 24:1-3; John 20:11-15). He did this in a way that no other human being does. He himself gave experiential proof of this to the disciples when he said,

See my hands and my feet - that it is I myself. Touch me and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have. (Luke 24:39)

This statement has the power to convince any open-minded person that the Lord's human manifestation is divine, and therefore that in him God is human and a human is God.