The Bible... what to make of it? Clearly, it's been a huge influence on world culture for two thousand years, and on culture in the Middle East for many hundreds of years before that. How should we read it, and use it, today?

It makes sense that a loving God would try to communicate true ideas to us, so that we could consider them in our rational minds, and decide what to do with them. With early people, before the development of written language, there's plenty of evidence from their art, and from oral traditions, that they felt a communication with God. Later, as writing developed, we find written works - notably the Old Testament of the Bible - that demonstrate God's drive to reveal truths to us.

The Bible, as it has come down to us, is a revelation of God's mind, his plan, his truth, and his love for us. It's a guidebook that we can use to live good lives. It's ancient, but still fresh and relevant. Its inner meaning has been the subject of many explorations.

The Bible is divided into two testaments, Old and New. Each testament is divided into "books", each of which has a name, e.g. Genesis, Exodus, etc. Each book is divided into chapters, and each chapter into verses. The Bible has been translated into many languages, by many translators, some from long ago, and many working still today. By and large, the divisions into books, chapters and verses are fairly standard. There's some variation, partly because the original texts come from scrolls that differ amongst themselves, but overall it's a surprisingly consistent, well-preserved set of work.

The Old Testament was written in Hebrew. Its earliest stories, starting with the creation story, and Adam and Eve, are very ancient. At the time of Moses, perhaps 1300-1500 years before Christ, those early stories were written down and preserved, but they were already part of a much older oral tradition.

The New Testament, written shortly after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, was written in Greek. The four gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and the Book of Revelation, form the core of it, and they are supplemented by letters - epistles - written by early church leaders: Paul, Peter, James, John, and Jude.

Should we call this work the Bible, or the Word?

In New Christian theology, we tend to use the term "The Word". Why? In his many volumes of theology, Emanuel Swedenborg uses the term “The Bible” only a handful of times, and most of those instances are in reference to ancient writing styles. On the other hand, the term “The Word” appears more than 15,000 times, and it is crucially important to the doctrinal system Swedenborg illustrates.

What’s the difference?

In Swedenborg’s works, “The Word” in its deepest sense means divine truth in its fullness, the infinite expression of the Lord’s infinite love, shining on us the way light shines from the sun. In fact, since the Lord’s essence is love itself and love cannot exist without taking form, Swedenborg’s works say that The Word actually is the Lord, and that the Lord actually is the Word (think about John 1:1: “The Word was with God, and the Word was God”).

Divine truth is, to be sure, an expansive thing: It is the agent and force of creation, and is reflected in all aspects of humanity and of the natural world. If we understood enough we could gaze on fields and trees and see the nature of the Lord’s love and the spiritual world. But that is a fluid expression; we can cut down a tree and change it. The ultimate expression of the Lord’s love is permanent and safeguarded, hidden away within the stories and prophecies of the Bible where only those who love the Lord can begin to understand. Understood at the most internal, symbolic level, those stories and prophecies are completely about the Lord Himself, unveiling His love in its infinite forms, and by reading it we open ourselves to Him and let Him flow into our hearts and minds.

In a sense, then, the Bible is a container for the Word, a compilation of natural language that is divinely ordered so that it can hold and express spiritual ideas. That’s one reason churches based on Swedenborg’s works have traditionally called even the physical book itself “The Word” instead of “The Bible.” They want to be open to the love the book contains, not just the external meanings of the text.

The other reason is more controversial. Swedenborg says that only 34 of the Bible’s books are written with a complete and continuous internal sense, and thus only those 34 are truly part of the Word. The 34 are the five books of Moses, Joshua, Judges, the two books of Samuel, the two books of Kings, Psalms, the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, the four Gospels and Revelation. This leaves out some treasured books of the Old Testament: Ruth, Job, Proverbs, Song of Solomon and others. Swedenborg describes them as "good books for the church", but not part of the Word itself.

But the exact contents of the Old Testament have been debated for millennia and there are already variations in the Jewish, Catholic and Protestant Bibles. What most people find harder to accept is the idea that the works of the early Christian Church -- Acts and the various epistles of Christian leaders - are not filled with the divine.

But consider the difference between how the Gospels were written and how the Epistles were written. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were simply trying to record the words and deeds of Jesus, telling what they knew of these things in their most outward form. The Lord was able to guide that outward form so that inwardly it could be filled with spiritual correspondences. The epistles, on the other hand, were really the first human attempts to interpret Jesus’s teachings and develop them into a consistent doctrine. The fact that the writers were already trying to find deeper meanings meant that their work could not be used to contain deeper meanings. It doesn’t mean their doctrinal conclusions are wrong - they had vast insight - but they are not divine.

(Ссылки: Arcana Coelestia 1403, 1405; Heaven and Hell 241; Teachings about the Sacred Scripture 2, 3, 22, 23 [1,3], 24, 56, 77, 110, 111, The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem Regarding the Sacred Scripture 4, 5, 8, 18, 19, 20, 21, 26, 31, 97; The White Horse 16)

18. 3. The spiritual meaning is what causes the Word to be Divinely inspired and holy in every word. People in the church say that the Word is holy, and this because Jehovah God spoke it. But because its holiness is not apparent from the letter alone, therefore someone who once doubts its holiness on that account, later finds, when he reads the Word, many things in it to confirm himself in that doubt. For he asks himself then, “Is this holy? Is this Divine?”

Therefore, to keep this kind of thinking from flowing in and prevailing among many people, and so causing the conjunction of the Lord with the church where the Word is to perish, it has pleased the Lord now to reveal the spiritual sense, in order to make known in what the holiness in the Word lies.

[2] But let examples illustrate this as well:

The Word has as it subject sometimes Egypt, sometimes Assyria, sometimes Edom, Moab, the sons of Ammon, Tyre and Sidon, Gog. Someone who does not know that the names of these entities symbolize matters relating to heaven and the church may be led astray into the error of supposing that the Word has much to say about nations and peoples and only a little relating to heaven and the church, thus much about earthly matters and little about ones having to do with heaven. On the other hand, when he know what these entities or their names symbolize, it enables him to return from error into the truth.

[3] The same is the case when a person sees in the Word its frequent mention of gardens, groves, and forests, and the trees in them, such as olives, vines, cedars, poplars, and oaks, as well as the frequent mention of lambs, sheep, goats, calves, and oxen; and also of mountains, hills, and valleys, and the springs, rivers, and waters in them; and still more of the like. Someone who knows nothing of the Word’s spiritual meaning cannot help but believe that these are the only things meant. For he does not know that gardens, groves and forests mean wisdom, understanding and knowledge; that olives, vines, cedars, poplars and oaks mean the church’s celestial, spiritual, rational, natural and sensual goodness and truth; that lambs, sheep, goats, calves and oxen mean innocence, charity, and natural affection; that mountains, hills and valleys mean the higher, lower and lowest planes of the church; and that Egypt symbolizes knowledge, Assyria reason, Edom the natural component, Moab the adulteration of goodness, the sons of Ammon the adulteration of truth, Tyre and Sidon concepts of truth and goodness, and Gog outward worship without any internal worship.

However, when a person knows this, he is able then to see that the Word deals only with matters connected with heaven, and that the earthly expressions are simply the vessels in which these are contained.

[4] But let an example from the Word illustrate this too. We read in the book of Psalms:

The voice of Jehovah is upon the waters; the God of glory causes it to thunder; Jehovah is upon the great waters.... The voice of Jehovah breaks the cedars..., Jehovah shatters the cedars of Lebanon, and makes them skip like a calf, Lebanon and Sirion like the offspring of unicorns. The voice of Jehovah strikes like a flame of fire. The voice of Jehovah causes the wilderness to quake; (it) causes the wilderness of Kadesh to quake. The voice of Jehovah makes deer give birth, and strips the forests bare; but in His temple everyone says, “Glory!” (Psalms 29:3-9)

Someone who does not know that each and every word there is holy and Divine may say to himself, if he is a merely natural person, “What does it mean that Jehovah sits upon the waters, that He shatters cedars with His voice, that He makes them skip like a calf, and Lebanon like the offspring of unicorns, that He makes deer give birth?” And so on.

[5] That is because he does not know that in the spiritual sense these declarations describe the power of Divine truth or of the Word. For in that sense the voice of Jehovah, which in this case is thunder, means Divine truth or the Word in its power. The great waters on which Jehovah sits mean the falsities of the rational self. A calf and the offspring of unicorns mean the falsities of the natural and sensual self. A flame of fire means the affection accompanying falsity. A wilderness and the wilderness of Kadesh mean a church without any truth and one without any goodness. The deer which the voice of Jehovah causes to give birth mean gentiles possessing a natural goodness. And the forests which it strips bare mean the kinds of knowledge and concepts which the Word lays open to them. Consequently the passage says next, “in His temple everyone says, ‘Glory!’ ” which means that there are Divine truths in every constituent of the Word; for the temple symbolizes the Lord, and so also the Word, as well as heaven and the church, and glory symbolizes Divine truth.

It is apparent from this that there is no word in the passage that does not describe the Divine power of the Word against falsities of every kind in natural people, and the Divine power of reforming gentiles.