Theology

This is a detailed explanation of the inner meaning of John's visions, as he described them in the "Book of Revelation," or the "Apocalypse".

This is an English translation of Swedenborg's largest Latin work, Arcana Coelestia.

A true loving marriage between a husband and wife is the ideal human state. It corresponds to the Lord's love and wisdom at a deep level. And, we can work to become able to receive this gift.

God works from Divine Love through Divine Wisdom to create the universe - first in its spiritual dimensions and then in its physical dimensions.

Are we free? How does the Lord operate in our lives? How can we square a loving God with the obvious evil in the world? Here's how it works...

Is faith alone workable? No. In this work Swedenborg argues carefully and convincingly that it isn't. He describes what faith is, how we work to develop it, and how it must be conjoined with charity, i.e. love to the neighbor, to be real faith.

This work describes the ideal Christian understanding of the real nature of God, with extensive references to the Old and New Testaments.

The literal stories of the Word are important and sacred because they contain deep inner meaning. The Old and New Testaments are based on correspondences between spiritual and natural things.

Do we go anywhere when we die? Swedenborg describes the spiritual world as a real "place" that operates on a different plane from the physical world.

How does the soul interact with the body? Swedenborg was a theologian, AND one of the leading neuroscientists of his day. Here's what he had to say about it.

What are we supposed to do with our lives? This little work explains the steps towards regeneration and how we can clear the ground and allow the Lord to implant and nurture a good set of loves within us. It's a practical book; a how-to guide to eternal happiness.

This brief work, published in 1769, compares the doctrines of the Catholic and some Protestant churches in the 1700s, and contrasts them with the teachings of the new Christian church.

At the end of each spiritual "age" in human history, there's a "last judgment", a spiritual sea change. The First Christian Church had its last judgment in the mid-1700's, clearing the way for newer, more truly Christian ideas to flow in.

This book supplements two of Swedenborg's earlier works, "The Last Judgement" and "Heaven and Hell".

This is an overview of New Christian theology, including such topics as love, faith, repentance, reformation and rebirth, the nature of the Word and more.

The apostle John saw a vision of a white horse, symbolizing the Divine truth of the Lord's Word. It illustrates a more general principle of correspondences.

This work surveys the fundamental doctrines of the New Christian Church - about the Lord, the Ten Commandments, faith, charity, repentance, reformation, regeneration, and much more.

Swedenborg was both a physical scientist and an early psychologist. He learned meditation techniques, and recorded his spiritual experiences. In some cases, he described meeting spiritually aware people from other planets.

Swedenborg was well known for his vivid descriptions of spiritual experiences. In this manuscript, he describes a conversation he had with John Calvin in the spiritual world.

In this note, Swedenborg outlines the points he would make in a potential work on the history of the new Christian church.

This was a draft of an essay to be titled "An Invitation to the New Church". It's an outline of New Christian doctrine, and its points are made in other published works - but it's interesting how they were packaged here.

This exegesis of the "Book of Revelation" was drafted from 1757-1759, but wasn't finished. (Later, in 1766, Swedenborg tackled "Revelation" again, reworking and condensing, and published "Apocalypse Revealed".)

In this short draft, Swedenborg briefly outlines a theological system for the New Church - a preliminary sketch for "True Christian Religion" that was published in 1770.

What does it really mean to be charitable? Swedenborg outlines the topic in this brief draft.

In these notes, Swedenborg recounts a few conversations he had with angels during some of his spiritual experiences.

In this collection of Bible passages, Swedenborg makes that case that the old Christian church was dying and that a new one, based on a fuller understanding of the Word, was being formed.

This is a pre-cursor draft of the work entitled "The Lord," It outlines the nature of the Lord Jesus Christ as God Incarnate.

This is a pre-cursor draft of "The Sacred Scripture". It outlines the way that the Divine communicates with us in the Word via its inner meaning.

This draft was a precursor to "The Divine Love and Wisdom". It describes how Divine Love operates in the physical universe, and in our lives.

This draft is a precursor to "The Divine Love and Wisdom". It shows how Divine Wisdom provides forms or methods that Divine Love uses to take action.

In this draft, Swedenborg describes five scenes from his spiritual experiences. In one interesting case, he gets to feel what it's like to wake up in the afterlife.

In this fragment Swedenborg notes the correspondences of Gad and Asher, two sons of Jacob.

In this note, Swedenborg lists the key points that describe how God could save us by being born in human form, as Jesus Christ.

This index was for a missing rough draft of Swedenborg's main published work on marriage, "Conjugial Love".

This index (2 of 2) was for a missing rough draft of Swedenborg's main published work on marriage, "Conjugial Love".

This is an English translation of the first draft of an index made by Swedenborg for his 1766 work, "Apocalypse Revealed." It was succeeded by a fair copy second draft.

This is an index to Swedenborg's work, "Apocalypse Revealed", translated from Latin to English by Rev. John Whitehead.

This is the Latin text of the first draft of an index made by Swedenborg for his 1749-1757 work, "Arcana Coelestia." The manuscript was followed by a second draft fair copy that was not finished, which is also available in this system. The entries in the two manuscripts have been synced up by the Heavenly Doctrine Publishing Foundation's editorial team, to allow for easy comparison.

As we was writing Arcana Coelestia, Swedenborg made an Index -- actually two indexes - a rough draft of one for the whole work, and and this one - a fair copy manuscript, left uncompleted - covering the first two volumes of the 8-volume work.

This is an English translation of the Latin index to "Arcana Coelestia" based on two draft indexes that Swedenborg made, with additional inputs from Beyer's index, and other places in Swedenborg's works.

This is a brief index of the subjects in the Protestant document "The Formula Concordiae". Swedenborg made it for his own use in writing "True Christian Religion".

This is a two-paragraph fragment of Swedenborg's thought on how the divine influence takes place in the natural world. It was inscribed by Swedenborg (in around 1750) on the leaflet of the copy of Swammerdam's "Naturae Bible" which he presented to Count Hopkin, and which is now in the possession of the Carolinska Institute in Stockholm.

In this short draft, Swedenborg outlines the Catholic Church's doctrine about justification (which he disagreed with). Summary points are filled in with details from official Council of Trent documents.

This manuscript was a draft for the published work, "A Continuation concerning the Last Judgment".

This is a collection of some of Swedenborg's letters.

This is a rough sketch for Swedenborg's work entitled "De Amore Conjugiali", usually titled in in English as "Conjugial Love" or "Marriage Love".

Swedenborg outlined a potential work on miracles, and how divine miracles differ from the magic practiced in ancient religions.

In this essay Swedenborg answers nine questions from Thomas Hartley, a reader in England.

In this short work Swedenborg describes the core theological problems relating to the Trinity, as it was described in the Athanasian Creed.

Swedenborg wrote this as a draft for "The Doctrine of Life", basing it on the Ten Commandments.

Swedenborg prepared this as a concordance for use in writing "True Christian Religion".

This is a brief outline of New Christian doctrine.

In these manuscripts, Swedenborg logged his experiences in the spiritual world, and his reflections about them. They were unpublished until the mid-1800s.

This is a sub-set of "Spiritual Experiences", sometimes called "minor" because Swedenborg used a smaller-sized diary on a publishing journey to Amsterdam.

This work dates from early in Swedenborg's transition from scientist to theologian. It's interesting; this shows his initial effort to explain the internal meaning of the Word.

In this study, Swedenborg summarized chapter-level explanations of the internal meaning of the "Book of Revelation".

Spiritual history traces the rise and fall of "churches" - the spiritual lives and worldviews of peoples. This outline draft describes the spiritual decline of the first Christian church and the beginning of the new Christian era.

This study is a nicely organized overview/study guide for the internal sense of the books of the Prophets in the Old Testament, and all of the Psalms. Originally translated by Rev. J. E. Schreck in 1900, it was updated by NCBS editors in 2015.

In 1758, Swedenborg published "The White Horse, using this image from Revelation to illustrate that the Word is written using correspondences between spiritual and natural things. In 1769, he wrote this letter to Rev. Thomas Hartley, providing more examples of places in the Word where horses correspond to the understanding of truth.

After publishing "True Christian Religion" in 1770, Swedenborg drafted these accounts of some spiritual experiences as potential additions to the main work.

This work is somewhat unique amongst Swedenborg's writings; it's the only one that was both published AND unfinished. It's a transitional work, between Swedenborg's scientific career and his theological one. In it, he describes the generation and formation of the soul. The work is dramatic in form, and allegorical. The first two Parts present a succession of six Scenes or Acts. Underlying the play, though, you can see Swedenborg's cutting-edge scientific understanding, in 1745.

In this journal from 1744, Swedenborg logged his dreams and then the spiritual experiences that he started having. It wasn't intended for publication. Instead, with his growing interest in human psychology, it seems to be an attempt by Swedenborg to start tracking and analyzing his own experiences as data.

The present translation of Swedenborg's treatise "De Via ad Cognitionem Animae" is by James John Garth Wilkinson, M. D., and is reprinted, with some revision, from the first edition of the Posthumous Tracts. In the second reference Dr. Tafel assigns to it the date 1738 and lists it as number 53 in the "Chronological Account." From the contents of this paper it appears that it marks the author's passage from his preliminary investigations concerning the nature of the soul to the more thorough methods which reached their first culmination in his Economy of the Animal Kingdom.

The full title of this translation is "THE WORD OF THE OLD TESTAMENT EXPLAINED". Swedenborg's interests gradually shifted from the physical sciences to life sciences -- biology, anatomy, and the human body -- especially the brain. He was exploring the interaction between the soul and the body, and - more and more - felt that he needed to approach the topic from a spiritual perspective, i.e. that anatomy wasn't going to find the soul -- but that human spirituality was a deep reality that needed to be better understood. In this work, which is seen by Swedenborg scholars as being transitional, he focuses hard on trying understand and explain the Bible's inner meaning.