Swedenborg, the Bible, and the Myth of a Third Testament
September 22, 2025
Most people today have never heard the name Emanuel Swedenborg. Fewer still have heard of the New Church, a small religious movement that traces its roots to his eighteenth-century theological writings, called within the church the Heavenly Doctrine or the Writings. Swedenborg’s twenty-seven years of theological output is vast and magnificent. Composed in Latin between 1749 and 1771, it covers everything from the nature of heaven and hell to the inner meaning of Genesis, Exodus, and the Book of Revelation, to the true nature of the Trinity, to the process of salvation. The questions he raised and the revelations he recorded strike at the heart of Christianity: Who is the Lord? What is the Word of God? How should the church on earth receive divine truth?
If you’re completely unfamiliar with Swedenborg, it will be helpful for you to read these articles first:
For those already familiar with him, another question arises that is less known to the general public but absolutely vital to the future of Christian faith: Are Swedenborg’s theological writings themselves the Word of God, or are they authoritative teachings drawn from the Word? The way one answers this question changes everything. If they are the Word independently, they become a new Scripture, co-equal with divine books in the Old and New Testaments. If they are doctrine from the Word, they serve as divinely inspired guides to unlock its meaning but remain distinct from it.
Here is a short table of contents that lays out the road ahead.
How a Misreading of Swedenborg Led to a Modern Heresy
The Canon According to the Lord
Swedenborg’s Calling and Mission
The Razor’s Edge: Concordant But Not the Word
When Brotherhood Holds and When It Breaks
Returning to the Lord in His Word
Appendix A: Addressing the New Century Edition’s Definition of the Word
Appendix B: Texts Reflecting the Third Testament Dogma — For Reference and Caution
How a Misreading of Swedenborg Led to a Modern Heresy
For those who may be encountering these ideas for the first time, the truth of the matter can be put simply: Swedenborg taught that the Word has layers of meaning hidden within it — called the internal or spiritual sense — placed there by the Lord. These layers connect our world with heaven. Not every book of the Bible has these hidden layers, but the core ones do. Swedenborg’s mission was to reveal those layers as they already are, not to write a new Word.
Dr. Gabriel Beyer, one of Swedenborg’s most faithful correspondents and a man who had discussed this subject with him, wrote to a colleague after Swedenborg’s death to explain it as follows:
It is not a new Divine Word but a disclosure in the Word we had, which is the crown of all heavenly revelation.
This statement captures the point precisely.
Many Christians will regard any claim that the canon of the Word has been expanded to new books as a massive red flag. And they’re right to do so. The Word itself forbids it in Deuteronomy 4:2 and Revelation 22:18-19. Swedenborg himself was well aware of this and reiterated the same truth. He never elevated his writings to the same level as the Word in its fullness. However, the irony is, many of his readers since his death, have elevated them to that status — wrongly so — and this has (even if unwittingly) besmirched much of his reputation, causing many people to turn away from his works who may otherwise have benefited from them.
Making the Word of God of no effect by your tradition which you have delivered up; and many such like things you do.
For the average Christian today, all of this might seem remote. Why debate whether books written three centuries ago are or are not “the Word”? But this is not just a matter of hair-splitting theology. It touches every point of Christian life: how the Bible is read, how churches are organized, how people discern truth from falsity, and even how they recognize the Lord himself. If we mistake the nature of doctrinal writings, we risk repeating the same cycle of error that has plagued the Christian Church for two millennia: replacing the Lord with human traditions and living faith in his Word with allegiance to institutional dogmas.
By Swedenborg:
There are many passages in the Prophets about our understanding of the Word, passages about the church, where it tells us that the church exists only where the Word is properly understood, and that the quality of a church depends on the quality of the understanding of the Word among its members. There are also many passages in the Prophets that describe the church among the Israelite and Jewish people, a church that was utterly destroyed and annihilated by the distortion of the Word’s meaning or message, for this is exactly what destroys a church.
Even though calling the Writings the Word goes against what Swedenborg taught, the common rhetorical move by bishops is to say that charity should allow them to preach and conflate two alternative doctrines about the fundamentals of the Word. However, the principal of allowing an infinite variety of beliefs within the church — which is something Swedenborg also taught — is true only within fixed fundamentals. He had a strong guardrail around this and said that matters of doctrine should be left to each individual’s conscience,
Provided it did not deny anything fundamental, that is, the Lord, eternal life, or the Word, and provided it was not contrary to divine order, that is, to the Ten Commandments.
When bishops ignore this issue they’re equivocating, using “variety” to permit rival definitions of the Word that misapplies fundamental doctrine. Variety presupposes a constant; it does not replace it.
To grasp what this constant is, we must briefly explain a bit more about what is meant by the term “the internal sense.” Every detail of the Word — names, numbers, places, actions — corresponds to spiritual realities. The story of Abraham leaving his country is not only historical but also a parable of spiritual regeneration. The temple in Jerusalem signifies the Lord’s Divine Human. Numbers like seven or twelve are not arbitrary but encode divine qualities such as holiness or completeness.
This internal sense is not merely allegory in the human sense of imaginative metaphor. It is a fixed language of correspondences woven into creation itself. The Word’s literal stories were chosen and arranged under divine providence precisely to embody this inner sense, whereby every word and image carries layers of meaning that unite heaven with earth. That is why certain books make the list and others do not: they were written in this correspondential style.
So which books have this internal sense?
The Canon According to the Lord
The Lord’s Old Testament canon comes from his words, here:
These are the words which I spoke unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which are written in the Law of Moses, and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms, concerning me. Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures.
The Lord’s New Testament canon comes from his testimony as spoken to and then written down by the Apostle John, here:
The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to him, to show to his servants what must quickly come to pass; and he signified, sending by his angel to his servant John, who gave by testimony the Word of God, and the testimony of Jesus Christ, whatever he saw.
This latter list obviously includes the Book of Revelation, as the Apostle John is writing in the name of the Lord from that book, and by extension, of course, the Gospels, as they include the testimony of the Evangelists, who are the Lord’s servants, detailing his own words when he walked among them. The testimony of each Gospel regarding this can also be seen within each of them, in Matthew 24:35, Mark 13:31, Luke 1:1–3, John 21:24.
THE BOOKS OF THE WORD ACCORDING TO THE LORD JESUS CHRIST
In the Old Testament
The Law of Moses
(aka “The Law” or The Pentateuch)
Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
The Prophets
Joshua
Judges
1 Samuel, 2 Samuel
1 Kings, 2 Kings
Isaiah
Jeremiah
Lamentations
Ezekiel
Daniel
Hosea
Joel
Amos
Obadiah
Jonah
Micah
Nahum
Habakkuk
Zephaniah
Haggai
Zechariah
Malachi
The Psalms
(aka “David” or The Psalms of David)
In the New Testament
The Four Evangelists
(aka “The Gospels” or The Four Gospels)
Matthew
Mark
Luke
John
The Apocalypse of John
(aka “Revelation” or The Book of Revelation)
This is spelled out in Swedenborg’s works:
Which are the Books of the Word. The books of the Word are all those which have an internal sense; but those books which have no internal sense, are not the Word. The books of the Word, in the Old Testament, are: the five Books of Moses, the Book of Joshua, the Book of Judges, the two Books of Samuel, the two Books of Kings, the Psalms of David, the Prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi: and in the New Testament, the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John; and the Book of Revelation. The rest have no internal sense.
—The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine #266, Arcana Coelestia #10325, The White Horse #16
The Lord is the Word
So far, we’ve defined the Books of the Word. These books define the Word because of their full, connected structure, which contains divine truth in a connected sequence, from end-to-end. This is what the Lord taught when he said he is the Word made flesh.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth.
By Swedenborg:
This sense is the very sanctuary of the Word: the Lord himself is in this sense with his divine, and in the natural sense with his Human.
If there is one theme that runs like a golden thread through all of true Christianity, it is the holiness of the Word. It has a structure unlike any other text in existence, and this structure makes the Word the very presence of the Lord with humanity.
The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.
By Swedenborg:
The Word may thus be compared to the Divine Man who is the Lord, in whom there is not only the divine natural, but also the divine spiritual and the divine celestial; it is on this account that the Lord calls himself the Word. And the angels said that the very holiness of the Word is in the sense of its letter, and that this is more holy than the other senses, which are internal, because it is the complex and containant of the rest, and is like the body living from the soul. Thus the Word in the sense of the letter (or the “natural”) is in its fullness, and also in its power; and by means of it man is in conjunction with the heavens, which, without the sense of the letter, would be separated from man.
No other books, no matter how holy or important they’re thought to be, can make that claim. Not the writings of church fathers, not creeds or councils, not the Book of Mormon, not the Koran — and not even Swedenborg’s own volumes.
What about the rest of the Bible?
You might now be thinking, “Wait a minute, I thought the Bible was the Word, but you’re saying it’s only these specific books of the Bible that qualify?”
Yes — but as shown above, the definition of this canon wasn’t an invention of Swedenborg’s, but was defined by the Lord based on his own statements in Luke 24:44–45 as well as those recorded by the Apostle John in Revelation 1:1-2.
This may come as a surprise to some people, who have inherited a canon settled centuries earlier by church councils and because since birth, or since they were baptized, they’ve had a broader definition of what constitutes the Word. But although other biblical texts are useful for instruction, they are not the Word. Swedenborg calls them “good books for the church” (Swedenborg’s Letters #2). They can be read and are doctrinally important, but they are not authoritative, nor supremely divine, because they are not the Lord himself, but rather derivative works of prophets, apostles, and priests.
The Lord said there is only one way to the Father, and that is through him as the Word:
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.
Within the literal text of the Word lies layers of deeper meaning which elevate all the way to the supreme divine of the Lord, and this full and complete connection only exists in the books of the defined canon.
I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.
Because this divine connection is eternal, it follows that the order established through the Word can never be altered. The New Church, formed from that order, is meant to endure into the ages, not only for centuries or millennia but into eternity. Were this law to be broken, the result would be a gradual drift away from the Word toward other texts, with consequences that would eventually touch the whole human race.
Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
The grass withers, the flower fades: but the Word of our God shall stand forever.
With this in mind, it may be helpful not only to define what is the Word but what is not the Word.
Books of the Bible which are not the Word
Ruth
Swedenborg listed summaries of the verses of Ruth in The Word Explained #6077, as if he intended, perhaps, to comment further on it, but it otherwise doesn’t show up anywhere in his published works and isn’t on his list of correspondential books. That said, in his notes, he wrote, “that Ruth was a pious woman, is clear from all the deeds of her life” (The Word Explained #6078).
1 and 2 Chronicles
Swedenborg does reference these books in Arcana Coelestia and often in The Word Explained, indicating that they are historically important. However, with the understanding “that the book of Chronicles and that of the Kings differ in many details and, indeed, in so many and of such importance that it may justly and deservedly be doubted whether [the Chronicles] are divinely inspired (The Word Explained #6330).
Ezra (including Nehemiah)
Ezra is referenced once in Arcana Coelestia #4818 and a few times in The Word Explained where Swedenborg is drawing on historical references, but otherwise it makes no other appearances. It includes records of the Jews’ return from Babylon, but is not written in correspondences.
Esther
Swedenborg was at least aware of Esther, as shown by a single marginal note in his personal Latin Bible (The Schmidius Marginalia), where he identified Haman as “the Agagite” (Esther 3:1). Beyond that, he never mentioned Esther anywhere in his theological writings that I’m aware of. It may be described as a narrative of providence, yet not written in the symbolic and correspondential style of the Word, and thus it fell outside the scope of his concern.
Job
An ancient book of moral wisdom that does contains correspondences, but because it does not have them in a perfect sequence, it doesn’t qualify. “The book of Job is an ancient book in which, indeed, there is an internal sense, but not in a connected order” (The White Horse #16).
Proverbs (Prophetic Enunciations) and Ecclesiastes
Solomon was the author of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and Swedenborg wrote that Solomon’s “manner of speaking” was the same across all of his writings, that he often “put forth half-sayings” (The Word Explained #3117, Spiritual Experiences-Word Explained #68), but with the caveat that it is “evident that the prophetic style was used in these proverbs; therefore, in respect to them, certain things should be observed which the reader may see above [n. 7340], where the book of the Wars of Jehovah is treated of” (The Word Explained #7343). The Wars of Jehovah was an ancient book mentioned by Moses (Numbers 21:14-15) and later lost to history. According to Swedenborg, it contained representative accounts of the Lord’s spiritual combats and temptations (Arcana Coelestia #2686), and was hidden by divine providence to protect its holiness (Apocalypse Revealed #11 [2]).
Song of Songs (Songs of Solomon or Canticles)
Poetic, with imagery, but not written in the style of the Word’s internal sense. It sounds eloquent and mystical, but it’s merely sensuous and doesn’t connect with the covenant of marriage in heaven. ”This book is not a holy book, because it does not contain within it heavenly and divine things in a series, as do the holy books” (Arcana Coelestia #9942 [5]).
Apostolic Acts and Epistles (Acts of the Apostles, Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, James, 1 & 2 Peter, 1, 2 & 3 John, Jude)
Doctrinally true and useful, but not written in the style of the Word; Swedenborg wrote that they “indeed communicate with heaven, but mediately,” and that “they are doctrinal writings, and so are not written in the style of the Word as are the Prophets, David, the Gospels, and the Revelation… Nonetheless, the writings of the Apostles are good books for the Church, maintaining the doctrine of charity and its faith as strongly as ever did the Lord himself in the Gospels and in the Revelation, as can be clearly seen and observed if one attends to the matter while reading those writings” (Swedenborg’s Letters #2).
Other Doctrinal Works of Various Religions
See the Appendix C at the end of this article for a longer list (although by no means fully expansive).
A Light to the Word
If you had known me, you would have known my Father also; and from now on you know him, and have seen him.
These other biblical books (those that are not the Word but still part of the biblical collection) are doctrinal teachings for Christians overall, including those in the New Church. The distinction is that they contain true teachings that primarily explain the natural sense of the Word without going fully into the deeper, spiritual sense. Only Swedenborg’s writings do that.
Regarding the spiritual sense, which exists according to correspondences, Swedenborg explained that although it is present in the Word, it has for many centuries been veiled from human understanding. The only way to fully understand this internal sense is with doctrine. For that reason, doctrine is essential in order to unlock its meaning.
By Swedenborg:
The Word is not understood apart from doctrine. That is because the Word in its literal sense consists of nothing but correspondent forms, in order for spiritual and celestial concepts to be present in it at the same time, and for each word to be a containing vessel and buttress of those concepts. In some places in the literal sense, therefore, we find not naked truths, but truths clothed, which we call appearances of truth. Many of these truths, too, are accommodated to the comprehension of simple folk, who do not elevate their thoughts above the kinds of things they see before their eyes. And some of them seem to involve contradictions, even though there is no contradiction in the Word when seen in its true light.
Moreover, in some places in the Prophets, we find also collections of place names and the names of people from which it is impossible to elicit any meaning…
Since that is the nature of the Word in its literal sense, it can be seen therefore that it cannot be understood apart from doctrine.
It may therefore be evident that those who read the Word without doctrine, or who do not procure for themselves doctrine from the Word, are in obscurity concerning every truth. Their minds are wavering and unsettled, liable to errors and prone to heresies, which they also embrace if these are held in favour and supported by authority, and if their own reputation is not endangered. The Word to them is like a lampstand without a light, and they see many things, as it were, in the shade, yet understanding hardly anything, for doctrine alone is that which enlightens. I have seen such persons being examined by angels, and they appeared able to confirm from the Word whatever opinion they pleased, and to confirm what pertained to their own self-love and the love of those whom they befriended. But I have also seen them stripped of their garments, a sign that they were destitute of truths; for garments in the spiritual world are truths.
—Doctrine of the New Jerusalem About Sacred Scripture #51, #52
We can see from this that although the Writings are not the Word, they are not unimportant or optional. Without them we cannot understand the Word and if we tried we would view it in darkness. The two must work together. The Writings, having been drawn from the Word, reflect back on it, functioning as a light: they enlighten our reading of Scripture, helping us to see what’s within it.
The doctrine is a light because it comes from the Word, which is the light. In this way, the Word points back on itself. It’s important not to call the doctrine of the Writings the Word, however, because it isn’t the source and doesn’t stand in isolation and so shouldn’t be termed as if it did.
The leaders are further warned at all costs to accept the belief that the Word is spiritual within, because it is divine, and that unless they have accepted this belief they can be seduced by satans, to the point of denying the holiness of the Word; and if this is denied, the Church with them disappears. It is also impressed upon them that if they do not believe in this internal sense of the Word, the Word may at last appear to them like an ill-formed and clumsy writing, or like a book of all heresies, since from its sense of the letter as from some pool or other heresies of all kinds may be drawn, and confirmed by means of it.
The Power of the Literal Sense
I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.
For angels, the Word appears without their understanding of it clinging to its natural history, so that it shines in pure light. But for mortals, literal imagery veils deeper truths so they can be preserved and not profaned. The literal sense functions as a protective shell and an entryway.
The Lord also compares it to a house founded on a rock:
Therefore whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock.
By Swedenborg:
The Word’s literal sense is the Foundation, Containing Vessel and Buttress of its spiritual and celestial meanings.
Swedenborg repeatedly warned against disregarding the literal sense of Scripture. In Arcana Coelestia #3954 he explained that the internal sense depends entirely on the literal as its foundation. To dismiss the letter in favor of doctrine is to cut off the root from which doctrine grows. A house cannot stand without a foundation, and the inner meaning cannot exist without the outer shell.
Doctrine, however, must not only be taken from the sense of the letter of the Word, but it must also be confirmed by that sense. For if not confirmed by it, the truth of doctrine appears as if it were only man’s intelligence in it and not the Lord’s divine wisdom; and thus doctrine would be like a house in the air, and not on the ground, and consequently without a foundation.
This is crucial for our topic. If the Writings are treated as the Word apart from the books listed, one might be tempted to sideline the literal Scripture. But that would destroy the very foundation on which the Writings stand. The doctrines Swedenborg expounds live only because the Word lives. The Writings explain it; they do not replace it.
By Swedenborg:
The doctrine of the church is to be drawn from the literal sense of the Word and supported by it.
It was shown in the preceding paragraph that the Word is in its fulness in the literal sense and endowed with holiness and power. Since the Lord is the Word and is the First and the Last, as he says in Revelation (Revelation 1:17), it follows that the Lord is most especially present in that sense and by means of it teaches and enlightens men. But these points must be demonstrated in due order:
1. The Word is not to be understood without doctrine.
2. Doctrine is to be drawn from the literal sense of the Word.
3. But divine truth, on which doctrine is based, is not visible to any but those who are enlightened by the Lord.
—True Christian Religion #225 (also see #229 and #234)
In Swedenborg’s era, people neglected the internal sense while still revering the literal Word. That danger remains, but in our time another has been added. In the world at large, the literal sense is disregarded; yet within some Swedenborgian circles, the Writings are treated as the Word apart from it. Both errors divide what the Lord joined together. The church endures only when the literal and internal senses are united, for truth and its form must not be separated.
You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life, and these are they which testify of me. And you are not willing to come to me, that you may have life.
Eighteenth century prevalence: In Swedenborg’s era, the Bible was far more central to everyday life in Europe and America. Literacy rates were rising, sermons and family devotions revolved around the Bible, and even skeptics were steeped in its language. Swedenborg likely assumed readers knew the stories and phrasing of the Word found in it.
Today: Globally, many people know of the Bible, but far fewer have actually read it. Surveys show that in much of the Western world, biblical literacy is declining rapidly. Many cannot identify basic stories or characters (e.g., Adam and Eve, the Good Samaritan). Even where Bibles are accessible, engagement is shallow. In some regions of the Global South, Bible reading is still strong, but in much of Europe and North America, it has collapsed. We live in an age when the Word no longer commands cultural respect. In previous centuries, even skeptics knew its stories and language. Today, large swaths of the population have no idea what “the Prodigal Son” refers to, or why Christmas and Easter are tied to the Lord’s birth and resurrection. The Word has been pushed to the margins. In many households, dusty copies sit unopened; in many schools, biblical literacy is gone.
People tend to overcorrect towards one extreme of the pendulum or to the other, coming up with their own ideas, rather than looking to the Lord, who is the unity of both the literal and the inner sense of the Word.
This is why both are needed. The Word is the Lord in fullness and power, and the Writings protect against confusion and heresies.
By Swedenborg:
Every divine work has in it a first, intermediate, and final element, and the first one progresses through the intermediate one to the final one, and so takes form and endures. Thus the final element is the foundation. Moreover, the first element is present in the intermediate one, and present through the intermediate one in the final one. Thus the final element is the containing vessel. And because the final element is the containing vessel and foundation, it is also the buttress.
Moreover, in a culture that already disregards the Word, clarity matters. People will not be helped if we further muddy the waters by multiplying “scriptures.” What they need is to see the Word opened in its inner light. Swedenborg’s mission was to make that light shine. To call his books themselves the Word may actually obscure their purpose, turning the lamp into a wall rather than a window.
In 2 Kings, Chapter 2:23–24, there is a story regarding the prophet, Elisha, and how boys taunted him, calling him “bald head.” The children are then mauled by bears. Many atheists like to point to this story as evidence that God is cruel or that the Word is ridiculous and not true. Yet, they completely ignore the fact that it’s meant to be understood as a divine allegory — a correspondence — and not literally. God didn’t condone bears mauling children and Elisha wasn’t necessarily a good person. Rather, this story was included in the Word because it’s a symbolic, divine correspondence about itself. “Boys” in the Word often represent natural or immature thoughts or affections. In this case, they are symbolizing derisive falsity — especially from those who make fun of what is divine — as represented by “Elisha.” Elisha’s baldness represents a state in which truth appears to be without power or stripped of its external form, and mocking that is mocking divine truth in its plainest form. The bears do not represent a cruel God, but the natural truths of the Word, which — when mocked or profaned — naturally turn against those who abuse them. The mauling is symbolic of spiritual ruin brought on by profaning holy things.
About this story, Swedenborg wrote:
The boys who called Elisha “bald head” were torn in pieces by bears, because Elisha and Elijah represented the Word; and the Word without the sense of the letter, which is like a head without hair, is without any power, and thus is no longer the Word.
Here, he states that without the sense of the letter, something can’t be called the Word. This, then, clearly applies to his own writings.
The pattern is this: first, read the Word. It’s now in your mind as knowledge. Second, study the Writings. Doing so allows the Lord to enter more deeply and convert that knowledge into understanding and will — but this can’t happen unless you go to the Word first. This is what it means to “directly approach the Lord.”
Swedenborg’s Calling and Mission
In 1745, while still serving as a Swedish nobleman, scientist, and assessor of mines, Swedenborg experienced a vision that changed his life. He later recounted that the Lord Jesus Christ appeared to him personally:
I then continued my prayer, saying, “Thou hast promised to receive in grace all sinners; Thou canst not otherwise than keep thy words!” In the same moment I was sitting at his bosom and beheld him face to face. It was a countenance of a holy mien, and all was such that it cannot be expressed, and also smiling, so that I believe that his countenance was such also while he lived in the world. He spoke to me and asked if I had a bill of health. I answered, “Lord, thou knowest better than I” he said, “Well, then do,” This I found in my mind to signify, “Love me truly,” or “Do what thou hast promised.” O God, impart to me grace for this! I found that it was not in my own power. I awoke, with tremors.
From that time forward his spiritual sight was opened, and although he reported interacting daily with spirits and angels, he nonetheless clarified that he was taught the truths of the Word not by the angels, but by the Lord alone while he was reading it.
I testify in truth that the Lord manifested himself to me, his servant, and assigned me to this task; after doing so, he opened the sight of my spirit and brought me into the spiritual world; and he has allowed me to see the heavens and the hells and to have conversations with angels and spirits on a continual basis for many years now. I also testify that ever since the first day of this calling, I have accepted nothing regarding the teachings of this church from any angel; what I have received has come from the Lord alone while I was reading the Word.
Although he often spoke with angels, the key point is that the only things he was allowed to teach to the church came from (Latin: ex, or literally “out of”) the Lord alone while reading the Word. That phrase captures the balance: the Writings are divine in origin, yet derivative in authority. They draw all their light from the Scriptures they illuminate.
Another thing that shocks some people from other Christian traditions who aren’t familiar with Swedenborg’s writings is his explanation of what the Lord’s Second Coming means. The Lord’s Second Coming doesn’t mean that he is going to return physically in the sky, but rather than he will return through the Word itself, since he is the Word, as just described. In that sense, the meaning of his Second Coming is correspondential. He’s returning through love united to wisdom and charity united to faith as seen in the Word’s inner sense.
Immediately after the suffering of those days, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then the sign of the Human-born One will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will lament. And they will see the Human-born One coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a trumpet and a loud voice, and they will gather his chosen ones from the four winds, from one end of the heavens all the way to the other end.
—Matthew 24:29-31 (See Concerning Heaven and Concerning Hell #1 for the full explanation of what this means)
Swedenborg’s writings act as a catalyst for this because they reveal the full picture. He does not hesitate to say that his teachings come directly from the Lord. In True Christian Religion #779 he wrote:
This, the Lord’s Second Coming, is taking place by means of a man to whom he has shown himself and whom he has filled with His Spirit, so that he may teach the doctrines of the New Church which come from the Lord through the Word.
This is bold language. Swedenborg proclaimed that he was chosen by the Lord to reveal the doctrine for the Lord’s Second Advent — but he is clear: the doctrines come from the Lord through the Word. That careful phrasing holds the key. Over and over Swedenborg emphasized that his Writings are drawn from the Word. He called them “Doctrines of the New Jerusalem” (Doctrinis Novae Hierosolymae), never “the Word of the Lord.” He insisted that every point must be confirmed by Scripture’s literal sense. He enumerated the canon of the Word with precision and did not include his own works.
Rather, he insisted that the Lord’s Second Coming is in the Word — in the revelation of its spiritual sense.
The reason this kind of direct revelation is taking place today is that this is what the Coming of the Lord means.
If we mistake his books for the Word, we shift the focus from the Lord to the servant, but if we treat his books as if they weren’t from a divine source, then we miss the Lord’s Advent altogether. Only by holding the right distinctions can we see the Second Coming for what it is: the Lord revealing himself anew in his Word, with power and glory.
This is why clarity on this point is not optional. It is the very heart of New Church theology. Without it, the church will wander. With it, the church can bear witness to the Lord for ages to come.
For most of his life, Swedenborg concealed his divine commission. He published anonymously or under neutral titles. By the end of his life, however, he no longer hid his role. On the title page of True Christian Religion (published in 1771), he openly signed his name with the words “Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Later he explained that this was not his own choice but done at the Lord’s command. In doing so, the Lord placed him among the biblical prophets, who called themselves servants of the Lord when delivering divine revelation. Still, Swedenborg never confused the nature of his calling. The biblical Prophets spoke the very letter of the Word, dictated audibly in the style of correspondences (though they did not understand it, compare Spiritual Experiences #3674); Swedenborg, as servant, was called to reveal the Word’s inner meaning and to set forth doctrine so that we could understand it. The authority was real, but the mode was different.
Unlike the Prophets of old, who typically received words by audible dictation, Swedenborg described a more interior mode of revelation. He was not personally enlightened by any angel; instead, the Lord enlightened his understanding while he was reading the Word and the angels merely illustrated and affirmed it, like Swedenborg has done for us.
This calling was the very fulfillment of prophecy concerning the Second Coming of the Lord; a second degree of perception and understanding of the Word, through the unveiling of its internal sense. His mission was therefore nothing more than to serve as the instrument of the Lord’s Advent in the doctrine of goodness and truth.
He described this mode of revelation in his journal, it consisted of:
Influx into thought — The words and meaning were impressed upon his mind in such a way that he was “held” to them by a heavenly force, so that even if he had wanted to write something different, he could not.
Not the same as the Prophets’ inspiration — He distinguished his experience from the verbal dictation and exact-letter inspiration of the Old Testament prophets. That’s why he ties verbal dictation to Moses, the Prophets, and David, but his own writings to influx of divine truth into rational thought, which is still from the Lord but is a different mode.
Purpose of this method — To open the rational understanding of the Word’s spiritual sense for the New Church, rather than to produce another literal-sense Scripture that joins heaven and earth in the same way the Word does.
These descriptions can be found in his writings as chronicled in his spiritual experiences during his transitionary period into prophecy. During this time, he was just finishing up an exploratory draft for what later became Arcana Coelestia, called The Word Explained. See Spiritual Experiences-Word Explained #42 and #344.
The 1758 Latin First Edition of Concerning Heaven and its Wonders and Concerning Hell, from Things Heard and Seen (Heaven and Hell).
He wrote:
I have not been permitted to say anything here that was dictated orally to me by any of [the angels] (when this did take place, as it sometimes did, it had to be erased), but only the things that streamed in from God the Messiah Alone, indirectly through them, and directly. This was very plain to me.
—Spiritual Experiences-Word Explained #42
…It was dictated, but in an amazing way in my thought, and my thinking was guided to an understanding of these words, and was firmly concentrated upon the individual words by a mental image, as if being held by a heavenly force.
…Neither is it allowed [the angels] to dictate anything [to me] aloud, even though I have been spoken to aloud for such a long time, almost continuously. But when [the doctrine] was being written, they kept quiet.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some ministers have misunderstood Swedenborg’s use of the term dictated (Latin: dictatus), citing Arcana Coelestia, where he wrote:
But that the internal sense is such as has been set forth, is evident from all the details that have been unfolded, and especially from the fact that it has been dictated to me from heaven.
Therefore, they put forward, Swedenborg’s writings were the Word. Yet, they were ignorant of Swedenborg’s definition of his use of the term, dictated, because his archive of theological notes later titled Spiritual Experiences wasn’t discovered and published until the latter half of the nineteenth century, long after their policies were already formed. These entries indicated that even though Swedenborg wrote that the doctrine of heaven was “dictated” to him, he didn’t mean audible dictation. And so, he didn’t mean it in the same way people in the nineteenth and later centuries did when thinking about someone audibly dictating to a typist, as before that time the term was often used to indicate a mandate. The invention of the typewriter narrowed the common usage of dictation into audible dictation, but the typewriter wasn’t invented until after Swedenborg’s death.
It is apparent from this that a mediated revelation effected through the Word is better than a direct revelation effected through spirits. As for myself, I have not been permitted to take anything from the testimony of any spirit, nor from the testimony of any angel, but from the testimony of the Lord alone.
He said that his books marked the beginning of the Lord’s Second Advent, that in the spiritual world they bore the inscription Adventus Domini (“The Coming of the Lord”), and that his mission surpassed all miracles given before.
For these reasons, many in the New Church rightly regard the Heavenly Doctrine as divinely inspired and concordant with the Word.
By Swedenborg:
The spiritual sense of the Word has today been uncovered by the Lord because the doctrine of genuine truth has now been revealed; and this doctrine is concordant with the spiritual sense of the Word, and not any other.
But here lies the razor’s edge: concordant, yes — but are they the Word?
Even in these declarations Swedenborg clarified that the content was divine because it unveiled the Word’s inner truth, rather than being the Word. By his own statements, although his Writings are divinely inspired doctrine, fully concordant with the spiritual sense of the Word, they are not the Word.
By Swedenborg:
The books of the Word are all those which have an internal sense; but those books which have no internal sense, are not the Word.
—The New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine #266
It might be thought that the doctrine of genuine truth could be acquired by means of the spiritual sense of the Word, of which we are granted knowledge by correspondences. But doctrine is not acquired through this, merely illustrated and confirmed.
—True Christian Religion #230, Doctrine of the New Jerusalem About Sacred Scripture #56
The spiritual sense therefore can be seen by the teaching of divine truth supported by the literal sense of the Word. But the teaching can never first be seen from the spiritual sense. It is false to think to oneself, “I know many correspondences; so I can know the true teaching of the Divine Word, the spiritual sense will teach it to me.” This cannot happen; but as I have said, let someone say to himself, “I know the teaching of divine truth, now I can see the spiritual sense, provided I know the correspondences.” But this must still be by enlightenment from the Lord, because the spiritual sense is divine truth itself bathed in its own light; and this is meant by glory, the literal sense being the cloud, in the passages of the Word about these subjects.
The reason for this is because in its inner sense, the term “doctrine” does not describe the text of doctrinal writings, but rather the underlying concepts of goodness and truth that have been extracted from the Word and into the soul of the person reading them, including how well they’ve been distilled into his life, that is, how effectively he puts them to use and understands them (Apocalypse Explained #644 [5]).
My doctrine shall flow down as the rain; my word shall distill as the dew, as the small drops upon the grass and as the showers upon the herb. I will proclaim the name of Jehovah; ascribe greatness to our God. The Rock, whose work is perfect, for all his ways are justice; a God of faithfulness, without perversity, just and upright is he.
This is what the Lord meant when he said he is “living waters” and “a fountain of water.”
If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, “give me a drink,” you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.
Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.
A cup of water in the desert restores life to a traveler, just as reading the Word restores life to the student of it. A teacher of the Word, such as Swedenborg, can then help to pass that water on to other travelers, but he is never the Fountain or the Water, only the conveyor (Doctrine of the New Jerusalem About Sacred Scripture #59), as the Fountain and the Water are the Lord alone.
This is why Swedenborg said that his Writings are drawn from the Word, like drawing a cup of water from a well.
This quality of life can only be drawn from the Word’s official canon, rather than from exposition about it. Expositional text, such as Swedenborg’s writings, are needed to illustrate and confirm the Word, but they have no life of their own.
It is better, therefore, for a person to study the Word in its literal sense. That alone is the source of doctrine.
By this definition, even the most divinely inspired commentary does not count as the Word. As was mentioned, Swedenborg acknowledged that the Epistles of Paul contain sound teaching and valuable exhortation, but they lack the correspondential structure that embeds an inner sense. They are straightforward prose, not written in a layered style.
The same applies to Swedenborg’s own works. They are didactic; explanatory. They open the internal sense of the Word but are not themselves written in correspondences. They do not veil spiritual truths under historical narrative but reveal them directly in plain speech. This can be confusing at first if you accidentally fixate on the fact that Swedenborg’s writings are called “The Heavenly Doctrine.” However, this is merely a heading, marking the fact that what it teaches was given to Swedenborg through the Word; whereas the actual, living sense of “doctrine” is contained in the Word, and each member of the Church must first receive it there before it can be illustrated and affirmed.
It is important to hold these two truths together:
The Writings are concordant with the Word because they are from the Lord, given under extraordinary revelation, and intended as doctrine for the New Church.
They are not the Word, because they are not written in the correspondential style with the internal sense.
Swedenborg lived by this distinction. He quoted the Word constantly, often verse by verse, as the source to be illuminated. He treated the Scriptures as the source and final authority.
What “The Word Itself” Means
That they all may be one; as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that you have sent me.
And the Father himself, which has sent me, has borne witness of me. You have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape.
For I have not spoken of myself; but the Father which sent me, he gave me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak. And I know that his commandment is life everlasting: whatsoever I speak therefore, even as the Father said unto me, so I speak.
This truth goes to the central arcana of heaven: that the Son is the Father and that the Father is the Son. They are united in one body, the body of our Lord Jesus Christ. They are not two separate people. And, just as the Lord is one, so is the Word one.
As the Father is in the Son and is seen only in the Son, so the internal sense is within the Scriptural letter and is perceived only through that letter.
In Arcana Coelestia #1540, Swedenborg said: “the internal sense is the Word itself.” Some have taken this to mean that the spiritual sense alone is the Word, apart from the letter. But this rests on a misunderstanding of the Latin word ipsum.
In Swedenborg’s usage, ipsum is an intensifier. It elevates or intensifies the noun it attaches to: “the Lord himself,” “the Word itself,” meaning the very essence, the inmost reality.
In English, “itself” can also function as an isolator. It can mean “on its own” or “by itself,” as in “the thing itself, apart from anything else.”
It might seem that the text that expounds the Heavenly Doctrine is the spiritual sense itself, but Swedenborg distinguished the two: the spiritual sense is contained within the Word and is guarded by the Lord, while his writings teach the doctrine for the New Church that is drawn from the Word, illustrating and confirming that sense rather than replacing it (See Doctrine of the New Jerusalem About Sacred Scripture #50–56, True Christian Religion #230).
Swedenborg never used the term in the context of an isolator, but the General Church of the New Jerusalem that formed after his death tended to read ipsum in an isolating context, institutionalizing a belief in generations to come that revered the Writings as the Word, which continues today. This traces its roots back to its first bishops, such as William Henry Benade and William Frederic Pendleton, and has been echoed by each and all of their successors.
Pendleton’s Principles of the Academy shows how he crossed this doctrinal boundary set by Swedenborg. In that work, Pendleton declared that “the Lord has made his Second Coming in the Writings…” and that within those Writings “is contained the very essential Word, which is the Lord,” concluding that “the Church acknowledges no other authority and no other law.” Though he avoided the term “Third Testament,” this teaching amounts to the same claim. By teaching that the Writings contain the Word rather than illustrate and confirm it, Pendleton exalted Swedenborg’s works — even if unwittingly — to the same level of divine plenitude as the Word, in which the Lord’s Divine Human exists in fullness, holiness, and power at every degree.
This same error can also be found in the works of Carl Theophilus Odhner, Alfred Acton, and Prescott Rogers, among others. In the quotations below, observe how “doctrine” and “the Writings” are treated as synonymous with the Lord and the Word, thereby erasing the distinctions Swedenborg carefully maintained.
The doctrines of the New Church are great and good because the Lord with his love is in them, for they are He.
—Carl Theophilus Odhner, “Universality of Swedenborg’s Mission” (1903)
From the very commencement of the church… the doctrine that the Writings are the Word of the Lord has been openly proclaimed. History, moreover, shows that the first organization of the New Church [rather, the General Church] was based upon the acknowledgment of this doctrine.
—Alfred Acton, “The Writings as the Word: A Study in the History of Doctrine” (1948)
The Heavenly Doctrines are the Word as much as the Old and New Testaments are, for the Lord is fully in the natural sense of all three.
—Prescott Rogers, The Triune Word (2014)
The same error continues in the General Church today (See New Church Life, 2024 historical review, page 350: “‘That the Lord be acknowledged in his Second Coming’ — that is, that the Writings are the Word of the Lord.”)
But Swedenborg’s meaning is more nuanced: the spiritual sense is the essence within the literal sense, and together with the spiritual sense it makes the Word. Without the letter, the internal is inaccessible; without the internal, the letter is dead.
This is why he insisted that doctrine cannot be drawn from the spiritual sense, but only from the sense of the letter. The Word is divine because the two are united: the internal sense making it holy, and the literal sense making it present. The holiness of the literal sense is not inherent but derived; when separated from the internal sense, it loses sanctity, yet when conjoined with it, it becomes even more holy than the internal sense alone. The literal sense thus draws its sanctity as a body from its soul.
Why This Precision Matters
At first glance, one might think this is quibbling over the details. If the Epistles are useful doctrinal books, for example, why not count them as the Word, and by extension, Swedenborg’s works?
Regarding the Book of Revelation, which said not to add or subtract from it:
For I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book, if anyone shall add to these things, God shall add on him the plagues that are written in this book. And if anyone shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the book of life, and out of the holy city, and out of the things written in this book.
Swedenborg wrote this:
That people may know that this warning does not apply to someone who takes away from the words of this book as it is written in the literal sense, but to someone who takes away from the doctrinal truths contained in its spiritual sense, let me say why this is:
The Word that was dictated by the Lord passed through the heavens of His celestial and spiritual kingdoms and so came to the person by whom it was written. Consequently the Word in its first origin is something purely divine. As it passed through the heavens of the Lord's celestial kingdom, it became divinely celestial, and as it passed through the heavens of the Lord’s spiritual kingdom, it became divinely spiritual, and when it came to the person it became divinely natural. As a result, the Word’s natural sense contains within it a spiritual sense, and this in turn a celestial sense, and both a sense purely divine, which is not apparent to any man, and not even to any angel.
We relate this in order that people may see that not adding anything to the words written in the book of Revelation and not taking anything away from them means in heaven not to add anything to or take away anything from the doctrinal truths regarding the Lord and faith in him. For it is this sense, including truths regarding a life in accordance with the Lord's commandments, from which, as we said, the literal sense originated.
Elsewhere, he refers to this as a threefold sense, referring to the celestial, spiritual, and literal senses (and, as he said, there are actually even more than three, which no man or angel is capable of perceiving, called the pure or supreme divine).
Someone might assume from this that because the literal sense can be added to with doctrinal text, insofar as it’s concordant, it can be called the Word. But the former reasoning doesn’t actually lead into the latter and the above passage doesn’t interfere with our earlier quoted sections.
The reason is that, while doctrinal writings reflect the truth, none can unite both the form and focus with the eternal and infinite perfection found only in the Word.
The Word is not holy only because it teaches sound doctrine. It is holy because it is a container of infinite truth, a vessel through which the Lord himself is present, the end-to-end of the pure divine.
And he said to me, it is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. I will give to him who thirsts of the fountain of the water of life freely.
The Lord compares it to a body filled with a soul: the literal words may seem ordinary, but within them dwells the life of heaven. This is why he insists that the Word alone has power to conjoin heaven and earth. Remove that foundation, and religion collapses into human speculation.
The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.
If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you shall ask what you will, and it shall be done unto you.
And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.”
Thus, the Lord protects the term “the Word” as a specific designation ever since the Word was “made flesh” (John 1:14). By limiting it to those specific books, he is safeguarding the conduit of divine influence.
Hallow them through thy truth: thy word is truth.
A common rebuttal to this is to quote from Arcana Coelestia #5075, which reads:
All divine truth in general is called “the Word,” and the Lord himself, from whom is all divine truth, is the Word in the supreme sense.
However, when read in context, it doesn’t negate anything we said above. This is because this passage explained that “words” in general mean divine truth, but it’s doing this within the context of the Books of the Word, wherein those “words” are contained.
Another common rebuttal is that Swedenborg often referred to something called the Ancient Word, which was lost and included the Wars of Jehovah, referenced by Moses (as mentioned above). However, this argument, too, breaks down, due to John 1:14. Once the Word was made flesh, it became the Word in its fixed body for all time and eternity, just as the Lord embodied it, making his human divine.
Bottom line: Revelation 22:18-19 with Apocalypse Revealed #959 safeguards the content (don’t add/subtract spiritual doctrine about the Lord and life), while John 14:6 with Doctrine of the New Jerusalem About Sacred Scripture #27–36 and Matthew 28:18 with True Christian Religion #230 safeguards the form and the method (the letter is where that content lives for us, and doctrine is drawn from it). That leaves our prior conclusions intact: no three-corpus canon, no treating the Writings as “the Word,” and no isolating the internal.
Arianism in Effect
The Lord said:
I and my Father are one.
He declared that his Divine and Human are united, yet after his death, the Christian world began to divide them in doctrine and worship. In Swedenborg’s True Christian Religion, he explained that the Catholic and Protestant churches have been operating under a profane creed that’s known as Arianism. Classically, Arianism is the claim that the Son is a created, subordinate being, not of one essence with the Father. But Swedenborg exposed a deeper form of it: Arianism in effect is any separation of the Lord’s Divine from his Human, even when people speak orthodox words. He showed that the Nicene Creed made Christians say “one” but think “three,” then worship in a sequence: Father, then Son, then Spirit. Wherever the Divine and Human of the Lord are split apart like that in thought and worship, the same heresy appears in practice.
In short, Arianism denies the full divinity of Jesus Christ. It places the Son beneath the Father as if he were a secondary or created being, rather than acknowledging that the Lord is himself the Father.
And his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, God, Mighty, Father of Eternity, Prince of Peace.
Not just one in essence, but one in body.
For in him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.
Both the Lord and Swedenborg consistently warned that separating the Lord’s Divine from his Human destroys the church. The Lord expressed this union clearly when he said:
Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time and still you don’t know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father?’ Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you I don’t speak apart from myself, but the Father who dwells in me does the work. Believe me — I am in the Father and the Father is in me — or at least believe me because of the works.”
By Swedenborg:
Since the Lord rose into heaven with his divine and human natures united into one and sat at the right hand of God (which means gaining omnipotence), it follows that his human substance or essence is now just like his divine substance or essence.
To think otherwise would be like thinking that his divine nature was raised into heaven and [literally] sits at the right hand of God, but not together with his human nature. This is contrary to Scripture and also contrary to the Christian teaching that in Christ, God and a human being are like the soul and the body. To separate them is also contrary to sound reason.
It is this union of the Father with the Son, or of the divine nature with the human nature, that is meant in the following passages:
I came forth from the Father and have come into the world. Again, I leave the world and go to the Father. (John 16:28)
I go (or come) to the one who sent me. (John 7:33; 16:5, 16; 17:11, 13; 20:17)
What then if you were to see the Son of Humanity ascend where he was before? (John 6:62)
No one has ascended to heaven except the one who came down from heaven. (John 3:13)
Every one of us who is saved ascends to heaven, though not on our own, but rather through the Lord’s power. Only the Lord ascended on his own.
Whenever the Lord’s Divine and Human are divided in thought, the same division spreads to their understanding of the Word.
History shows what happens when people confuse doctrine with Scripture. The Catholic Church gradually placed tradition and papal decrees on par with the Word. Protestants, though they revolted against Rome’s excesses, ended up elevating the dogmatic writings of Luther and Calvin into de facto scripture for their followers. And since then, Mormons went further still, canonizing the Book of Mormon and other volumes alongside the Word, creating a multi-part canon that distorts Christianity.
This pattern of separation has repeated itself in every age.
I have wrestled with this distinction for some time and have thoroughly explored the subject in articles on this website about Mormonism, showing how it has openly subordinated the Son and multiplied the canon, which also fits Swedenborg’s criteria for Arianism. Coming out of Mormonism, where the Book of Mormon is claimed to be “Another Testament of Jesus Christ,” I saw firsthand the damage caused by adding to the Word. It distorts doctrine, confuses the Trinity, and leads people away from the Lord. Swedenborg goes so far as to call it “spiritual murder” because it murders people’s faith, eventually turning them into atheists once they discover they’ve been deceived by priests they thought they could trust (see True Christian Religion #379, #380).
The Subtle Return of Arianism
The same pattern did not end with the first Christian Church. It reappeared, though in subtler form, within the institutions that arose after Swedenborg’s death. In the late 1800s, Rev. Pendleton and the Academy movement began teaching that Swedenborg’s Writings were equal in sanctity to the Old and New Testaments, an idea Swedenborg never taught.
But what if this was a misstep? What if Swedenborg himself drew a line that the later church ignored? In that case, the General Church has elevated doctrine above Scripture just as Rome did, only with a different set of books. The very body meant to preserve Swedenborg’s teachings would then risk betraying them.
If the Writings are taught to be the Word, then by the same reasoning Mormons could teach that the Book of Mormon is the Word, and any other religion could elevate its own writings to the same status. The Word is uniquely the Word because it has an inner sense. The Writings do not have an inner sense of their own, because they are given to explain the inner sense, and they are written in a distinct doctrinal style.
What I’ve discovered now is that the General Church has repeated a similar type of separation by isolating the spiritual sense of Scripture and elevating Swedenborg’s expository works to a separate corpus of “the Word,” bypassing the Lord’s Divine Human as present in the letter. This inversion breaks the order Swedenborg guarded, and so functions as Arianism in effect, even while paying verbal honor to the Lord.
Swedenborg would say that turning to doctrine as if it acted as a vessel of the Lord, rather than a light, is a practical denial of the Lord’s Divine Human, which resembles the Arian error even though the terminology differs; that naming a distinct corpus of “the Word” or a “Threefold Word” is the same as dividing the divine from the Human, which he vigorously condemned:
Any faith which acknowledges three lords of one church is the offspring of adultery.
When I entered the General Church, I carried that caution with me. If it was clear to me at that time that Swedenborg’s followers treated the Writings in the same way Mormons treat Joseph Smith’s, I would have turned away. At the time I almost did, but I didn’t have the full understanding and hadn’t done the full research on it yet. Just recently, after completing my research, it came into sharper focus, and I officially left the General Church. I still consider myself a member of the New Church — but the spiritual New Church — which exists only insofar as it distinguishes itself from the General Church and this foundational error. Only by carefully studying Swedenborg’s writings did I see the distinction: his works reveal the Word; they do not add to it.
This distinction is crucial. The holiness of the Word is complete in its full structure, because the divine terminates in what is lowest in the letter and with the internal sense becomes even more holy. To confuse other writings with the Word is to blur the very boundary that gives the Word its divine power.
That insight preserved my faith and gave me clarity. And I believe the same clarity is needed for anyone today who wants to follow the Lord in sincerity.
From Private Conviction to Institutional Doctrine
Regarding the history of the Swedenborgian movement, the naming of the sects which have formed after Swedenborg’s death can be a bit confusing at first, so I’ll lay it out plainly, with a few short notes about each one:
The General Conference of the New Church
Based in London, United Kingdom, one of the first sects to organize, founded in 1789.
Teaches that the Bible is the Word (which is not fully correct, as seen in our discussion above).
Holds to policies which are not concordant with the Word, by sustaining LGBT and female ministers (see my articles that explain and thoroughly reference the Word regarding this subject: “Drawing a Line While Utilizing Both Love and Wisdom with the Homosexual Community” and “The Heavenly Role of Men and Women in Marriage, Church, and Society”).
General Convention of the New Jerusalem
Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, founded in 1817.
Does not claim that the Writings are the Word.
But, their policies are not concordant with the Word, by disregarding some of the content in Swedenborg’s opus, De Amore Conjugiali (Concerning Conjugial Love), as stated in a policy statement they made called A Declaration by the General Convention of the New Jerusalem, page 12: “From the summary of the doctrine herein given, and the brief considerations presented, it will be seen, therefore, that if there is immorality anywhere it is in the doctrine itself, for which revelation is responsible.”
Like the General Conference, they also sustain LGBT and female ministers.
General Church of the New Jerusalem
Based in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, USA, founded in 1897.
Split from the General Convention over disagreements regarding Concerning Conjugial Love.
Teaches that the Writings are the Word (which is heretical and the subject of this article).
The Lord’s New Church Which Is Nova Hierosolyma
Based in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, USA, founded in 1937, after they split from the General Church.
Systemized the General Church’s error by declaring unequivocally that the Writings are a Third Testament and have an internal sense of their own.
This schism from the General Church was an eventual inevitability, since it’s what was implied by the General Church since its formation once they started calling the Writings “the Word.”
The split between the General Church of the New Jerusalem and the General Convention of the New Jerusalem in the late nineteenth century centered on doctrinal authority, with Concerning Conjugial Love as a flashpoint. Many in the Convention held that Swedenborg’s Writings were merely human commentary on Scripture, valuable but not themselves divine revelation. This led to skepticism about teachings in it, especially its affirmation of eternal, monogamous marriage, its rejection of adultery, and its explanations for how adultery is properly defined. Critics in the Convention questioned whether such details could bind the conscience, treating them as Swedenborg’s opinion rather than revelation from the Lord. In response, leaders of what became the General Church insisted that the Writings were revelation given at the Lord’s Second Coming and therefore authoritative on all matters, including marriage. (As chronicled in The New Church in the New World: A Study of Swedenborgianism in America by Marguerite Block.)
The General Church was correct to defend the doctrine of conjugial love. This teaching holds that true and eternal marriage between one man and one woman comes from the Lord and is central to authentic Christianity. In this, they rightly upheld the sanctity of marriage against voices in the General Convention who dismissed the doctrine as merely Swedenborg’s personal opinion.
Yet, in making their defense, the General Church overreached. They tried to strengthen their position by declaring Swedenborg’s theological works to be the Word. The Lord, however, defined the books of the Word as the sacred books of Scripture: the Law, the Prophets, the Psalms, the Gospels, and Revelation. The Word is the fullness of those Scriptures in their spiritual sense, which can only be accessed within those texts. Swedenborg’s Writings are divinely given to open and illuminate the Word, but not to replace or extend it. By blurring this distinction, the General Church preserved one vital truth while introducing yet another foundational error.
The detailed history behind the General Conference and General Convention, and their current situation today as I understand it, is a subject I plan to address in detail in a future article.
The Temple’s Fall and the Church’s Preservation
Regarding the Nicene Creed, Swedenborg wrote:
Clearly, then, from that time on, the Christian temple did not just develop cracks; it collapsed into a pile of rubble.
I had a dream where I saw this take place again, both with the Salt Lake City Temple and with the Bryn Athyn Cathedral.
…O reader of mine, put your trust in the holy Word rather than in councils, and turn to the Lord and you will be enlightened. The Lord is the Word. That is, the divine truth itself is there.
None of the major organized sects of the New Church, as of today, have aligned their policies with the true doctrine of the New Church. This is a sad state of affairs, but does not speak against the authenticity of the Lord, his Word, or the Heavenly Doctrine revealed through Swedenborg.
Because we live in this situation where none of the sects of the New Church have actually aligned their policies with heaven’s doctrines, my experience has been that when I share the New Church with Evangelicals in Utah, they’ll navigate to newchurch.org, see the error they’ve made by defining the Writings as the Word, and immediately reject the New Church and its teachings. This essentially blocks the Lord’s Second Coming from being revealed in the clouds because the sects who are safeguarding the Writings are not in alignment with them, and have thereby profaned them.
The Lord alone is the only authority in the Church.
But don’t call yourselves rabbi; for one is your teacher, the Christ; but all you are brothers. And don’t call anyone your father on the earth; for one is your father who is in the heavens. Neither call yourselves teachers; for one is your teacher, the Christ.
For readers of this blog, I encourage you to go to the Word and read and compare it with the Writings. It’s clear that the Lord has made the above mentioned sects stewards over the Writings (at least for the time being) so that they’d be preserved, and so I nonetheless recommend downloading and reading Swedenborg’s books from them. Swedenborg explained in Concerning Divine Providence that in a fallen, dark world, the Lord’s options for safeguarding the Word (and likewise his doctrines) are slim, because everyone is engaged in self-love and self-intelligence. And so he does what he must to preserve them while safeguarding free will, as he did in ancient times with Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant sects (Concerning Divine Providence #260, Doctrine of the New Jerusalem About Sacred Scripture #110).
With that said, be sure to read Swedenborg’s own works and analyze them closely, not just the works of later priests and commentators — including my own — without first verifying all of the above against the Word.
Along with it, and regarding the subject of this article, I recommend that you read Swedenborg’s short works, Doctrine of the New Jerusalem About the Lord and Doctrine of the New Jerusalem About Sacred Scripture.
Consequences of Imbalance
Both extremes carry consequences:
Where the Writings are downgraded, the church loses its distinct identity. It becomes just another liberal Christian denomination, dissolving into vague moralism.
Where the Writings are canonized, the church becomes insular and rigid and cracks form in the bedrock. The life of the Word fades and dialogue with the wider Christian world is stunted.
In both cases, the vitality of the New Church wanes. Membership declines, schools close, and the younger generation drifts away. Without clarity, the church withers.
The Dutch Expansion: De Hemelsche Leer
The doctrine that the Writings are the Word did not remain confined to the General Church. What had been taught there indirectly — that the Writings carry the same sanctity as Scripture — was later made explicit and systematized.
In the 1930s, a group of Dutch theologians developed this idea further in their journal De Hemelsche Leer (“The Celestial Doctrine”). If the Writings were truly the Word, they reasoned, then they must also possess an internal sense, hidden beneath their literal prose, just as Genesis and Exodus do. According to this claim, the same correspondential method that Swedenborg used to interpret the Word must now be applied to his own books.
This was a bold and perilous leap. It transformed what had been a doctrinal assumption into a full theory of revelation, implying that the Writings themselves were written in correspondences and therefore contained deeper layers of meaning beyond Swedenborg’s plain explanations. In practice, this elevated them above Scripture, making the Writings appear inexhaustible in the same way as the Word.
One of the leading defenders of this teaching was Theodore Pitcairn, a prominent layman and patron of the General Church. Building on the earlier statements of Benade, Pendleton, and Odhner, Pitcairn argued that if the Writings declared themselves to be the Word, then by definition they must have an internal sense of their own. When the General Church refused to endorse that conclusion officially, the controversy led to a schism. In 1937, Pitcairn and his followers formed The Lord’s New Church Which Is Nova Hierosolyma, making the doctrine of the internal sense in the Writings its central principle.
They were correct that doctrine is a living understanding and not mere literal text, yet they misplaced that living doctrine inside the Writings, treating them as a containing vessel rather than the Word as the sole vessel. By treating the Writings unequivocally as a Third Testament with its own correspondential structure, they shifted the source of divine influx away from the Word, repeating the same inversion Swedenborg warned against (Doctrine of the New Jerusalem about Sacred Scripture #56).
The General Church never embraced this radical step, but neither did it fully confront the kernel of the error that allowed it: the decision to call the Writings the Word in the first place. By leaving that seed unaddressed, it gave space for the later falsity to grow — and that ambiguity continues to exist within it today.
From the Word:
Because, even because they have seduced my people, saying, “peace;” and there was no peace; and one built up a wall, and lo, others daubed it with untempered mortar. Say unto them which daub it with untempered mortar, that it shall fall. There shall be an overflowing shower; and you, O great hailstones, shall fall; and a stormy wind shall rend it. Lo, when the wall is fallen, shall it not be said unto you, “Where is the daubing wherewith you have daubed it?” Therefore thus says the Lord God, “I will even rend it with a stormy wind in my fury; and there shall be an overflowing shower in my anger, and great hailstones in my fury to consume it.”
And I will set judgment to the line, and justice to the plumb-line; and hail shall overturn the protection of a lie; and waters shall overflow the hiding place.
In the Word, rain corresponds with truth. If truth is ignored, it will eventually catch up with you; falling down like a deluge (Apocalypse Revealed #343, #496).
The Threefold Sense Unites; the “Threefold Word” Divides
Ministers with this idea (that the Writings acted as a container of divinity in the same way as the Word) justified it by finding one of the few scriptures Swedenborg hadn’t had time to expound on directly, and distorting it:
And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. And the writing was, Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews… and it was written in Hebrew, and Greek, and Latin.
In their thinking, “Hebrew” meant Old Testament, “Greek” New Testament, and “Latin” the Heavenly Doctrine (since the Heavenly Doctrine was written in Latin).
There are several problems with this mapping:
The Old and New Testaments contain the Books of the Word, but the Heavenly Doctrine does not.
Not all of the Old and New Testaments are considered to be the Word. Some of the books in those Testaments are not among the Books of the Word.
Since the Lord is the Word, the implication of mapping the Testaments that contain it over an imagined correspondence with “Hebrew” and “Greek” implies that his Word is being split into separate corpora — divided into two — rather than kept together as one.
Carrying this a step further and mapping the Heavenly Doctrine onto “Latin” implies that it is the Word in fullness like the Books of the Word are, collapsing the distinction between the Word and doctrine drawn from the Word.
Just because a threefold symbolism is used in the Word to represent three aspects of the Lord, doesn’t mean we should stretch our imaginations to presume it’s applied to everything, such as to a separation of the Testaments, or to priesthood structure, which pulls the Trinity apart into separate designations. The correspondence of the Trinity must only be applied as far as the Lord outlined it: it represents him as the Divine Human. This is proven by the fact that the Old Church abused the correspondence of the Trinity, applying the symbolism of a trine onto ideas where it wasn’t meant to be taken — which is the very error that the Lord corrected through Swedenborg in True Christian Religion.
This trinal scheme had an immediate, however erroneous appeal. It seemed to harmonize the Two Testaments with Swedenborg’s doctrine of the Lord, and it appeared to give the Writings an exalted status. But it is built on a false parallel. Swedenborg never did the kind of explicit three-book mapping that Theodore Pitcairn attempted (OT = Hebrew, NT = Greek, Writings = Latin), nor did he map them onto the Persons of the Trinity. That’s a correspondential misapplication, not Swedenborg’s own exegesis. His entire theology rejected dividing the Divine into three beings. To do so with the Word is to reintroduce the very tritheism he worked so hard to overcome.
Is it ironic that the very verse of scripture that Pitcairn chose to propose that idea is the one where the Lord’s name is nailed to the cross?
At first the difference may look like semantics, but it is not.
Two very different patterns for using the term threefold:
The threefold sense unites the Word. It shows how one text can speak simultaneously to heaven and earth, binding the church in every age to the Lord through each level of meaning in it: celestial, spiritual, and literal.
The “Threefold Word” divides. It suggests three separate Scriptures, three separate Testaments, even three separate gods, each represented by one of three corpora.
The difference may seem subtle, but its implications are vast. One path preserves the unique holiness of the Word while honoring the Writings as divinely inspired doctrine. The other path risks creating a new canon, repeating the errors of history. The result is two doctrinal paths that diverge:
Swedenborg’s own teaching: The threefold sense unites the Word. The books of the Word are specific books of the Bible that the Lord defined, those written in correspondences with a threefold sense. Swedenborg’s Writings are doctrine from the Lord through the Word, in harmony with it because they reveal its inner meaning.
The General Church’s doctrine: The Writings are themselves the Word, they are a sequel, which makes up a Threefold Word, a Third Testament, coequal with the Old and New Testaments. Some even claim they contain their own inner sense.
The former magnifies the holiness of the Word. The latter risks fragmenting it and multiplying canons.
The Three-Dimensional Word
And the city lays foursquare, and the length [or depth] is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal.
For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.
A mistake sometimes made is to think of Divine Truth as the Writings themselves. “Divine Truth” is the Lord in the Word, flowing in through influx into life. As mentioned above, this is a quality of life itself, which is the operation of the Holy Spirit. Because that influx exists outside of time and space, it cannot be comprehended in any fixed or containable form except by looking to the Lord in the Books of the Word.
In order to get around the problem that humans cannot visualize something that exists outside of time and space, the Lord used correspondences to represent it. One of these was the layers and dimensions of the Tabernacle of Moses (there is a reason why he goes into so much detail explaining it). Another was with the dimensions of the city of the New Jerusalem.
(Of course, the New Jerusalem isn’t literally a cube that is going to descend from heaven. That’s completely ridiculous and not at all what the Scripture means.)
By Swedenborg:
As for numbers and measurements in the Word meaning celestial and spiritual things, this becomes quite clear from the measuring of the New Jerusalem and of the Temple in John and Ezekiel.
The city’s length, breadth and height are said to be equal in order to symbolize the fact that everything connected with that church springs from the goodness of love. For length symbolizes the goodness of love, and breadth the truth emanating from that love (no. 906), and height symbolizes goodness and truth together in every degree. For height extends from the highest point to the lowest, and the highest descends to the lowest by degrees, degrees we call degrees of height, in which the heavens exist from the highest or third heaven to the lowest or first heaven.
From this imagery of the temple and the city, we can see and think of the Word as something three-dimensional as it relates to human life. This is why we often say that some work contains “deep,” “broad,” or “elevated” concepts, for example. We may not realize it, but the Lord’s correspondences are at work in our subconscious mind.
Earlier, we compared the idea of a “threefold sense” to a “Threefold Word.” Getting that equation wrong risks “flattening” the Word into something one-dimensional, by stretching the three senses out like a chord in time, as if they existed successively only in one degree with each new corpus of books stacking next to the other in a single line.
A quote from Swedenborg that the General Church has used to claim the idea of the Threefold Word comes from Arcana Coelestia #3432:
The literal sense of the Word is threefold; namely, historical, prophetical, and doctrinal, each of which is such that it may be apprehended even by those who are in externals.
In this passage, “threefold” (Latin: triplex), names the three expressions of the literal sense: historical, prophetical, and doctrinal. “Doctrinal,” here, is in context to natural doctrine, such as when the Lord directly explained his parables to the Apostles in the Gospels (for example, when he explained the parable of the sower in Matthew 13:18-23, before he had Swedenborg outline the correspondential meaning of it). So the term triplex was being used in a different context than when Swedenborg used it in the context of the Word in its fullness (which is celestial, spiritual, literal).
Yet, the fact that the General Church has been using this teaching in the wrong context correlates with the error Swedenborg mentioned:
From these few things it may be evident that one who knows nothing about discrete or gradual degrees of height can know nothing about the state of a person as to reformation and regeneration, which take place through the reception of love and wisdom from the Lord, and then through the opening of the interior degrees of his mind in their order; nor can he know anything about influx through the heavens from the Lord, nor anything about the order into which he was created. For if anyone thinks of these things not from discrete degrees of height, but from continuous degrees of breadth, then he can see nothing of them except from effects, and nothing from causes; and to see only from effects is to see from appearances, whence come errors, one after another, which may thus be multiplied by inductions until at length grotesque falsities are called truths.
The “Virgin Mind” Heresy
Some General Church ministers, such as Alfred Acton, drew a bold analogy to convey the Threefold Word idea. He likened Swedenborg’s revelatory role to the Virgin Mary’s in the incarnation of Christ, in supporting quotes from an article from a discontinued periodical named the Aurora:
Can any one suppose for a moment that the Word in its glory is less Jehovah, because Baron Swedenborg was its vehicle? as well might he suppose that Jesus Christ was not Jehovah, because the Virgin Mary gave him birth?
—Alfred Acton, “The Writings as the Word: A Study in the History of Doctrine” (1957)
Acton’s idea was that just as Mary’s natural womb provided a body for the Word made flesh, Swedenborg’s prepared mind — described as a “mental or internal womb or matrix” — provided the vessel for written divine truth. This striking metaphor implies that Swedenborg’s intellect was miraculously formed to “give birth” to a new embodiment of the Word — a third textual advent of divine truth.
But the idea that the Lord was spiritually born in Swedenborg’s mind like the Lord’s body was born in Mary’s womb is grotesque and deeply profane because it inverts the actual order of divine influence. In reality, the opposite occurred: Swedenborg’s mind was spiritually born in the Lord.
(As is shown in the principals outlined in Concerning Divine Love and Concerning Divine Wisdom #4 and #187)
What this inversion of truth amounted to was, once again, a division of the Trinity. In order to make this new idea work, Acton, and perhaps those before him, had essentially divided each component of the Trinity onto a different collection of books: The Old Testament was equated to the Father, the New Testament to the Son, and the Heavenly Doctrine to the Holy Spirit, this last piece of which — the idea goes — was what was born in Swedenborg’s mind.
Mary spoke personally to Swedenborg and said she was “entirely averse” (prorsus aversata) to the idea that the Lord was her Son (Spiritual Experiences #5834), because “everything in him is divine” (True Christianity #102 [3]). Likewise, Swedenborg was similarly averse to the idea of anyone saying that he was the source of the Heavenly Doctrines.
Remember, as we mentioned above, the Lord is united in one Word, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; he isn’t split up into two or three components. Modeling the Lord upon three collections of books is like crucifying him the same way the Old Church did: splitting him up into three corpora and thereby denying the divinity of his humanity:
People who deny that the Lord’s humanity is divine are like the Jews [who crucified him] because everyone views the Lord as a person, and anyone who views his humanity as on par with the humanity of any other person is incapable then of thinking of his divinity, no matter how often this is called the Son of God, born from eternity, coequal with the divinity of the Father. When he is told this or hears it read, it penetrates his hearing, indeed, but not at the same time his belief, since he thinks of the Lord as being a material person like any other man, retaining the same properties of the flesh. And because he then sets the Lord’s divinity aside and pays it no attention, he is therefore in the same state as he would be if he denied it; for he denies that the Lord’s humanity is the Son of God, even as the Jews did also, for which reason they crucified him. That the Lord’s humanity is nevertheless the Son of God is something plainly said in Luke 1:32, 35, Matthew 3:16-17, and elsewhere.
It is apparent from this why people in the church turn directly to God the Father, and many also to the Holy Spirit, and rarely anyone directly to the Lord.
The Internal Sense “Entombed”
In correspondences, Egypt often signifies memory-knowledges and the natural mind. These are good when subordinated to the spiritual mind, but destructive when they dominate. An Egyptian mummy vividly pictures externals preserved without living internals. The correspondence fits the error in the General Church being diagnosed: an embalmed doctrine of the Word’s internals, abstracted from the living body of the letter.
That is exactly the separation Swedenborg warned against.
And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.
“Sodom” means self-love, which relates to the LGBT heresy in the General Convention, a violation of the sixth commandment; “Egypt” means self-intelligence, which relates to the heresy of misattribution of the Word in the General Church, a violation of the first commandment (Apocalypse Revealed #502, #503).
In the Book of Revelation, the “two witnesses” that are left dead in the street represent “an acknowledgment of the Lord as the only God of heaven and earth, and conjunction with him by a life in accordance with the Ten Commandments.”
This symbolically means that these two essential elements of the New Church have been utterly rejected by people inwardly caught up in the doctrinal falsities connected with justification by faith alone.
The bodies of the two witnesses symbolize the two essential elements of the New Church…
The street of the great city symbolizes doctrinal falsity connected with justification by faith alone — the street symbolizing falsity… and the city symbolizing doctrine.
The reason it remains “faith alone,” even in so-called New Church circles, is that core doctrines of life have been set aside in favor of whatever aligns with prevailing social trends or established institutions. Organizationally, this often stems from a fear of unpopularity and financial loss. Were the General Convention, for instance, to draw a clear line against LGBT ideology, it would risk losing much of its membership. Likewise, if the General Church were to repudiate the idea that the Writings themselves are the Word, it would endanger key sources of funding that have historically supported that belief.
The early Academy movement under Benade and Pendleton was financed largely through the generosity of the Pitcairn family, whose support helped establish the Church’s schools and publishing work. Its founding premise was that Swedenborg’s Writings are the Word, and from the beginning, the General Church’s institutional and financial foundations have been interwoven with that doctrine.
All of this implies that Benade and his followers missed the point of the New Church, and the General Church which they founded cannot be rightly termed the New Church any more than the General Convention.
The Present State of the New Church: As if Dead in the Street, Yet Watched from Heaven
Swedenborg lived the scene of Revelation 11 as he was explaining it in writing. For “three and a half days” he lay as dead in the city “spiritually called Sodom and Egypt,” while those who trusted in faith-alone mocked his call to repent and to adore the Lord’s Divine Human. When he revived, a voice from heaven declared that a faith without repentance is dead; the impenitent were cast down, and the rest were warned to examine themselves, forsake sin, and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ (True Christian Religion #567).
The fact that Swedenborg underwent this trial does not mean he had done anything wicked to deserve it; rather, as a prophet, he was called to represent the wickedness of those to whom he was sent. So it was with Ezekiel, who was commanded to lie upon his side for many days as a sign against Israel (Ezekiel 4:4–6); and above all with the Lord, the supreme Prophet, who bore the cross as the full representation of humanity’s sins.
Elsewhere, when Swedenborg explained the correspondence of the number “three and a half,” he taught that the New Church would not appear as a sudden world-wide body, but would begin quietly:
This New Church that is called the Holy Jerusalem will first begin with a few, afterwards to be with more, and finally to reach fullness.
In the same section he explained the reasons.
Two and a half centuries of small, scattered societies may fit the picture of a church “beginning with a few,” yet it may also be the case that the New Church is not as far along as many suppose and that it remains, in effect, “dead in the street” during the symbolic “three and a half days,” outwardly alive in name but slow to embody genuine repentance.
The fact this is occurring in the New Church movement today may correspond with how the dragon (self-love and self-intelligence) is described as being “loosed for a little season” before he is then once again bound and cast into the abyss:
…that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.
…And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth.
—Revelation 20:3, 7-8 (Apocalypse Revealed #856, #858, #859)
When Brotherhood Holds and When It Breaks
One of the most beautiful teachings of the New Church is that anyone can be saved from any religion, even if they haven’t heard about the Lord Jesus Christ. All that is required is to believe in one God and to live by the Ten Commandments because this is what it means to follow the Lord in essence, even if not by literal name. Additionally, Swedenborg wrote that after death, anyone who didn’t believe in one God because they didn’t know better, but who lived by the Ten Commandments in sincerity, from common sense and spiritual perception, usually do accept the Lord in the next life once they’re taught, insofar as they had lived with a humble heart.
Along those lines, he wrote that in ancient times, such as in the Gold and Silver eras, most religions were bound together in charity, so that, even if their doctrines differed, they still worked together as one body, and didn’t break themselves apart into sects. This is an important truth to realize and understand, but just as important, is the truth that this rule has a limit: it only applies insofar as nothing is denied regarding the Lord, eternal life, the Word, or the Ten Commandments, especially once people have the Word in full, as Christians now do:
When a Church is raised up by the Lord it is faultless to begin with. At that time one person loves another as his brother, as is well known from the Primitive Church after the Lord’s Coming. In those days all members of the Church lived with one another as brothers; they also called one another brothers, and loved one another mutually. In the course of time however charity faded and passed away, and as it passed away evils took its place, and along with the evils falsities too wormed their way in. From this, schisms and heresies resulted, which would never have existed if charity had continued to reign and live. In those days they would not even call schism “schism,” or heresy “heresy,” but a matter of doctrine adhered to in accordance with the particular belief of that schism or heresy. That matter of doctrine they would leave to each individual’s conscience, provided it did not deny anything fundamental, that is, the Lord, eternal life, or the Word, and provided it was not contrary to divine order, that is, to the Ten Commandments.
This principal is the same grounds that Swedenborg used when writing Summary Exposition of the Doctrine of the New Church and True Christian Religion, both of which clearly outlined the necessity for New Church separation from the Catholic and Protestant churches. The same principal applies today to any church which veils itself under the moniker, “The New Church” and yet whose teachings are foundationally opposed to the New Church’s core teachings about the Word.
Neither do men put new wine into old wine-skins: else the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins perish: but they put new wine into fresh wine-skins, and both are preserved.
This is not merely a question of terminology. Changing the canon of the Word affects the method of doctrine, the way heaven is conjoined to the church, and even the doctrine of the Lord’s Second Coming. These are matters of life and salvation, and therefore constitute a basis for separation.
There is no way in which we can simultaneously hold the views of the new church and the views of the former church on faith; if we did hold both these views at once, they would collide and cause so much conflict that everything related to the church would be destroyed in us.
Beware of “Charity” as a Cover for Evasion
Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword… He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.
A subtle but potent tactic by false prophets posing as Christians is to reframe a doctrinal disagreement as a failure of fellowship. Instead of testing the issue against the Word, the conversation shifts to relationship: an appeal to “keep talking,” to “collaborate,” or to preserve “unity in charity.” The implication is that insisting on clarity is unkind or divisive. Swedenborg warned that genuine charity is the life of truth and cannot exist apart from it (Doctrine of Life for the New Jerusalem #32; True Christian Religion #387). When leaders avoid defining the canon or the nature of the Lord while urging continued dialogue, they invite people to trade doctrinal precision for a pleasant sense of community. This is not heavenly charity but natural persuasion through political maneuvering; the appearance of warmth used to quiet conscience while the core question remains unanswered.
For those who employ this strategy, the idea of loyalty to the institution then becomes paramount and replaces ultimate loyalty to the Lord and his Word.
Beware of Deflections that Focus on Tone and Mission While Ignoring Goodness and Truth
The Jews answered and said to him, ‘Do we not say rightly that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?’
Jesus answered, ‘I do not have a demon; but I honor my Father, and you dishonor me.’
Another quiet maneuver is to shift the question from truth to temperament or institutional goals. Comments that frame the questioner as argumentative recast a doctrinal challenge as mere contentiousness, implying that the problem lies in a debater’s spirit rather than in the teaching under review. Likewise, appeals to cooperation and collaboration for the sake of church growth place numerical expansion above doctrinal clarity. Swedenborg warned several times that genuine charity is inseparable from truth and that a church stands or falls on its acknowledgment of the Lord and the Word. When numerical growth or pleasant dialogue becomes the priority, the underlying error remains untouched while the conscientious critic is subtly portrayed as the obstacle.
Returning to the Lord in His Word
The heart of the matter is simple: the Lord Jesus Christ is the Word. He came into the world as the Word made flesh, and he remains present with us in the Scriptures. The Second Coming is not an arrival of him in person, nor of a new book, but the unveiling of the divine meaning within the books he already gave.
Emanuel Swedenborg was called to be the servant of that Advent. For nearly three decades he labored to open the inner sense of the Word, showing that every verse is about the Lord, about his kingdom, and about our regeneration. His writings were not human speculation but doctrine from the Lord, given for the sake of the New Jerusalem.
Practical Implications for Church Organization, Study, and Education
The doctrinal distinctions we have explored — between the Word and the Writings, between the threefold sense and the so-called “Threefold Word” — are not merely academic. They shape the spiritual health of the New Church in the present day. How the church regards its own foundation determines whether it thrives, declines, or fades into irrelevance.
The way forward is not complicated. It is to return to the Lord in his Word. Let the Word be read and honored as Scripture. Let the Writings be studied and revered as doctrine that enlightens it. Let every doctrine be tested and confirmed by Scripture’s letter. If this path is followed, the New Church will fulfill its destiny. It will not matter whether it is large or small, visible or hidden. What will matter is that it testifies faithfully.
System:
Personal Devotion: The faithful should read both the Word and also the Writings as the Lord’s light to understand it.
Preaching and Worship: The Books of the Word should remain at the center of liturgy and sermons should teach it alongside the Writings to unfold its inner meaning.
Study and Education: New Church schools and colleges must train students always to confirm teachings by Scripture, while treating the Writings as doctrine fully concordant with the Word, including all of Concerning Conjugial Love (a subject I’ll address on this blog as well).
Guarding Against Extremes: One extreme is to elevate the Writings into a Threefold Word or Third Testament; the other is to diminish them into mere commentary. Both are errors. The safe path is to honor them as divine doctrine derived from the Word.
Guardrails:
Do not call the Writings “the Word,” a “Threefold Word,” or a “Third Testament.” Instead, refer to them as the “Heavenly Doctrine,” “Doctrines of the New Jerusalem,” or simply “the Writings.”
Do not describe the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Heavenly Doctrine as three folds of a Threefold Word and do not map them onto Hebrew, Greek, and Latin in John 19:20, nor onto the Trinity.
At the same time, affirm that the Heavenly Doctrine, revealed from the Lord through Swedenborg is wholly concordant with the Word and is the revelation by which the Lord effects his Second Coming.
The Writings should be termed as “concordant” with the Word rather than as “authoritative” because only the Lord, as affirmed through the literal sense, is authoritative: “And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, All authority is given to Me in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28:18).
Books and articles that have quoted Swedenborg out of context, pointing to or hinting at a Third Testament, should no longer have a place in the Church (see Appendix B: Texts Reflecting the Third Testament Dogma — For Reference and Caution).
It should be clearly taught and understood that charity through deference to various alternative beliefs regarding doctrine only goes so far. If this principal is applied against the essential understanding of the Lord, the Word, eternal life, and the Ten Commandments, then it is no longer charity, but a cloak for institutional dogmas (Arcana Coelestia #1834, Summary Exposition of the Doctrine of the New Church #48-50
“Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6)
“There is only one true faith, because faith is truth. Truth cannot be split or cut in half in such a way that part of it heads left and part of it heads right, and maintain its trueness.” (True Christian Religion #379)
Why this Distinction Safeguards the Future
This collapse of respect for Scripture is not just intellectual. It reflects a deeper spiritual turning. Swedenborg foresaw how the former church was vastated — emptied of living faith and charity — so that the Lord could establish a new one. That time is now. And in that climate, clarity about the Word and the Writings becomes even more urgent.
This distinction is not casuistry. It is the safeguard of the Second Coming. The Lord promised to return “in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.” Swedenborg explained that the “clouds” mean the literal sense of the Word and the “glory” its spiritual sense.
Finally, how the Writings are received shapes the witness of the New Church to the world. If we present them as another Word, we will be dismissed as a sect adding to Scripture. If we present them as mere commentary, we will fade into irrelevance. But if we present them as the Lord’s revelation of the Word’s inner sense — doctrine from the Lord through the Word — then we have something unique and powerful to offer: the testimony of the Lord’s Second Coming.
The True Church Beyond Institutions
Swedenborg, however, taught us that the church is not confined to its external institutions. The true church exists wherever people live by charity and truth from the Lord. It may exist invisibly in individuals scattered across the world, even outside the organized New Church.
This truth is both a comfort and a warning. If the institutions entrusted with preserving Swedenborg’s revelation betray its balance, the Lord will still preserve his church in individuals who cling to the truth. The visible church may falter, but the invisible church — the communion of those who live in charity — will endure.
The spiritual New Church foretold in Revelation still lives and will endure forever, for it is the Lord’s own. Yet its outward form must also be renewed whenever truth is obscured by human tradition, for the church’s external form is important to its internal life, as Swedenborg explained in The New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine #311 to the end. When an organization calling itself the Church departs from divine order, the rise of a new body is not rebellion but restoration, for it is the true continuation of what the Lord began. I do not yet know when or how that new form will take shape, but I am certain it must, unless the existing sects turn from their errors. Such renewal is how the Lord preserves his kingdom on earth. Those who see this have a duty to gather and build again in his name, so that the visible church may once more reflect its inward soul.
Looking Forward
In this moment of cultural collapse and ecclesiastical confusion, clarity about the Word and the Writings is more than a doctrinal luxury. It is a matter of survival. If the New Church is to serve its role as the crown of all churches, it must preserve this distinction with unwavering clarity.
This clarity gives the church something no other denomination can offer: the ability to show people the Lord in his Word in a way that makes sense, that reveals coherence, that unites love and wisdom. It offers not just more doctrine, but light — the very glory of the Second Coming.
Even if they may be useful, the future of the New Church will not depend on numbers, buildings, or institutions. It will depend on whether it remains faithful to its calling. That calling is simple: to testify that the Lord Jesus Christ is God, that his Word is holy, and that the Writings reveal its inner sense. Where that testimony is clear, the church will live, even if only in a few. Where it is blurred, the church will fade, even if the institutions endure.
Appendix A
Addressing the New Century Edition’s Definition of the Word
In the notes of the New Century Edition (NCE) translation by the Swedenborg Foundation for The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Teachings #1, by Jonathan Rose, it states:
By “the Word” Swedenborg generally means the Bible — a terminology that was prominent in the world of his Lutheran upbringing. However, the particular Bible books he includes in this designation vary over time. In his earlier theological works, in three roughly parallel passages (Secrets of Heaven 10325; New Jerusalem 266; White Horse 16), he defines “the Word” as only those books of the Bible that have an inner meaning, by which he apparently means a generally hidden layer of meaning that concerns the Lord and his kingdom, running continuously behind the literal text; see Secrets of Heaven 3540:4, 9942:5. In fact, in the three parallel passages just mentioned he provides a list of the books that have an inner meaning: “The books of the Word in the Old Testament are the five books of Moses, Joshua, Judges, the two books of Samuel, the two books of Kings, David’s Psalms, and the prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Those in the New Testament are the four Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — and Revelation.” The clear implication is that the Bible books not on this list are not part of the Word — namely, Ruth, 1, 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs (Song of Solomon) in the Old Testament; all the books now included in the Apocrypha; and Acts and the Epistles in the New Testament. Nevertheless, although he never retracts these strong statements or explains that he has changed his mind, in his last theological works and manuscripts he extends the term “the Word” to apply to Acts and the Epistles as well; see True Christianity 158, 176, 585:4, 601, 675:2, 730:1; Draft for “Coda to True Christianity” (Swedenborg 1996b) §§2:3, 23:2; Draft Invitation to the New Church (Swedenborg 1996c) §47. In one of these passages, for example, he cites a phrase that is “frequently mentioned in the Word of the New Testament, both in the Gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles and their Epistles” (True Christianity 158). In two other passages, he apparently refers to Acts and the Epistles as “the Apostolic Word” (Draft for “Coda to True Christianity” [Swedenborg 1996b] §§1, 59:5; compare True Christianity 730:1). By contrast, he never overtly quotes or cites Acts or the Epistles in Secrets of Heaven.
Much of this note doesn’t align with what’s been quoted by the Word and the Writings in this article. The statement, “By ‘the Word’ Swedenborg generally means the Bible” isn’t true, as has been shown above.
The passage referenced from True Christianity #158 has been misunderstood because of translation. In that passage, Swedenborg was explaining where the term “Holy Spirit” is found in the New Testament. The Latin reads:
Verum in Verbo Novi Testamenti, tam apud Evangelistas, quam in Actis Apostolorum, et in horum Epistolis frequenter.
Some translations, such as the one by John Chadwick, translated this as:
But there are frequent references in the New Testament Word, as much in the Gospels as in the Acts of the Apostles and in their Epistles.
Chadwick’s translation combined all of those books under the term “Word.” In this passage, however, Swedenborg acknowledged where the term “Holy Spirit” is found, without expanding the canon. It should not be taken to mean that Acts and the Epistles are the Word. Rather, it means:
But in the Word of the New Testament, to the extent that [the term ‘Holy Spirit’ is found] with the Evangelists [Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Revelation], so too in the Acts of the Apostles and in their Epistles, [it’s found] frequently.
As mentioned above, he elsewhere affirmed that Acts and the Epistles are “good books for the Church” (in a letter to Beyer, April 15, 1766), but not part of the Word.
Regarding the other sections referenced in the NCE from True Christianity, where Swedenborg first cites the Word and later includes quotations from Paul, he is providing doctrinal illumination, not redefining canonicity, since he begins those lists with passages from the established canon.
Elsewhere, such as when he referenced Romans, he did so because it was necessary in order to explain the misconceptions in the Old Church regarding them.
All of this is clear from his own statements as mentioned above, such as in The New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine #266 and based on his letter to Beyer. By “the Word of the Old Testament,” he meant the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms, and by “the Word of the New Testament,” the Gospels and Revelation. Note that wherever you see references in brackets (such as “[1 Timothy 6:16]”), it indicates insertions by translators inferring a reference after his death, not by Swedenborg himself, and many New Testament teachings by the Apostles were doctrinal teachings drawn from the canonical books of the Word within the Old Testament — and the fact it captures the same teachings, or quotes directly from it, doesn’t mean the canon has been expanded. There is an instance in An Invitation to the New Church #47 where he refers to the Epistles as the Word, but I believe this was a slip of the hand, since this was a draft, not a final, published work, and it is otherwise an outlier and not evidence for a redefinition of the canon, which he outlined in detail at least three times in his published works.
In True Christian Religion #730, he wrote, “the Word written after His coming by means of the Evangelists and Apostles,” however, this doesn’t infer that the canon is changed either. The reason is because Mark and Luke are considered Evangelists but were not technically Apostles because they were not among the Lord’s Twelve Apostles; so, where Swedenborg said, “the Word… by means of the Evangelists and Apostles,” he meant Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Revelation.
I couldn’t actually find any place where his Latin said “Apostolic Word,” even though some English translators translated it that way despite the fact that it isn’t what he wrote. If it existed, it would look something like Verbum Apostolicum, which I didn’t find. But, I did find: tam Prophetico quam Apostolico and similar constructions — in each case, he used the words tam…quam… again, which means “to the extent that.” In this context, “Apostolic” (as opposed to “Apostles”) sometimes refers to all of the “Apostolic Fathers” or the early Christian Church (either those among the Twelve Apostles or not) and so that distinction depends on the context.
The only doctrinal practice that aligns with the Lord’s teachings is to uphold his formal list of the Books of the Word. When Swedenborg cited from other New Testament writings, they remain valuable for the Church, but not in the same category as the Gospels and Revelation, which contain the continuous internal sense. As he said regarding the Acts and Epistles, they communicate “mediately with heaven” rather than directly.
Appendix B
Texts Reflecting the Third Testament Dogma — For Reference and Caution
Below is a list of notable publications by various New Church sects (especially the General Church in Bryn Athyn and the Lord’s New Church in Huntingdon Valley) in which their ministers or leaders explicitly promote the teaching that Emanuel Swedenborg’s Writings, called the Heavenly Doctrine, are the Word of God. The selections are arranged from the most subtle and difficult to discern (and therefore the most spiritually misleading) to those that state the claim openly and without qualification.
What the Heavenly Doctrine Testifies Concerning Itself (Compiled by Carl Theophilus Odhner, 1902; revised by Hugo Lj. Odhner, 1960; modern edition by Calvin Heinrichs and Lawson Smith, 2023)
A curated compilation of passages from Swedenborg’s theological works. The compilers present selections in which Swedenborg wrote about the nature of the Word and his own writings. While framed as a reference tool, its underlying purpose is to suggest that the Writings testify of themselves as the Word rather than as doctrine drawn from the Word, thus treating them as Scripture rather than revelation about Scripture.
The claim that “the Writings are the Word” is often made without using the phrase “the Writings are a Third Testament,” yet the two assertions lead to the same conclusion. Both make the Writings equivalent to the Lord in fullness, when in fact Swedenborg taught that only the Books of the Word are the Lord’s complete embodiment in textual form.
Because this volume collects only favorable excerpts and omits Swedenborg’s crucial clarifications found in Doctrine of the New Jerusalem concerning the Sacred Scripture, it serves as a subtle but powerful instrument for promoting the Third Testament idea through misrepresentation by omission. It appears at the top of this list precisely because of its subtlety, which enables it to pass easily under the radar of readers unaware of Swedenborg’s distinctions regarding the nature of the Word.
The Triune Word – Prescott Rogers (Academy of the New Church, 2014)
A modern General Church publication (based on a dissertation) that teaches the Old Testament, New Testament, and Swedenborg’s Writings together form a Triune Word of God. Rev. Rogers argues that each revelation is fully the Word, coequal with the others, and that “the Heavenly Doctrines are the Word as much as the Old and New Testaments.” This doctrine collapses the distinction between the Word and the Writings, reinforcing the teaching that the Writings share the same divine status as Scripture. It appears next on the list because it sits within the General Church ethos, where it can easily pass unnoticed.
“The Writings as the Word: A Study in the History of Doctrine” – Alfred Acton (1948)
An article published in New Church Life tracing how the General Church came to regard Swedenborg’s writings. Acton argued that from the Church’s founding, the belief that “the Writings are the Word” was openly taught and consistently upheld. Although presented as historical analysis, the essay functions mainly as doctrinal reinforcement, confirming this teaching as a defining feature of General Church identity. Acton described the distinction between the Word and the Writings as “a distinction without a difference,” showing that he viewed them as the same in form and function. While he never used the later term Third Testament, his reasoning rests on the same premise that the Writings hold equal authority and divinity with the Old and New Testaments.
“The Universality of Swedenborg’s Mission” – Carl Theophilus Odhner (1903 address)
A public address in which Odhner teaches that the doctrines in Swedenborg’s works are “great and good because the Lord with his love is in them, for they are He.” In this language, the Writings are not merely acknowledged as divine revelation, but are identified with the Lord himself. By treating revelation as if it were the Lord’s embodied presence (rather than his truth proceeding through Swedenborg), this address confuses divine origin with divine incarnation and thus furthers the conflation of the Writings with the living Word. Odhner also produced an excellent defense of Swedenborg’s Concerning Conjugial Love in his book Laws of Order for the Preservation of the Conjugial, which might otherwise make him appear to be a trustworthy voice within the New Church movement. Yet in both that work and this address he went too far, asserting that the Writings themselves are the Word.
The Principles of the Academy – William Frederic Pendleton (1899 address; 1909 pamphlet; 1958 reprint)
Delivered at the Third General Assembly of the General Church and later reissued in pamphlet form, this address codified the foundational philosophy of the Academy movement. Its opening declaration teaches that “the Lord has made His Second Coming in the Writings of the New Church,” and that “the Church acknowledges no other authority and no other law.” This statement departs from Swedenborg’s own teaching, which is that the Lord’s Second Coming is effected by means of the Writings, not in them. The distinction is vital: the Writings are the instrument through which the Lord reveals himself, not the place where he personally dwells in fullness. By erasing this difference, Pendleton transferred the qualities of divinity and plenitude that belong only to the Word itself into the Writings, setting a doctrinal precedent that later figures (such as Odhner, Acton, and Pitcairn) articulated into the Threefold Word ideology.
De Hemelsche Leer (The Hague, 1930s)
A monthly series of doctrinal studies published in Dutch by a circle of scholars (including Theodore Pitcairn in translation) presenting what became known as the “Hague Position.” These writings assert that Swedenborg’s Writings constitute a Third Testament. By applying to the Writings the same rules of interpretation and sanctity as the Word, the series fully merged Swedenborg’s books with Scripture, resulting in a profane misuse. Their influence provoked a schism that led to the founding of the Lord’s New Church (of Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania) in 1937. Although its implications are even more serious than those of the works listed above, it ranks lower here because its error is more readily discernible; even the General Church formally rejected it.
The Works of Theodore Pitcairn (1939–1968)
From his doctrinal essays and treatises, including My Lord and My God (1967) and The Beginning and Development of Doctrine in the New Church (1968), Theodore Pitcairn consistently advanced the claim that the Lord made his Second Coming in the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. Although Pitcairn had already advanced this doctrine in 1939 in a document stating his founding principles, he reiterated it plainly in a 1947 letter, writing that “the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg are the Word of the Lord, or the Third Testament... without reserve or difference,” asserting that the doctrine of Sacred Scripture applies to them in full (Forgotten Pages of New Church History, 1951). Across his works, Pitcairn presented the Writings as the Lord’s own “Spirit and Life” in fullness, holiness, and power from firsts to lasts. By teaching that the Writings are not doctrinal works derived from the Word but are the Word, Pitcairn removed the essential distinction between Swedenborg’s revelation and the sacred text of Scripture. These documents stand among the most injurious of those listed, for it moves beyond implication to assert an explicit identity between the Writings and the Word, collapsing the difference between revealed doctrine and the original Scripture that alone constitutes the Word in its degrees.
Each of the above publications – whether doctrinal statements, compilations, or scholarly works – espouse treating Swedenborg’s Writings as the Word in isolation (a Third Testament equal to the Old and New Testaments). These works misappropriate or misinterpret Swedenborg’s teachings to obscure the distinction between the Word and Swedenborg’s writings, a doctrinal stance that the Heavenly Doctrine itself rejects as illegitimate in Doctrine of the New Jerusalem About Sacred Scripture #56. All of these would fittingly belong on a “ban list” for those who support what Swedenborg wrote there (which is impossible not to do when you consider that they came from the Lord. Unless this distinction is upheld, it creates an Arian double-bind).
Appendix C
Other Books Which are Not the Word
Swedenborg taught that the Word is unlike any other book ever written. It alone is composed entirely in correspondences, with a continuous internal and celestial sense through which heaven is joined to earth and the Lord speaks directly to humankind. Other writings, however inspired, moral, or beautiful, do not possess this divine structure.
The following are the principal doctrinal writings of several major religions. Each serves its own community and purpose and holds value for those who receive it. Yet Swedenborg explained that such works belong to a class that is neither the Word itself nor fully concordant with it as doctrine (Doctrine of the New Jerusalem About Sacred Scripture #25).
These alternate texts are sometimes preserved by the Lord’s providence to sustain religious life among the nations. They are not harmful to read, provided that:
It’s understood that they are derivative works and not the Word in fullness; or
Their adherents are otherwise unaware of the Word or have not yet been instructed in it because of their birth and upbringing in another faith.
Swedenborg wrote concerning such:
A Gentile sees from his religious principle that there is a God, that he must be regarded as holy and be worshiped, that good is from him, that there is a heaven and that there is a hell, that there is a life after death, that the evils forbidden in the Decalogue must be shunned. If he does these things and believes them he is saved. And as many Gentiles perceive God to be Man, and as God-Man is the Lord, so after death when they are instructed by angels they acknowledge the Lord, and afterwards receive truths from the Lord that they had not before known. They are not condemned because of their not having the ordinances of Baptism and the Holy Supper; the Holy Supper and Baptism are for those only who are in possession of the Word, and to whom the Lord is known from the Word; for they are symbols of that church, and are attestations and certifications that those who believe and live according to the Lord's commandments in the Word are saved.
1. Ancient Non-Biblical Religions
Before Israel, many ancient peoples received spiritual light accommodated to their state. Their sacred writings preserve remnants of that early revelation, yet without the pure correspondential form that makes the Word a living channel of divine influx.
The Vedas and Upanishads (Hinduism)
Poetic and philosophical, these writings explore creation, the soul, and divine truth. They are holy in their context but represent human reflection on divine order, not revelation through the inner sense.
The Avesta (Zoroastrianism)
Containing hymns and moral law, the Avesta reveals ancient monotheistic ideas and cosmic struggle between good and evil. Yet it speaks in symbolic imagery rather than in the strict correspondential language of heaven.
The Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi (Taoism)
Their paradoxes and aphorisms express profound insight into moral and natural harmony. Swedenborg would class them with other ancient wisdom texts — illuminated by Providence but not written as the Word.
2. Middle Eastern Monotheisms
These faiths proclaim one God and uphold sacred scripture, yet their books do not share the Word’s internal sense or correspondential construction.
The Qur’an / Koran (Islam)
Held as God’s literal speech to Muhammad, it conveys divine truth adapted to its audience. Swedenborg’s definition of the Word, however, is narrower: only scripture written in correspondences unites heaven and earth, which the Qur’an does not.
However, it’s important to note that he wrote:
A Muslim sees from the Koran that God is one, that the Lord is the Son of God, and that all good is from God, that there is a heaven and that there is a hell, that there is a life after death, and that the evils forbidden in the commandments of the Decalogue must be shunned. If he does these latter things he also believes the former and is saved.
—Apocalypse Explained #1180 [2]
The Baha’i Writings (e.g., Kitáb-i-Aqdas)
Moral and devotional, these works present spiritual reform and universal ethics. Their expression is clear and doctrinal rather than symbolic, placing them outside the correspondential form of the Word.
3. Far Eastern and South Asian Movements
Religions of Asia preserved lofty moral philosophy and compassion. Their scriptures enlighten the natural mind but are not vehicles of direct divine speech through the internal sense.
The Tripitaka and Mahayana Sutras (Buddhism)
Collections of sermons and parables offering ethical and contemplative instruction. They are human records of wisdom, not revelation through the layered structure that characterizes the Word.
The Guru Granth Sahib (Sikhism)
Venerated as the eternal Guru, it gathers inspired hymns and teachings. Swedenborg would honor its holiness for that people yet distinguish it from the Word, which alone carries the spiritual sense in every detail.
4. Biblical-Adjacent or Para-Christian Writings
These writings stand close to the Bible historically or thematically, yet they are not part of the canonical Word defined by the Lord.
Apocryphal and Gnostic Gospels (e.g., Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Judas)
Early Christian compositions exploring the Lord’s sayings and mysteries. They are reflective and speculative, but only the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Revelation were divinely structured as the Word.
The Pseudepigrapha (e.g., Book of Enoch, Jubilees)
Inter-testamental Jewish works rich in symbolism, sometimes even quoted in Scripture. Their imagery imitates, but does not replicate, the true correspondential form.
Catholic Deuterocanon and Patristic Tradition (e.g., Tobit, Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Church Fathers)
These writings instruct and edify but were never written in the correspondential language of heaven. Their truth is moral and historical, not revelatory.
Christians, however, have the Word, and so their responsibility is greater. If Christians add doctrinal texts that take away from, or add to, the spiritual sense of the Word, those writings become harmful and must not be taught as doctrine concordant with it.
By Swedenborg
All Protestants see the Word in the light of their teachings and explain it accordingly. Catholics too see it and explain it in the light of their teachings, and Jews see it and explain it in the light of theirs. A body of false teaching yields false beliefs, and a body of true teaching yields true beliefs.
5. Post-Biblical Christian Writings
Following the closing of the Word with the Book of Revelation, later Christian authors produced writings of commentary, devotion, and reform. Yet these works departed in varying degrees from the genuine doctrine of the Word. They borrow its language but not its life, and where they mix truth with falsity, they obscure rather than reveal it. Whatever light they contain is reflected and fragmentary, for they do not proceed from the correspondential structure through which the Lord speaks.
Theological and Devotional Writers (e.g., Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Thomas à Kempis)
Influential and often devout, yet their writings arose in periods when the true understanding of the Word had been obscured by doctrines such as a Trinity of Persons and faith alone. Whatever truth they contain is drawn indirectly and in fragments; their truth is human and interpretive, not divine. They do not speak as the Word, nor do they convey its genuine spiritual sense.
Latter-day Saint Texts (e.g., Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price)
Later non-canonical texts that blend revelation and moral teaching. Some ideas within them may have been influenced by Swedenborg’s Writings (such as the three heavens and eternal marriage), yet they distort the unity of the Lord’s Divine Human into a trinity of distinct beings. They are not written in the divine form of correspondences and therefore do not communicate directly with heaven. Nor are they fully concordant with the Word, since many of their doctrines interpret its symbols in a merely literal way (such as expecting a physical Second Coming or a material New Jerusalem).
Jehovah’s Witness Publications (e.g., Watchtower writings)
Considered authoritative within their sect, but they interpret scripture rather than contain the divine sense within themselves.
Scientology Texts (e.g., Dianetics, Scientology Scriptures)
Philosophical and psychological in nature, entirely human in origin, lacking any inner sense corresponding to heavenly realities.
Christian Science Writings (e.g., Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures)
Founded by Mary Baker Eddy in the nineteenth century, Christian Science presents a human reinterpretation of divine truth through the lens of metaphysical idealism. Its writings are not composed in correspondences and therefore contain no internal sense. Though they often cite the Word and speak of spiritual healing, they deny the reality of the natural world and reframe sin and redemption as merely errors of perception rather than states of will to be lived in action “as if from oneself” (as Swedenborg would say). Some people in the early New Church movement noted its surface resemblance to Swedenborg’s teaching on spirit and influx, yet it reduces divine love to a concept rather than a living union of love and wisdom. Whatever truth it conveys is reflective and derivative, not divinely inspired in form or content.
6. Later Metaphysical and Esoteric Movements
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a variety of movements arose that echoed fragments of Swedenborg’s theology, such as degrees, influx, correspondence, and the spiritual world, but detached them from the Lord’s Divine Human and the Word. Their writings multiplied, yet they are philosophical or mystical compositions, not revelation in the form of correspondences.
New Thought and Mind-Cure Literature (e.g., Lessons in Truth, Divine Science Textbook, Unity and New Thought magazines)
Emerging alongside Christian Science, these movements taught that thought alone shapes reality and that “divine mind” is impersonal consciousness. Their literature, often practical and optimistic, borrows Swedenborg’s vocabulary of spirit and correspondence yet strips it of repentance, regeneration, and the acknowledgment of the Lord as the only God. They are human reflections on truth, not vehicles of divine influx.
Transcendentalism and Romantic Idealism (e.g., Emerson’s Representative Men, Nature, and Alcott’s writings)
Admiring Swedenborg as a visionary, the Transcendentalists reinterpreted his theology into poetic pantheism. They saw correspondences as symbols of harmony rather than vessels of the Lord’s wisdom. Their essays inspired moral contemplation but replaced the personal Lord with abstract spirit.
Spiritualism and Mesmerism (e.g., writings on “Animal Magnetism,” Modern Spiritualism, séances, and spirit communications)
These sought intercourse with spirits apart from the Word and turned revelation upside down, seeking knowledge from the lower world rather than from the Lord through heaven. Swedenborg was often misread as a medium, yet his experiences were uniquely governed by divine influx, not by human will. Such writings invert the order of influx and endanger the mind by inviting falsity from below.
Internal Family Systems (e.g., No Bad Parts, by Richard C. Schwartz; Internal Family Systems Therapy, by Richard C. Schwartz & Martha Sweezy)
IFS is a psychotherapy that divides the psyche into a core “Self” and multiple “parts.” The Swedenborg Foundation has at times promoted IFS in its programming, which warrants a caution for readers who might mistake it for theology. Swedenborg taught that only the Lord reforms our soul by truths drawn from the Word, and that spiritual healing comes through actual repentance and a life according to the commandments, not by techniques that create the illusion of harmony among parts while substituting a created Self for the Lord.
A further warning: Swedenborg taught that our thoughts and affections are in company with spiritual societies, which flow into us. What IFS calls “parts” can map to real influences from spirits, sometimes represented by a single spokesman spirit. At times those who are firmly grounded in faith from genuine doctrine are permitted to hear angels, but he strongly cautioned against seeking contact with spirits, since most in the world of spirits are evil and skilled at appearing good in order to mislead. Protection is found in repentance, life according to the commandments, and doctrine drawn from the Word, not in techniques that create an illusion of inner harmony. (See Concerning Heaven and Concerning Hell #249, #250, and Spiritual Experiences #3781.)
Summary Principle
Across all nations, Providence has ensured that humanity retains some knowledge of God, charity, and moral life. Yet the Word alone — the Law, the Prophets, the Psalms, the Gospels, and Revelation — was written in pure correspondences, containing within every syllable a continuous internal and celestial sense. Through it alone the Lord’s influx descends to humankind and returns heavenward.
