The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained/Chapter7

by Benjamin Fiske Barrett

 

VII.—Salvation.

The prevailing belief among Christians respecting salvation at the time Swedenborg wrote, was, that it is deliverance from hell and its miseries, and the qualification for heaven and its joys; that this deliverance and qualification for heaven may take place suddenly—in the twinkling of an eye; that it is wrought by an act of immediate Divine mercy, and without any regard to the inner life or character of its subjects—provided they have faith.

With this idea the teachings of the New Church are everywhere and perpetually at war. According to these teachings salvation is a thing of degrees—a certain advanced spiritual state—a more or less perfect, orderly and healthy condition of the human soul. A man is saved in the degree that his natural hereditary and selfish proclivities are brought into subjection and due subordination to the higher and truly human faculties, and the Divine Wisdom and Love are so enthroned within him that he finds his chief delight in learning and doing the will of the Lord. So that the higher his wisdom and the purer his love, that is, the more closely he is conjoined to the Lord through a life of obedience to revealed truth, so much the more orderly and healthy is his soul, so much the more blissful his state, and in so much higher degree, therefore, is he saved.

And this blessed, orderly or saved state, is not one to be instantaneously or suddenly attained. It is reached only through a long and brave conflict with the selfish propensities of the natural man—the foes of each one's own household. It is a state that one grows into gradually, as we grow from infancy to manhood, from a state of ignorance to one of intelligence. The means by which this state is reached, or salvation achieved, are the natural and spiritual truths we learn, our, trials and disappointments, our Joys and sorrows, our successes and defeats, our relations and intercourse with others, and all the varied discipline of life. By these means the all-loving and merciful One is perpetually working through all our lives, to recreate us in his own Divine likeness, and so to save us with an everlasting salvation—to fill us with his own Spirit and Life. And his life flows into us just in the degree that we deny, overcome, and lose our own hereditary selfish life for his sake; for in that degree we receive or find our true life, agreeably to the Lord's own words: "He that loseth his life for my sake, shall find it;" that is, he shall find a new life far superior and more blissful than the old selfish life he has lost. And the only sure way of attaining this new life, which is the salvation (in different degrees) that the Bible speaks of, is, by shunning all known evils as sins against God.

"To be led away from evils, to be regenerated and thus to be saved," says Swedenborg, "is of mercy which is not immediate, as is believed, but mediate, that is, to those who recede from evils, and thereby admit the truth of faith and the good of love from the Lord into their life. Immediate mercy, or that which would extend to every one from the good pleasure alone of God, is contrary to divine order; and what is contrary to divine order is contrary to God, for order is from God, and his Divine in heaven is order. For any one to receive order in himself is to be saved, which is effected solelv by living according to the precepts of the Lord." (A. C. 10, 659.)

"Instantaneous reformation and consequent salvation would be comparatively like the instantaneous conversion of an owl into a dove and of a serpent into a sheep. . . . It is evident that all who think of salvation from life, think of no instantaneous salvation by immediate mercy, but of the means of salvation in which and through which the Lord operates according to the laws of his Divine Providence; that is, through which man is led by the Lord out of pure mercy. . . . Instantaneous salvation out of immediate mercy, is the fiery flying serpent in the church." (D. P. 338, '40.)

"Salvation comes from the life which a man has procured for himself in the world by the knowledges of faith. This life remains; whereas all thought which does not agree with a man's life, perishes and becomes as if it had never existed. Heavenly consociations are formed according to the kinds of life, and by no means according to the kinds of thought which are not in agreement with the life." (A. C. n. 2228.)