new church life: jan uary / february 201 4
Church on earth. As a previous Charter
Day speaker from more than 70 years
ago noted: “The Academy has, from its
beginning, been intimately bound up in
the life of the Church, and this so much
so that to speak of the one is to imply
the other.” (Nathaniel D. Pendleton, New
Church Life 1931, page 68)
With the Old Testament charge
to “teach [the laws and statutes] to
your children and your grandchildren”
(Deuteronomy 4:9), and the wealth of
information on the development of the
mind and the nature of learning in the
teachings of the New Church, it is no
wonder some of the earliest adherents
envisioned a complete educational
system that could bring together all
spiritual and natural knowledge and
share it with the world.
In the 1800s those who would
become the Academy movement saw
that Sunday Schools were of very limited
value in conveying and supporting this vision. And they saw that the piecemeal
and inconsistent training clergy received, primarily under an apprenticeship
program, was wholly inadequate to provide the church with clergy “skilled
in the [Divine] law, wise and God-fearing.” (New Jerusalem and its Heavenly
Doctrine 313)
On June 19, 1876, some of these dedicated adherents asked Bishop Benade,
the leader of the group, to give a statement of purpose. In it Benade declared
the Academy was:
The founders of the
Academy had a vision
from the Lord of what
life could be – in this
world and the world
to come. They saw
in the revelation to
the New Church the
Lord’s purpose in all of
creation, a heaven from
the human race . This
is why we are here – to
support and promote
a heavenly existence.
to cultivate and promulgate a knowledge of those Divine revelations in their
spiritual purity, and to engage in those uses of spiritual charity which have respect
primarily to the growth and development of the Spiritual Church.
The provisions of our Charter grew out of this. And from this seed the
“uses of spiritual charity,” as he put it, grew into these institutions.
A few months later they set up a coordinated curriculum for theological
education, the first beginnings of this educational system.
The next year formal classes opened in Philadelphia for on-site instruction
for the Theological School and College. By 1880 a library was being established
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