discovered.”
Reading this number, the place this fits is a sentence that, in my old Ager
translation, reads: “But as the Lord has now opened to me the spiritual sense of
the Word, and has granted me to be associated with angels and spirits in their
world as one of them, it is disclosed that ‘a cloud of heaven’ means the Word in
the natural sense, and…”
Now if the Lord opened to Swedenborg the spiritual sense of the Word, is
it more accurate for the text to read, “it has been disclosed,” or “I discovered”?
The Writings (or, if you wish, the understanding of what they reveal) are
the Lord’s Second Coming; they are the Holy City descending from God. The
Lord has taken the initiative both to introduce Swedenborg consciously into
the spiritual world and to open the spiritual sense to him in order to bring
about that Second Coming; neither of these things could Swedenborg have
done on his own.
To say that he discovered something transfers the initiative to Swedenborg
and away from the Lord. I think that this does indeed change the meaning of
the passage, making it inaccurate.
Just three numbers later, in No. 779, we come to the familiar passage
that starts: “Since the Lord cannot manifest Himself in person, as shown just
above, and nevertheless has foretold that He was to come and establish a new
church . . . it follows that He will do this by means of a man. . . . That the Lord
manifested Himself before me, His servant, and sent me to this office. . . . I
have not received anything pertaining to the doctrine of that church from any
angel, but from the Lord alone while I have read the Word.”
Here, most decidedly, is giving all credit to the Lord. This isn’t to belittle
the unbelievable amount of work that Swedenborg did, or the ability of his
mind to grasp and then explain the concepts he was being given, nor the
humility with which he subordinated himself to the Lord’s needs.
My hunch is that all along, Swedenborg’s reaction was much like Mary’s:
“Behold the servant of the Lord, be it unto me according to Your Word.”
If a translator really wants to use an active voice, the text might read, “He
disclosed to me … ”
Joseph S. David
Indianapolis, Indiana
Lasting Gems from New Church Life
To The Editors:
Selected Editorials, published by the Academy of the New Church Press in
1978, contains 169 essays written by the Rev. W. Cairns Henderson while he
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