n e w c h u r c h l i f e : j u ly / au g u s t 2 0 1 5
and the moon shall not give her light, and
the stars shall fall from heaven, and the
powers of the heavens shall be shaken.’”
(Matthew 24:29)
Again, in another passage, the
spiritual fall that took place in the
Christian Church with the Council of
Nice is likened to the symbolic account
in the third chapter of Genesis in which
the man and his wife, contrary to the
command of the Lord, did eat of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
leading to their expulsion from the
Garden of Eden. (True Christian Religion
638)
Finally we arrive at the New Church.
There is an exciting and glorious
beginning! However, from the outset the
assault on the Word commences again.
There is, for example, Tulkism. In clever and persuasive reasoning, the Divine
creation account in Divine Love and Wisdom is bypassed and replaced by what
is sometimes called “Idealism.” The Lord’s glorification becomes a mere image
representative of man’s regeneration, rather than the other way around. Indeed,
ultimately in this perversion of doctrine, the Lord’s advent – His incarnation –
is deemed not to have actually taken place. Any sort of “Christianity” is gone.
In America, the New Church is hardly in existence for 100 years,
and then with one major group the Divine revelation effected by means of
Emanuel Swedenborg progressively is regarded and treated as “Swedenborg’s
perspective.” We are, as it were, invited to go out into a spiritual desert – a
barren wilderness – if we are to find our Lord.
Then there is a new approach to the Word, and specifically to the He avenly
Doctrine. This time we are invited to seek the Lord in the “closets” – in inner
or secret chambers. The Heavenly Doctrine is presented as a “letter” to be
approached and regarded in much the same way as we might approach and
regard the Old and New Testaments.
Rather than believing and trusting in what can be seen by all to be written
in the text of the doctrine from the internal sense that has been given to us out
of heaven, the Heavenly Doctrine, we are asked to rely for the real or inner
truth on the enlightenment of finite men who supposedly are being, or are,
regenerated.
The point is that truly
every church down
through history has
been destroyed by
the same evil. The
people of the church,
eventually, did not
believe in the Lord
or His Word but
in themselves and
their own senses.
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