new church life: november/december 2016
1769) All of this writing and printing took place “while I have read the Word.”
(True Christian Religion 779)22
There is no evidence that Jennens or Handel knew anything of Swedenborg.
But it is interesting that Swedenborg first began to write of the Second Coming
using “God Messiah.” This was some time after Jennens compiled the text for
Handel’s Messiah. As a devout opponent to Deism, Jennens certainly seems
qualified for the enlightenment any commoner can receive if he holds the
Word to be holy. Thus Jennens collected the “doctrine of genuine truth” –
hand and face passages where the spiritual meaning is open in the literal text
(Sacred Scripture 55) – from Holy Scripture, the King James Version he loved,
to disprove Deism, and send Handel to his most famous victory: The Messiah.
In its apparently miraculous music, receiving of the “true order and
heaven’s realities,” Handel’s Messiah serves as a platform for the explanation
of who Messiah really is by the “manifestation of the Lord, and admission
[of Swedenborg] into the spiritual world, [which] surpasses all miracles . . .
[since it] has not been granted to anyone since the creation, as it has been to
[Swedenborg].” (Invitation to the New Church 52)
These two miracles were just a couple of years apart – 1741-2, and 1743
– with first public performances or publications in the spiritually central,
English-speaking world, so that both could follow the track of Christianity and
spread to the whole world. That is why the New Church today is world-wide.
Hallelujah!
The Rev. Dr. Erik E. Sandstrom has served in the Olivet
Church, Toronto, Canada; the Michael Church, London,
England; the Hurstville New Church in New South Wales,
Australia; as an instructor in Bryn Athyn College and its
Theological School; and as Director of Swedenborgiana in the
Swedenborg Library in Bryn Athyn. In retirement he continues
to serve as Acting Curator of Swedenborgiana. He and his wife,
Lynn-Del (Walter), live in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania.
Contact: [email protected]
22 This opening stage of Divine enlightenment from 1743 also would account for Swedenborg’s
interworks, between his Worship and Love of God (printed in 1745 i.e. Adam and Eve chatting about
how creation actually took place, the Nebular Hypothesis revisited), (Coleridge later lauded this work as
the very Parnassus of poetry!) and the Arcana in 1749: These never-printed-by-Swedenborg interworks
are: 1. the Adversaria or Word Explained (a dry run for the Arcana) 2. the Spiritual Diary starting in 1748
– coming into daily adventures in the after-life -- he also renewed studies of Hebrew; 3 .Index Biblicus,
a biblical Index -- meanings of key scriptural names and words, 4. Messiah about to Come, 5. Gad
and Asher, 6. Isaiah and Jeremiah Explained, 7. The Greek Orthodox Religion, 8. Miracles. We might
also include 9. Marginal Notes – his own jottings on the spiritual sense of various texts in his Sebastian
Schmidt or Schmidius Bible (Leipzig 1694); the Old and New Testament Hebrew and Greek translated
into Latin.
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