new church life: september/october 2015
from the creation story to the strange symbols and images of Revelation. Many
of them assume there must be a deeper meaning to all this and speculate on
interpretations, but much that cannot be explained is just accepted on faith.
There is great beauty and power in just the letter of the Word, but much as
well that people find hard to reconcile with a loving God.
When the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible was
celebrated in 2011, a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer praised it as “a
mighty collection of wisdom, holiness and comfort – a warning against
extremism in religion and secular life.”
This prompted a scornful letter from a reader wondering if the writer
had been “so caught up in the language and translation that he’d missed all
the violence: the jealous God full of wrath and vengeance; the genocide; the
denigration of women; the approbation of slavery; and the approval of incest
and infanticide? Extremism to the max! Most of us are taught to revere the
Bible, not read it. When I actually did read it, I became an atheist.”
That is a sad reaction to the letter of the Word, but understandable. With
so much in the Old Testament especially about a jealous, vengeful, punishing
God – and without the clear explanations from the “Spirit of Truth” – it can
be challenging to reconcile all the apparent ugliness there with an all-loving,
merciful God.
One of the gems of New Church collateral literature is The Bible that was
Lost and is Found by John Bigelow. He was a prominent lawyer, statesman
and publisher in the mid-19th century who found himself stranded in Haiti
by a smallpox epidemic. As was his custom, he studied the Bible regularly. He
complained one day to the only other occupant of his hotel about the passage
in Genesis where Abram asks Sarai to lie to the pharaoh, saying she is his sister,
not his wife. Bigelow wonders why an honorable man should so such a thing.
His Danish companion quietly asked if he had ever read Swedenborg and
handed him a copy of the Arcana with the explanation of the spiritual sense
of this story.
Bigelow was intrigued and began reading everything of Swedenborg that
he could get his hands on. But he brought a skeptic’s zeal, certain that he would
come across something outrageous that would expose Swedenborg as a fraud.
That never happened. Instead Bigelow became convinced that this had
to be revelation from God, not the product of a mortal mind. He had the
epiphany that “once I was blind and now I see.”
Even though we have the gift of the second coming, unlocking all
of the mysteries of the Word, we may still read it at times with the sudden
enlightenment of John Bigelow – like Jacob awakening in the wilderness after
dreaming of angels ascending and descending a ladder to heaven and saying:
“Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not. . . . This is none other but the
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