A church dictionary

by Walter Farquhar Hook

Emanuel Baron Swedenborg was born at Stockholm in 1688, and died in London in 1772. He was a person of great intellectual attainments, a member of several of the learned societies of Europe, and the author of very voluminous philosophical treatises. In 1745 he separated himself from all secular pursuits, relinquished his official labours in the Swedish State, and commenced the career which led to a religious movement. In that year, and thenceforth, he was favoured, he reports, with continual communications from the spiritual world, being oftentimes admitted into heaven itself, and there indulged with splendid visions of angelic glory and felicity. The power was given him to converse with these celestial residents; and from their revelations, sometimes made directly to himself and sometimes gathered by him from the course of their deliberations, he obtained the most important of his doctrines. His own account of the matter is thus stated in a letter to a friend:—“I have been called to a holy office by the Lord himself, who most graciously manifested himself before me, his servant, in the year 1745, and then opened my sight into the spiritual world, and gave me to speak with spirits and angels, as I do even to this day. From that time I began to publish the many arcana which I have either seen, or which have been revealed to me, concerning heaven and hell, concerning the state of man after death, concerning true Divine worship, and concerning the spiritual sense of the Word, besides other things of the highest importance, conducive to salvation and wisdom.”

The general result of these communications was to convince the baron that the sacred writings have two senses—one their natural, the other their spiritual, sense; the latter of which it was his high commission to unfold. The natural sense is that which is alone received by other Christian churches—the words of Scripture being understood to have the same signification (and no other) which they bear in ordinary human intercourse; the spiritual sense is that which, in the judgment of the New Church, is concealed within the natural sense of these same words, each word or phrase possessing, in addition to its ordinary meaning, an interior significance corresponding with some spiritual truth.

The principal tenets he deduced from this interior meaning of the Holy Word, and which his followers still maintain, are these: That the last judgment has already been accomplished (viz. in 1757); that the former “heaven and earth” are passed away; that the “New Jerusalem,” mentioned in the Apocalypse, has already descended, in the form of the “New Church;” and, that, consequently, the second advent of the Lord has even now been realized, in a spiritual sense, by the exhibition of his power and glory in the New Church thus established.

The usual doctrine of the Trinity is not received; the belief of the New Church being, “that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, comparatively as soul, body, and proceeding operation are one in every individual man.”

The New Church also rejects the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and the imputed righteousness of Christ: salvation, it inculcates, cannot be obtained except by the combination of good works with faith. “To fear God, and to work righteousness, is to have charity; and whoever has charity, whatever his religious sentiments may be, will be saved.”

The resurrection, it is believed, will not be that of the material body, but of a spiritual body; and this will not immediately pass into a final state of being, but be subject to a kind of purgatory, where those who are interiorly good will receive truth corresponding with their state of goodness, and thus be fitted for heaven; while those who are interiorly evil will reject all truth, and thus be among the lost.

The sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s supper are administered in the New Church. The former is believed to be “a sign and a medium, attended with a Divine influence of introduction into the Lord’s Church; and it means that the Lord will purify our minds from wicked desires and bad thoughts, if we are obedient to his holy word.” The latter is believed to be “a sign and a medium, attended with a Divine influence, for introducing the Lord’s true children, as to their spirits, into heaven; and it means that the Lord feeds their souls with his Divine goodness and truth.”

The mode of worship adopted by the followers of Swedenborg resembles in its general form that of most other Christian bodies; the distribution of subjects in their liturgy, and the composition of their hymns and prayers, being, of course, special; but no particular form is considered to be binding on each society.

The general affairs of the New Church (which is the name assumed by the Swedenborgian sect) are managed by a conference, which meets yearly, composed of ministers and laymen in conjunction; the proportion of the latter being determined by the size of the respective congregations which they represent: a society of from 12 to 50 members sending one representative, and societies of from 50 to 100 members, and those of upwards 100 members, sending each two and three representatives respectively. There is nothing, however, in Swedenborg’s writings to sanction any particular form of Church government.—Registrar-general’s Report.

SYMBOL, or SYMBOLUM. A title anciently given to the Apostles’ Creed, and for which several reasons have been assigned. Two of these have an appearance of probability, viz. that (1.) which derives it from a Greek word, signifying a throwing or casting together, and alleges that the apostles each contributed an article to form the creed, forming their joint opinion or counsel in an abridged form; and (2.) the opinion that this creed was used in times of persecution as a watchword or mark whereby Christians (like soldiers in the army) were distinguished from all others. This latter is the sense given in the short catechism of Edward VI., 1552, where we read, “M. Why is this abridgment of the faith termed a symbol? S. A symbol is, as much as to say, a sign, mark, privy token, or watchword, whereby the soldiers of the same camp are known from their enemies. For this reason the abridgment of the faith, whereby the Christians are known from them that are no Christians, is rightly named a symbol.”