“Is it Christian?” That’s one of the first questions many ask when they first encounter the ideas offered by Emanuel Swedenborg. The answer is simple: “Yes, it is.”
That said, the ideas in Swedenborg's works are the basis for a new Christianity, that clears away some of the mistaken concepts and practices of the old Christian churches, which fell into various falsities and corruptions.
Merriam-Webster defines a Christian as “one who professes belief in the teachings of Jesus Christ.” Dictionary.com is similar: “a person who believes in Jesus Christ”; and defines the adjective form as “of, pertaining to, or derived from Jesus Christ or His teachings.”
Swedenborg’s works teach that Jesus was the actual embodiment of Jehovah himself, the divine soul in a human body. They also teach that His words and acts are not only compelling as literal statements, but are also filled with the infinity of divine truith when understood on a spiritual level. That would certainly make the ideas “Christian” according to the dictionary definitions.
In modern parlance, however, “Christian” is often used in a more narrow sense. Fundamental Protestants tend to define it as “a person who believes that God the Father sent Jesus the Son into the world to become the ultimate sacrifice, taking on Himself all the sins of humanity and atoning for them on the cross; and that to go to heaven people must accept the salvation so offered.” Swedenborg’s works say that God is one; there was no separate Son from eternity. They say God took human form as Jesus for two reasons: first, so the He could be tempted, and could thus battle the hells and put them order; and second, so that people, who had nearly lost their connection to the divine, could again see Him as a human and be open to His teaching and leading. Finally, they say that salvation comes through believing in God and following His commandmants; they say we need to turn away from evil and strive for good out of a determination to follow the Lord, and that if we do the Lord will ultimately bring us into a state of loving what is good.
By those criteria, then, many would (and do) label the belief system non-Christian.
Swedenborg’s works themselves offer an interesting take on Christianity. On one hand they clearly regard Christianity - in its proper form - as the “true” religion, the one best able to bring people to conjunction with the Lord, the one that rightly regards Jesus as divine. In fact, the last work published by Swedenborg is titled “True Christian Religion,” or “True Christianity” in some translations. The intent seems to be one of putting Christianity on the right track, not one of destroying it and starting something new.
On the other hand, they say Christianity was spiritually devastated by the idea of one God in three persons, with further destruction brought by the idea of salvation by faith alone. They say that the fall of the Christian Church was foretold in the Gospels and in Revelation, and that by the 18th century Christianity had became as spiritually empty as Judaism was at the time of Jesus’s birth. In fact, they say that Swedenborg was called by the Lord to write what he did so that a new version of Christianity could rise from the ashes of the old churches and finally be what the Lord intended it to be.
Predictably, these are not terribly welcome ideas among Christians, but it’s interesting to look at what Christianity was at the time of Swedenborg (his theological works were published from 1748 to 1770) and what it is now, and also to look at the world then and now. Despite adhering to the ideas of the Trinity and blood atonement, many churches have put less and less emphasis on the fine points of doctrine and more and more emphasis on developing a personal relationship with Jesus and with living “a Christian life” - getting ever closer to simply loving the Lord and keeping His commandments. As for the world, it has moved from a system of monarchy and aristocracy to one of democracy, equality and freedom, a world in which people are judged by what they make of themselves rather than by the circumstances of their births. Could it be that we are living in the New Christian Age, and have been for 250 years, without even knowing it?
(Reference: Heaven and Hell 318, 319; The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem Regarding Faith 34; True Christian Religion 180, 183, 206, 536, 632, 636, 681, 760, 761, 831, 836)
