By Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swede

Revelation 21:2, 5: I, John, saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And the one sitting on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new”; and said to me, “Write, because these words are true and trustworthy.”

§1 / [Author’s Preface]

§§2–8 / Roman Catholic Teachings Concerning Justification, Taken from the Council of Trent

§§9–15 / Protestant Teachings Concerning Justification, Taken from the Formula of Concord

§16 / Sketch of the Teachings of the New Church

1. §§17–18 / The churches that separated from Roman Catholicism during the Reformation disagree with each other on many points of theology, but there are four points on which they all agree: there is a trinity of persons in the Divine; original sin came from Adam; Christ’s merit is assigned to us; and we are justified by faith alone.

2. §§19–20 / In fact, in regard to the four theological points just listed, Roman Catholics before the Reformation had exactly the same teachings as Protestants did after it. That is, Catholics had the same teachings regarding the trinity of persons in the Divine, the same teachings regarding original sin, the same teachings regarding the assigning of Christ’s merit, and the same teachings regarding our being justified by believing that we are assigned Christ’s merit; the only difference was that Catholics united that faith to goodwill or good works.

3. §§21–23 / The leading reformers—Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin—retained all the dogmas regarding the trinity of persons in the Divine, original sin, the assigning of Christ’s merit to us, and our being justified by faith, in the same past and present form they had had among Roman Catholics. The reformers separated goodwill or good works from that faith, however, and declared that our good works contribute nothing to our salvation, for the purpose of clearly differentiating themselves from Roman Catholics with regard to the essentials of the church, which are faith and goodwill.

4. §§24–29 / The leaders of the Protestant Reformation do indeed describe good works as an appendage to faith and even an integral part of faith, but they say we are passive in the doing of them, whereas Roman Catholics say we are active in the doing of them. There is actually strong agreement between Protestants and Catholics on the subjects of faith, works, and our rewards.

5. §§30–38 / The entire theology in the Christian world today is based on the idea that there are three gods—an idea that has arisen from the teaching that there is a trinity of persons.

6. §§39–40 / Once we reject the idea of a trinity of persons and therefore the idea that there are three gods, and accept in its place that there is one God and that the divine trinity exists within him, we see how wrong the teachings of today’s Christian theology are.

7. §§41–42 / After we make this change, the faith we then acknowledge and accept is a faith that is truly effective for our salvation—a faith in one God, united to good works.

8. §§43–44 / This faith is faith in God the Savior Jesus Christ. In a simple form it is this: (1) There is one God, the divine trinity exists within him, and he is the Lord Jesus Christ. (2) Believing in him is a faith that saves. (3) We must abstain from doing things that are evil—they belong to the Devil and come from the Devil. (4) We must do things that are good—they belong to God and come from God. (5) We must do these things as if we ourselves were doing them, but we must believe that they come from the Lord working with us and through us.

9. §§45–46 / The faith of today has removed living a religious life from the church. A religious life consists in acknowledging one God and worshiping him with a faith that is connected to goodwill.

10. §§47–50 / The faith taught by the modern-day church is incapable of being united to acts of goodwill; it is incapable of producing any fruit in the form of good works.

11. §§51–52 / Th e faith of the modern-day church results in worship that engages our mouths but not our lives. How acceptable the Lord finds the worship of our mouths, though, depends on how worshipful our lives are.

12. §§53–57 / The body of teaching espoused by the modern-day church is woven together out of numerous absurdities that have to be taken on faith. Therefore its teachings become part of our memory alone. They do not become part of our higher understanding; they rest instead on supporting evidence from below the level of the intellect.

13. §§58–59 / The tenets of the church of today are extremely difficult to learn and retain. They cannot be preached or taught without a great deal of restraint and caution to keep them from appearing in their naked state, since true reason would not recognize or accept them.

14. §§60–63 / The teachings of faith of the modern-day church attribute to God qualities that are merely human: they say, for example, that God looked at the human race with anger; that he needed to be reconciled to us; that he was in fact reconciled through his love for his Son and through the Son’s intercession; that he needed to be appeased by seeing his Son’s wretched suffering, and this brought him back into a merciful attitude; that he assigns the Son’s justice to unjust people who beg him for it on the basis of their faith alone, and turns them from enemies into friends and from children of wrath into children of grace.

15. §§64–69 / The faith of the modern-day church has given birth to horrifying offspring in the past, and is producing more such offspring now: for example, the notion that there is instantaneous salvation as a result of the direct intervention of mercy; that there is predestination; that God cares only for our faith and pays no attention to our actions; that there is no bond that unites goodwill and faith; that as we undergo conversion we are like a log of wood; and many more teachings of the kind. Another problem has been the adoption of [false] principles of reason that are based on the teaching that we are justified by our faith alone and the teaching concerning the person of Christ, and the use of these principles to judge the uses and benefits of the sacraments (baptism and the Holy Supper). From the earliest centuries of Christianity until now, heresies have been leaping forth from a single source: the body of teaching based on the idea that there are three gods.

16. §§70–73 / The references in Matthew 24:3 to “the close of the age” and “the Coming of the Lord” that follows it mean the final state or the end of the church of today.

17. §§74–76 / The reference in Matthew 24:21 to “a great affliction such as has never existed since the world began and will never exist again” means an attack by falsities and the resulting end—the devastation—of all truth in the Christian denominations of today.

18. §§77–81 / The statement in Matthew 24 “After the affliction of those days, the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken” (Matthew 24:29) means that at the last time of the Christian church, when its end is imminent, it will have no love, no faith, and no knowledge of what is good or what is true.

19. §§82–86 / The goats mentioned in Daniel and Matthew mean people who are devoted to the modern-day view that faith is what justifies us.

20. §§87–90 / Adamant devotees of the modern-day view that faith is what justifies us are depicted in the Book of Revelation as the dragon, its two beasts, and the locusts. This belief (when strongly held) is depicted there as the great city that is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where the two witnesses were killed, and as the pit of the abyss from which the locusts came forth.

21. §§91–94 / Unless the Lord establishes a new church, no one can be saved. This is the meaning of the statement in Matthew 24:22 “Unless those days were cut short no flesh would be saved.”

22. §§95–98 / “The one who sat on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new’; and said to me, ‘Write, because these words are true and faithful’” (Revelation 21:5). This statement in the Book of Revelation means our examining and rejecting the tenets of faith of the modern-day church and God’s revealing and our accepting the tenets of faith of the new church.

23. §§99–101 / The New Jerusalem, which is the topic of Revelation 21 and 22, and is there called the bride and wife of the Lamb, is the new church that is going to be established by the Lord.

24. §§102–104 / There is no way in which we can simultaneously hold the views of the new church and the views of the former church on faith; if we did hold both these views at once, they would collide and cause so much conflict that everything related to the church would be destroyed in us.

25. §§105–108 / Roman Catholics today are not at all aware that their church once embraced concepts of the assigning of Christ’s merit to us and of our justification by faith in that. These concepts lie completely buried beneath their external rituals of worship, which are many. Therefore if Catholics give up some of their external rituals, turn directly to God the Savior Jesus Christ, and take both elements in the Holy Eucharist, they are better equipped than Protestants to become part of the New Jerusalem, that is, the Lord’s new church.

§§109–115 / [The Assignment of Christ’s Merit]

§§116–117 / Concluding Appendix

§§118–120 / Three Memorable Occurrences Taken from Revelation Unveiled

46. Brief Analysis

Surely every group of religious and reasonable people on the face of the earth knows and believes that there is one God; that doing good things is being with God; that doing evil things goes against God; that we must apply our own soul, heart, and powers to doing what is good and not doing what is evil, even though these faculties and abilities actually flow into us from God; and that the religious life consists in doing all the above. Surely everyone can see, then, that to confess three persons within the Divine and to declare that salvation has nothing to do with good works is to remove religious life from the church.

The Protestant assertion that salvation has nothing to do with good works is made in the following passages. Faith makes us just apart from good works; see §12a, b. Good works are not necessary either for our salvation or for our faith, because salvation and faith are not preserved or maintained by our good works; see §12g, h, l, m. Therefore there is no bond that unites faith and good works.

If we go back to the assertion that good works nevertheless spontaneously follow faith like fruit issuing forth from a tree—see §13k, m—then we must ask this: Who does these good works? In fact, who would bother thinking about them or feel spontaneously moved to do them when they know and believe that these works contribute nothing to their salvation, and that none of us on our own can do any good for our own salvation, and so on?

If someone asserts that Protestants do nonetheless unite good works to their faith, I reply that if you deeply examine that union, you find that it is not actually a uniting but rather an appending of good works to faith. Good works are an appendage that is tacked on; they are not an integral part or even securely attached. They are like the shadows that are added to a painting to make it look more realistic. Religious practice, though, has to do with our lives; it consists in good works that we do in accordance with the truths taught by our faith. Clearly, then, religious practice is not in actuality an appendage; it is the thing itself.

To many people, though, living a religious life is like a horse’s tail; you can remove it if you want, because it serves no purpose. Who could come to any other reasonable conclusion from statements such as the following when taken at face value?

It is foolish to dream that the works enjoined by the second tablet of the Ten Commandments make us just before God; see §12d.

Any who believe they will gain salvation because they do acts of goodwill are insulting Christ; see §12e.

Good works must be completely excluded from any discussion of our justification and eternal life; see §12f.

There are many other such statements there as well.

When we go on to read that good works necessarily follow faith, and that if they do not follow faith, our faith is false and not true (see §13o, p, v, and many other passages), who among us pays any attention to this? Or if we do pay attention to it, do we do good works consciously? Because good works that somehow flow out of us when we are unaware of them are surely as lifeless as if they had been done by a statue.

If we look more deeply into the cause of this teaching, we find that the leading reformers first assumed faith alone as their standard dogma in order to be differentiated from Roman Catholics, as I mentioned above (§§21, 22, 23). Later on they attached acts of goodwill so as not to go against Sacred Scripture and so that their denomination would be viewed as a religion and something wholesome.

13. Particular teachings from the Formula of Concord concerning the fruits of faith:

(a) The difference between the works of the law and the works of the Spirit must be most diligently noted. The works that the reborn do with a free and joyful spirit are not works of the law but works of the Spirit; they are the fruits of faith. Such people are no longer under the law but under grace (pages 589, 590, 721, 722).

(b) Good works are the fruits of repentance (page 12).

(c) Through faith, the reborn receive a new life, new desires, and new works; these come from the faith that exists in repentance (page 134).

(d) After this conversion and justification, our minds and eventually even our intellects begin to be renewed. Then our will is not idle in the daily exercise of repentance (pages 582, 673, 700).

(e) We need to practice repentance both from original sin and from our own actual sins (page 321; appendix, page 159).

(f) This repentance endures among Christians until death because it struggles with the sin that remains in the flesh throughout life (page 327).

(g) The law of the Ten Commandments must take hold in us and then increase more and more (pages 85, 86).

(h) Although the reborn are indeed liberated from the curse of the law, they should daily practice the law of the Lord (page 718).

(i) The reborn are never without the law, and at the same time they are not under the law; they live according to the law of the Lord (page 722).

(j) For those who are reborn, the law must be the norm of their religious practice (pages 596, 717; appendix, page 156).

(k) The reborn do good works not by coercion but spontaneously and freely, as if they knew of no commandment, had heard no threat, and were expecting no reward (pages 596, 701).

(l) The faith the reborn have is constantly engaged in doing good works. Whoever does not do such works is an unbeliever. Where faith exists, there good works are being done (page 701).

(m) Goodwill and worthy fruits follow faith and regeneration (pages 121, 122, 171, 188, 692).

(n) Faith and good works fit beautifully together and are inseparably connected. But it is faith alone that lays hold of the blessing, apart from works, and yet it is never, ever alone. As a result, faith without works is dead (pages 692, 693).

(o) After a person has been justified by faith, there then exists a true, living faith that works through love. Good works always follow justifying faith and are certainly found with it. Faith is never alone but is always accompanied by love and hope (page 586).

(p) We say that if good works do not follow, then faith is false and not true (page 336).

(q) It is impossible to separate good works from faith, quite as impossible as to separate heat and light from fire (page 701).

(r) Because the old Adam still continues to hang on in their nature, the reborn need not only the law’s daily instruction and admonition, its warning and threatening; often they also need its punishments. They are reproved and restrained by the Holy Spirit through the law (pages 719, 720, 721).

(s) The reborn still have to struggle with the old Adam. The flesh, which is still a part of them, needs to be forced into obedience through admonitions, threats, and blows, since the renewal of life through faith merely begins in this lifetime (pages 595, 596, 724).

(t) The battle of the flesh against the Spirit continues even in the elect and truly reborn (pages 675, 679).

(u) Christ announces that our sins will be forgiven because of our good works. He says this for three reasons: because our good works follow our being reconciled to God; because good fruits ought of necessity to follow [our repentance]; and because our good works are signs of his promise to us (pages 116, 117).

(v) There is no saving faith in those who lack goodwill. Love is a fruit that certainly and necessarily results from true faith (page 688).

(w) Good works are necessary for a host of reasons, but we are not to count on meriting [grace] through them (pages 11, 17, 64, 95, 133, 589, 590, 702; appendix, page 172).

(x) With the new powers and gifts the reborn have received, they should cooperate with the Holy Spirit, but in a particular way (pages 582, 583, 674, 675; appendix, page 144).

(y) In the Belgic Confession, which was officially adopted at the Synod of Dort, we read the following:

It is impossible for this holy faith to be unfruitful in us—faith works through love. These works, as they proceed from the good root of faith, are good and acceptable in the sight of God, like the fruit of a good tree. We are indebted to God for the good works we do, but he is not indebted to us on their account, since it is he who produces them in us. (Belgic Confession [24])