For several decades, responsible churchmen have been viewing with alarm a divided Christianity. The body of Christ appears to be a multitude of shattered fragments, each struggling piece trying to maintain its own individuality and independence. The tragic absurdity of this picture is brought home to us in the Hindu fable of the blind men and the elephant. Six men of Hindustan who are blind but have a great desire to learn, go to examine an elephant. Each stumbles against a part of the beast or clutches at some protruding member like the trunk or tail. Each mistakes the part he touches for the whole animal and makes fantastic comparisons. We often mistake our one member of the body of Christ for the whole; we insist that the body of Christ is all arms or legs, all head or all heart. We dispute absurdly about the vision of the one church which none of us has seen. A considerable number of churchmen are beginning to glimpse the vision, and the realization is dawning that unless the differing churches see themselves as parts of a living whole, Protestant Christianity at least will be a rubble of broken shards which the spiritual archeologist of the future may examine at his leisure. As Walter Marshall Horton states it, "Protestantism is finished unless it can become radically transformed into a new type of Christianity." The churches must be made alive again by identifying themselves as servants of the One Church in which each member performs a needed service that contributes to the rich and varied life of a renewed Christianity.

Here is one area of Swedenborg's abiding significance. He caught the vision of a renewed and united Christianity. In a statement which has been quoted often in recent years, he says: "I have heard that churches which are in different goods and truths, provided their goods have reference to love to the Lord, and their truths to faith in him, are like so many jewels in the King's crown." Swedenborg's own life, his basic altitude as a theologian, and his systematic restatement of Christian theology give life and substance to his vision. Today his spirit and theological outlook can he a stimulus to our own vision of a church made whole; and to New Churchmen at least, Swedenborg's work should be the basis for our determining what our particular contribution can be to a Christianity trying to recover a sense of oneness. The rest of these remarks will, I hope, give some of the pertinent evidence of the ecumenical character of Swedenborg's work.

Swedenborg's horizons were never narrow; his wide range of interests prevented that. Although his interests in science, philosophy, and religion may at times have seemed to him hostile to each other, in his later life each had its place. Science, he found, is the study of effects: the observation and analysis of the phenomena of nature. Philosophy is the study of the why of these phenomena: it is the examination of the causes of things that lie in the spiritual realm which eludes the senses. Theology is 'the study of ends, or the seeking to know the nature and purposes of God. These three fields of study have a meaningful place in the life of men if each is kept to its proper function. The three areas help one another, if men begin with the affirmative state of mind of willingness to believe in God. This underlying acknowledgment of God can 'bring harmony out of discord in these three main areas of our concern.

Besides this sense of unity which embraced his varied interests, there is Swedenborg's own attitude toward his mission as the herald of a new age. He thought of himself as a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord gave the vision of a renewed Christianity; Swedenborg reported faithfully as much as he could of this vision within the limits of human language. The Lord composed the tune; Swedenborg gave it an understanding performance which men could hear.

There are tell-tale bits of evidence which show that this role of the servant was not an exercise in literary humility, but an expression of honest conviction. Swedenborg founded no sect. Tie would not establish a following; he discouraged his admirers from establishing a church organization which could be identified as his church. He avoided entangling alliances with special sects. Swedenborg never disclaimed his membership in the Swedish Lutheran communion. Another piece of evidence that the servant role is genuine is the style of writing in the theological works. There is no attempt to develop a distinguished literary style. No new terminology of Christian learning which often seems to be hackneyed and shopworn from centuries of repealed use. Immanuel Kant took the highroad of coining a complete set of terms for his thought; Swedenborg took 'the low and difficult road of breathing renewed life into the old terms, in order that there might be a firmly established basis of communication between himself and the learned world of the churches and universities to which he sent his books. The response to his effort from the learned world was slim enough in his lifetime, but this did not appear to injure his work. He knew that the new church would begin with a few. The renewed life of Christianity is not a sudden upsetting of history by God, but a sure and gradual growth. Swedenborg persisted in his task regardless of discouragement, for he was confident in the knowledge that "a new church is now being instituted by the Lord, which is called in the Apocalypse, the New Jerusalem, to which the things being published by me at the present day will be of service: it is also being instituted elsewhere."

What is the nature of this new church? It is not a new sect, nor is it an entirely new set of doctrines which have nothing to do with historic Christianity. The new church is the Lord bringing about a reawakening to the values for living which have been in Christianity since the incarnation. There is renewed awareness of the truth men must live by, which truth the Lord has been revealing to men since he created them. If a man is willing to believe in a God who loves him, he will find in the new age that religion is intelligible and reasonable. "Now it is permitted to enter with understanding into the mysteries of faith." Religion in .the new era encompasses the whole life of man, his will and his conduct as well as his mind. To love God and our neighbor is not only to understand what God teaches, but to do what he asks. As the gospel of John states it: "He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me."

There must be a restatement of theology for this age of revitalized Christianity, and Swedenborg makes a non-sectarian contribution to this work in what he characterizes in True Christian Religion as a universal theology.

Swedenborg lived with the agonized recognition of the chaotic diversity of churches. He acknowledged that there would continue to be diversity, but that the church could be bound into one in fundamentals or essentials. "There are three essentials of the church: the acknowledgment of the divinity of the Lord, the acknowledgment of the holiness of the Word, and the life which is called charity." "If the church had held these three as essentials, intellectual dissensions would not have divided but only varied it, as light varies colors in beautiful objects, and as various diadems give beauty in the crown of a king." In all his detailed exegesis of Scripture, in his complex discussions of the structure of the Human spirit, in his reporting of his own religious experience, Swedenborg kept these essentials before him.

Oneness in the church requires that there be oneness in its God, even though every individual Christian and every group of Christians will understand God differently from one another. Scripture, nature, and reason all conspire to show us that there is one God for us to worship. While Swedenborg insists upon the oneness of God, he does not adopt what would appear to be the simple solution of discarding the problem of the trinity. This solution would mean a clean break with historic Christianity. Some absurd and erroneous notions about the Lord might be laid to rest, but the abiding values of the teachings of the New Testament about the Lord could be damaged as well. Unloading the doctrine of the trinity from theology could narrow our idea of God to just what we can know from the gospels or some other part of the Bible. This would be making God finite like ourselves, reducing Him to be the creature of the limits of human knowledge and understanding. There is one God who is infinite and eternal, but He reveals to men that there is a trinity in Him of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit- These three are not persons in the Godhead, but three ways in which God relates Himself to us, three aspects of His nature which have their counterpart in man's nature. Will, thought, and action are all aspects of one man; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three aspects of one Divine Nature. One God is our Father, because He creates us and gives us life; because, when we are born again to the awareness of the life of the spirit, He has created us anew, God was obedient to His own love of the humanity He created, just as a son is obedient to his father, and He came into the world to reveal His love for us in a human life. Even those who will not acknowledge the divinity of Jesus Christ will stoutly maintain that this was the greatest human life ever lived. This human nature which God took upon himself and glorified with His love is called by the New Testament the Son of God. As the Son He was tempted while on earth to live a life of less than divine stature. He overcame the evil in His humanity and so restored for men the balance between heaven and hell within our nature, and gave to us again the freedom to choose whether we will make of our life a heaven or a hell.

If the Father designates God's creative life, and the Son refers to his power to save men's souls, the Holy Spirit is a name for the Lord's activity of guiding us in our search for the truth and a deeper understanding of it when we find it. The Holy Spirit is our Lord still teaching us how to live with new insights into his life and Word.

So much for this sketch of Swedenborg's explanation of the trinity. What is new here is not so much the doctrine of the trinity itself, but the depth of penetration into its meaning in order to produce an interpretation which was rational and plausible to modern man. Swedenborg was so dedicated to the vision of a renewed Christian unity in this essential of the acknowledgment of the Lord, that he says at the beginning of a section of his Doctrine of the Lord, "I will now present the entire doctrine which: has its name from Athanasius, and afterwards demonstrate that all that is there said is true, provided that instead of a trinity of persons, the trinity of person be understood." With this change which refers to the three areas of the Lord's nature, it appears that Swedenborg thought that even this worn confessional symbol might serve as one common creed to many churches. This is my own passing speculation, for it is certain that Swedenborg thought of this creed as just one of the possible instruments which the Lord might use in restoring oneness to his Church. Although he states his rational explanation of the nature of God in a number of ways, he did not draft a new creed.

To the second of what he calls the essentials Swedenborg also gives ecumenical rather than sectarian treatment. In Christian history there have been two major approaches to interpretation of the Bible. One school of thought has emphasized the literal text. These interpreters stress the grammatical and historical meaning of biblical texts, and they derive whatever theological meaning they can on this basis. The other school which is not quite so fashionable now is the allegorical school. Here the emphasis is on meaning which is not literal. Allegorical interpretation makes symbols out of the words of the text and these symbols make up a code which the interpreter uses to read a special theological or philosophical meaning into Scripture. This special meaning tends to explain away the literal meaning with all its inconveniences and inconsistencies. The two schools have never lived peaceably together, for one approach will not admit the validity of the other: the allegorist insists that his meaning must replace the literal meaning; the literal approach will not admit of other meanings beyond the plain sense of the text.

Although Swedenborg does not accept the allegorical approach, he speaks to this long-standing dilemma. He does not wish to explain away the literal meaning of Scripture. But he argues that the reason for the inspired character of the Scriptures must lie beyond the surface meaning of the Bible with all its paradoxes. The reason for the inspiration of Scripture he finds in what he characterizes as the spiritual sense. This level of meaning goes beyond, or is added to the literal meaning of Scripture, but it does not explain away that literal meaning. This spiritual sense has always been in the Bible since its composition, but in this age of Christianity renewed, the Lord is disclosing the spiritual meaning of Scripture more fully than he has before. This inward meaning is not arrived at by a set of man-made symbols; it is governed by a universal law called correspondence. This law governs not only the relation of the spirit and letter of Scripture; but correspondence is a law of the working of the universe which embraces the entire relationship of the world of spirit and the world of nature. Correspondence is something like a cause-effect relation between the two worlds. In the world of our emotion and thought lie the causes which express themselves in the world of action which is the level of effects. The law is also reflected in common speech. We speak not only o{ a warm day but a warm heart. We talk of a quick eye and also of a quick mind, etc. According to this law the spiritual meaning of Scripture which Lies within the letter is a cause. It conveys the full range of truth which is partially expressed in the letter in ways that meet the varied types of limitations of man's understanding. The statements of the letter of the Bible are what Swedenborg calls appearances of truth. The ideas expressed in these appearances of truth are near to or remote from real truth, depending upon the state of man's mind to which they are addressed. The letter speaks of both a God who is merciful and a God who is angry. The picture of an angry God is addressed to people who load human weakness and evil upon God; and God, because of his love for all, allows communication with this state of mind in its own terms. Statements about a God of mercy are addressed to more mature people who do not insist upon making God in their own image. The spiritual meaning, which is closer to the real truth than the letter, never admits a God of anger but is consistent in its presentation of a God of mercy.

Swedenborg presents a working solution to the problem of biblical exegesis. There is a significant function which the letter performs. Christians must draw their doctrine from the sense of the letter of Scripture. Swedenborg insists that there is sufficient matter in the literal text from which to draw adequate teaching for the Christian life. The spiritual meaning, he tells us, is for the most part for those who have attained the heavenly life in the world of the spirit. Excursions into the spiritual meaning are possible for some in this life; but these excursions are regulated by the Lord, depending upon the degree of spiritual maturity of the individual and the depth of his religious experience and insight. Here we have a view of the Scriptures which permits the greatest possible variety of types of genuine acknowledgment of the holiness of the Word of God.

The two essentials we have considered, which contribute to the oneness of the church, cannot do without the third. This is the life which is called charity or the Christian life. By the life of charity do we mean the life of doing good? Swedenborg points out that to do good we need beliefs which give us standards to determine what doing good is. We need love of God and of our neighbor to give motive and force to our standards and our actions. Swedenborg is not stating anything startlingly new here. The Lord teaches this view of the Christian life in his incarnation, and he still teaches it in the Bible. But Swedenborg was, and still is, speaking to churches which have tendencies to divide on the question of the Christian life. The Lord strives to renew our awareness of a balanced view of Christian living, because most of us are more or less guilty of the sin of over-emphasis.

First, we may emphasize faith or belief to the detriment of Christian love and action. Harping on faith can take the form of intellectualizing religion too much, subjecting all questions of Christian belief to the limitations of human reason. This cramped approach can become religious theory with no relation to Christian practice. Here is how Swedenborg characterizes Christian faith: Such a believer "wanders about like a blind man who everywhere is hitting something and who falls into pits." Over-emphasis on faith can be mere passive acceptance of a set of doctrines. Instead of being tools for living, doctrines become the markers for the graves of convictions which died of malnutrition.

Faith without real love of the Lord cart change from faith in God to an overdose of self-reliance. Then there is talk about self-made men. A good comment on this abuse of faith appeared in a Sunday paper. Two Irishwomen were conversing. One said, "But Timothy is a self-made man." The second replied, "Sure, what a fine example of unskilled labor."

Love can be overstressed as well as faith. Good will without sound thought and belief is undiscriminating. Such love is insensitive to the real attractions of what is good in people, and equally unaware of the rebuffs of evil. Love like this loses sight of God and becomes an expression of self. It either smothers its victims with kindness, or tries to mold them into images of itself. This love feeds itself on the lives of others. If we are guilty of this unhealthy stress on love, we can be characterized in the poet's line: "each man kills the thing he loves."

Today we seem to live in an age which puts a painful premium upon activity. Do-gooders run riot. If churches cannot be something they must do something. We have to do something for somebody whether they need it or not, or whether we have any good reason or clear motive for doing it. People "must" have things done for them so they can live the same kind of life we do! In a poem called "The Roadside Stand" Robert Frost pictures the way the do-good complex affects the none-too-prosperous owners of these stands during the depression. They are brought into the village

Where they won't have to think for themselves anymore; While greedy good-doers, beneficient beasts of prey. Swarm over their lives enforcing benefits That arc calculated to soothe them out of their wits. And by teaching them how to sleep the sleep all day Destroying their sleeping at night the ancient way.

To clear away the smoke of over-emphasis, a few generalized definitions are in order. Doing good or a life of Christian service is at its best a concrete realization of loving God and man and active practical faith. Real faith is to believe in the Lord and to keep his commandments. Christian love is not alone good will to God and men, but a desire for truth which gives love eyes to see the lights and shadows of right and wrong in life. Such love has the persistence to seek to know God's will, the courage to work for it, and the discernment to find goodness from God in the lives of fellow men.

Unless Swedenborg had dared with the Lord's guidance to give solid theological content to the three essentials of the church, his vision of a united and renewed Christianity might sound from his pages like wishful thinking or an idle dream. We can look now at some of his remarks about the ideal of oneness in the church with the realization that they grow out of a restatement of fundamentals of Christian doctrine which presents a non-sectarian basis for the discussion of theological questions that divide the church.

Perhaps we can quote without comment one of Swedenborg's most significant statements concerning one Christian church:

In the Christian world the doctrines are what distinguish churches; and from them men call themselves Roman Catholics, Lutherans, etc. ... it is from what is doctrinal alone that they are so-called; which would not be at all, if they would make love to the Lord and charity toward the neighbor the principal thing's of faith. The doctrines would then be only varieties of opinion respecting the mysteries of faith, which truly Christian men would leave to everyone according to his conscience, and would say in their hearts that one is truly a Christian when he lives as a Christian, or as the Lord teaches. Thus from all the differing churches there would become one church; and all the dissensions which exist from doctrine alone would vanish; yea, the hatreds against one another would be dissipated in a moment, and the Lord's kingdom would come upon earth (Arcana Coelestia, No, 1799)

But the Lord's church is not restricted to Christians. "The church of the Lord is spread over all the globe, thus is universal, and all those are in it who have lived in the good of charity according to their religion." Such a church is invisible, transcending religious organizations. Religious organizations can be servants of the Lord's church, but they are hardly the measure of its unity. Men of real faith throughout the world are united by the bond of their love and worship of God and their striving to live by the standards which their religion teaches. Swedenborg has a still larger vision of the church which unites those who serve God in this world with those who arc serving him in the world of the spirit.

Although the one great church includes all who serve God in both worlds, Swedenborg will not let us lose sight of the individual in our contemplation of the vastness of the church. "The church," he says, "is within man and not without him; and every man is a church in whom the Lord is present in the good of love and faith." We are temples not made with hands if we give the Lord a sanctuary in our lives. The World Council of Churches in one of its Evanston statements speaks of the need for the Christian churches to repent of their divisions. But repentance, or the changing of the character of our lives, begins in the individual. Each Christian is called by the Lord to repent of his daily selfish divisions with his own neighbors. Here is where the binding up the church begins.

Beyond the repentance which is the common lot of all Christians, what contribution can our New Church denomination make to the work of realizing the vision of a united Christianity? What distinctive part can the champion of Swedenborgian theology play in binding up the church? We can begin by reminding ourselves that Swedenborgian theology is intended not to divide Christians, but to bring them together. From this basic premise we can work to promote intelligent and charitable discussion of theological issues among Christians of our own and other churches. In our local communities we can continue to participate with other churches in bearing witness that Christians of many names can unite effectively in an ever larger area of Christian life and work. It is in the occupants of our local pulpits and pews that the ecumenical character of New Church theology must come alive. Each of us will have to get used to the idea of living with a vision of one church, for as the proverb says: "Where there is no vision, the people perish." Do we have the courage to live with the vision?