The application of the Law of
Correspondence to the interpretation of Holy Scripture as actual Divine
revelation becomes manifest. As everything in nature has a Divine end and a
spiritual meaning, so Divine revelation, expressed in terms taken from nature
and from the thoughts and images of the human mind, becomes rationally
conceivable. For the mind can conceive of the Divine Spirit selecting, by
inspiration in the mind of the amanuensis, out of the vocabulary not only of
nature but of human history and tradition, those things, countries, persons and
events which may be the outward form and symbols of inner, spiritual
realities.
So may God ‘open His mouth in parables’
and make known ‘by things that are made the things invisible, even His eternal
power and Godhead.’
Applied to the
conception of God and the Divine Trinity, the law of Discrete Degrees
distinguishes the Father as the Esse,
the Divine Love and primal Substance—from the Son as the Εxistere, the Wisdom or Word by whom all things are, and from the
Holy Spirit as that proceeding and perpetual Operation of the Divine Love and
Wisdom in uses in the created world. It is in the sending forth of the Divine
that things are created. Potentially existing from eternity as Love, Wisdom and
Use in the one God, Jehovah, the Trinity becomes actual in time in the Divine
Humanity of Jesus Christ. In the Word made Flesh the Divine Love, which is the
Father, is ‘made manifest, and through this the Holy Spirit is breathed upon
the world. Thus in Him, Jesus Christ, dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead
bodily.’ The Divine Trinity is not a trinity of persons, but of person. The
essential trinity of love, wisdom and their operation, or of will, thought and
work, constitute personality whether human or divine. In the work of redemption
Jehovah has clothed Himself in the womb of a virgin with the nature of man, and
thus in the person of Jesus Christ taken upon Himself the burden of all the
accumulated sinful heredity of mankind from the beginning. In the life of
Jesus Christ on earth the Divine fought with those evils admitted into the
infirm humanity by temptation and conquered them. By so doing He overcame the
hells and subdued them unto Himself, and was enabled with the cry upon the cross,
‘It is finished,’ to say to all men ‘Be of good cheer … I have overcome the
world.’ Redemption therefore consisted, not in a plan of judicature by which divine justice was to be satisfied by a
vicarious sacrifice, but it is a veritable fait
αccοmpli, a most real warfare with and victory over the hells, achieved by
the one Champion of human spiritual liberty. This liberty is attainable by men
through faith and obedience, not as conditions arbitrarily imposed, but as
essential to that free self-activity on man's part, which enables him to become
a voluntary recipient of God's love, and a willing subject of His Kingdom. The
worship of Jesus Christ in His Divine Humanity as the one and only God of
heaven and earth, and the one and only Saviour of mankind, is therefore the
corner stone of Swedenborg's religious system and of the doctrine which he
outlined of a New Christianity. Swedenborg's religious scheme knows nothing of
sect or nationality as affecting the Divine regard for man. All nations and all
religions are embraced under the survey of the Divine Providence, which looks
to eternal ends, and strives to lift men continually out of the evil into which
they have fallen through the abuse of their moral freedom, and to bring them
into the liberty of heaven.
Since God in Jesus Christ is alone
worshipped in all the heavens, all men of all religions who have believed and
worshipped, however blindly and grossly here, will, in the intermediate World
of Spirits, have the veils of heredity and local ignorance removed, and come to
see the one true God behind all the various symbols by which He has been
worshipped here. The only essential conditions of salvation are belief in the
Divine and voluntary self-subjection to the Divine Law because it is Divine.
Swedenborg's
religion is eminently ethical and practical. According to him the ‘Kingdom of Heaven is a kingdom of uses.’ ‘All
religion,’ he says, 'is of life, and the life of religion is to do good.’ But
by doing good is not meant eleemosynary acts of benevolence of the works of
piety. It is rather the shunning of evils as sins against God, and the faithful
performance of the duties of one's station from a religious motive. This
constitutes the essence of Charity in the sublime sense in which Swedenborg
uses this much-abused word. Charity is simply the love of God to man exercised
by means of, or through, voluntary human agents. Men, by shunning evils as
sins, open the channels of their life for the influx from above, and the
outflow to their fellowman of this universal divine benevolence and its
delights. The universe is love; but love requires human moral freedom as the
condition of its own exercise. When sinful self-love is removed by man, all the
works that he performs become good works, and all earthly uses become the
ultimate forms in which the ends of Divine love are realized in effect.
