Emanuel Swedenborg

Emanuel Swedenborg (born Emanuel Swedberg; January 29, 1688 – March 29, 1772) is a Swedish scientist, philosopher, theologian and Christian mystic.

He terms himself a "Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ" in True Christian Religion, one of the works he publishes himself.

Swedenborg has a prolific career as an inventor and scientist.

In 1741, at the age of 53, he enters into a spiritual phase in which he eventually begins to experience dreams and visions beginning on Easter weekend April 6, 1744.

This culminates in a spiritual awakening, whereupon he claims he has been appointed by the Lord to write a heavenly doctrine to reform Christianity.

He claims that the Lord has opened his spiritual eyes, so that from this point on he can freely visit heaven and hell, and talk with angels, demons and other spirits.

He says that the Last Judgment has already occurred, in 1757, although only visible in the spiritual world, where he had witnessed it.

That Judgment is followed by the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which occurs, not by Christ in person, but by a revelation from Him through the inner, spiritual sense of the Word to Swedenborg.

In fact, Swedenborg says, it is the presence of that spiritual sense that makes the Word Divine.

For the remaining 28 years of his life, he writes and publishes 18 theological works, of which the best known is Heaven and Hell (1758), and several unpublished theological works.

Some followers of Swedenborg believe that, of his theological works, only those which Swedenborg published himself are fully divinely inspired.

In Life on Other Planets, Swedenborg stated that he conversed with spirits from Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Venus, and the Moon.

He did not report conversing with spirits from Uranus and Neptune, which were not yet discovered.

This lack is seen by some to raise question about the credibility of all his reports on this matter.

This issue has been extensively reviewed elsewhere.

Swedenborg rejects the doctrine of salvation through faith alone, since he considers both faith and charity necessary for salvation, not one without the other, whereas the Reformers taught that faith alone procured justification, although it must be a faith which resulted in obedience.

The purpose of faith, according to Swedenborg, is to lead a person to a life according to the truths of faith, which is charity, as is taught in 1 Corinthians 13:13 and James 2:20.

Swedenborg's theological writings have elicited a range of responses.

However, he made no attempt to found a church.

A few years after his death – 15 by one estimate – for the most part in England, small reading groups formed to study the truth they saw in his teachings.

As one scholar has noted, Swedenborg’s teachings particularly appealed to the various dissenting groups that sprang up in the first half of the 19th century who were "surfeited with revivalism and narrow-mindedness" and found his optimism and comprehensive explanations appealing.

A variety of important cultural figures, both writers and artists, were influenced by Swedenborg, including Johnny Appleseed, William Blake, Jorge Luis Borges, Daniel Burnham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Flaxman, George Inness, Henry James Sr., Carl Jung, Immanuel Kant, Honoré de Balzac, Helen Keller, Czesław Miłosz, August Strindberg, D. T. Suzuki, and W. B. Yeats.

His philosophy had a great impact on the Duke of Sodermanland, later King Carl XIII, who as the Grandmaster of Swedish Freemasonry (Svenska Frimurare Orden) built its unique system of degrees and wrote its rituals.

In contrast, one of the most prominent Swedish authors of Swedenborg's day, Johan Henric Kellgren, called Swedenborg "nothing but a fool".

A heresy trial was initiated in Sweden in 1768 against Swedenborg's writings and two men who promoted these ideas.

In the two centuries since Swedenborg's death, various interpretations of his theology have been made, and he has also been scrutinized in biographies and psychological studies.

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