The ideas on this site are drawn from the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, an 18th-
century Swedish scholar who spent his last three decades writing about the meaning of the Bible and the nature of God, humanity, reality and life after death.
Swedenborg (1688-1772) said he received revelation from the Lord, and that he wrote what he did at the Lord’s behest. He also said he was able to visit heaven and hell and talk to people there.
Critics have claimed that Swedenborg was misguided, deceptive, drug-addled and/or schizophrenic. Supporters, however, note that he was described by contemporaries as pleasant and sensible, that he was a respected member of the Swedish House of Nobles, and that he was an apparently humble man who never tried to start a church and avoided public speaking.
Ultimately, though, Swedenborg’s supporters point to his body of work as its own best defense. His take on the Bible is deep and coherent, and his approach to God and reality is astonishingly modern.
To put it very briefly, Swedenborg wrote that the Lord is love itself, perfect and eternal, and that the natural world was created as an extension of that love. He wrote that the Lord operates from love into the lives of everyone every moment, trying to get people to accept love while also leaving them free to reject it.
Everything Swedenborg wrote – more than 30 volumes in all – centers on that idea:
- Because nature comes from the Lord’s love, things in the natural world correspond to things in the spiritual world. This system of “correspondence” is in full force in most books of the Bible, filling them with spiritual meaning.
- We humans exist so we can, of our own free will, choose to accept the Lord’s love and return it, fulfilling the Lord’s loving desire for conjunction.
- We are all both spiritual and natural creatures. When we die physically we “wake up” to the full experience of our spiritual existence.
- Those who have accepted the Lord’s love and have been loving to others will be together in the spiritual world, creating heaven. Those who have chosen to love themselves and hate others will also be together, creating hell.
- The Lord’s love is expressed through perfect wisdom, a duality that permeates nature. This includes men and women, which means a husband and wife can become two halves of one soul in a beautiful, loving, passionate eternal marriage.
- And more!
This website is intended to help people explore what Swedenborg had to say. It is supported by the General Church of the New Jerusalem, which is centered on Swedenborg's writings, and assumes that what Swedenborg wrote is true, but it is open to all who are curious.
In keeping with Swedenborg’s own statements, modern believers downplay his role as author, attributing the ideas to the Lord instead. For this reason they generally refer to Swedenborg’s theological works as “the Writings,” and some resist the label “Swedenborgian” as placing emphasis on the man rather than the message.
Since “the Writings” would be an unfamiliar term to new readers, we have elected to use the name “Swedenborg” as a label for those theological works, much as we might use “Isaiah” or “Matthew” to refer to books of the Bible. The intent, however, is not to attribute the ideas to Swedenborg, any more than we would attribute the divinity of the Bible to Isaiah the man or Matthew the man.
So when you read “according to Swedenborg” on this site, it’s really shorthand for “according to the theological works from the Lord through Swedenborg.” When you read “Swedenborg says,” it’s really shorthand for “the theological works of Swedenborg say.”