@GratefulDisciple I'm part of a small congregation that's undergoing a merger. The pastor's message was that Jesus sometimes asks us to overcome uncomfortable past relationships and accept difficult people in a common pursuit for the glory of God. So he uses the apostles needing to accept Matthew as an illustration.

@GratefulDisciple Your ignorance is about what Swedenborg taught. Swedenborg was a scientist before he was a theologian. The harmony of science and religion is all through his writings, both in his earlier scientific period and in his later theological period. The idea that he just "spiritualized" everything shows a complete lack of knowledge about his biography and his writings.

One of Swedenborg's seminal teachings is the "correspondence" between nature and spirit, both of which have a correspondence with the nature of God. In Swedenborg's cosmology, God, spirit, and nature are always intimately connected, and not just in a general way, but in a high level of detail.

Plato's doctrine of forms was a pale shadow of Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondences. No other theologian or philosopher in history developed this idea to anywhere close to the level of fullness and detail that Swedenborg did.

@GratefulDisciple This is all fine talk. But the reality is that trinitarians generally picture three divine individuals in their mind: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That's three gods, no matter how many times trinitarians insist that there is only one. This contradiction of concept in the mind vs. what is said with the lips is right there in the Athanasian Creed:

> For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity; to acknowledge every Person by himself to be God and Lord; So are we forbidden by the Catholic religion; to say, There are three Gods, or three Lords.

It could hardly be clearer that trinitarians think "three," but say "one."

Further, the rest of Nicene Christian doctrine requires that there be three gods, each of which plays his own role. Satisfaction theory requires this. Without three gods, there would not be one god to satisfy another god, and a third god to carry the results to the people who are thus redeemed.

However, as the Creed says, the church doesn't allow them to say "there are three Gods or three Lords," so they always say that there is one God.

It's a whole lot of double-talk.

@GratefulDisciple You can place Swedenborg within the "Western Esoteric Tradition" or within "Theosophy" if you want to avoid taking him as he is. Even some highfalutin' Swedenborgians like to make those identifications because it makes Swedenborg sound highfalutin' to people who don't know much about him. But he is not really in any tradition, because he doesn't accept or draw on tradition.

His three pillars do not include "tradition," as both the Catholic and Anglican three pillars do. His are the Word, reason, and experience. No tradition in there. He explicitly rejects believing things based on tradition.

If he were Enlightenment only, he would reject the Word, as Enlightenment thinkers increasingly did, and accept only reason and experience. But once again, he lived during the Enlightenment, but he himself was not an "enlightenment philosopher."

@GratefulDisciple At least some humans have know for thousands of years that the earth is spherical. The ancient Greeks even had a pretty good measurement of exactly how big the earth is. It was only off by a few percent. But the biblical conception of the world is generally as a flat disk with a dome above it. This was not something that was asserted scientifically. It's just how people thought of it.

When modern English Bibles use the word "earth" to translate the underlying Hebrew word, this is a misrepresentation. There was not a conception of Earth as we think of it today. It should be translated "land," just as the word commonly translated "heaven" should more often be translated "sky," except where it is used as a metaphor for the spiritual world, mostly in the New Testament.

But none of this really matters for my analogy. There are certain fundamentalist Christians today who believe that the earth is flat, and they interpret everything they see and hear about the cosmos on that basis. If we were to hypnotize all the scientists into believing that the earth is flat, they would produce just as much "scientific" nonsense as the flat-earthers.

And if we hypnotize all the theologians into thinking that there are three gods who are somehow one God, they will similarly produce centuries worth of theological nonsense based on that stupid and self-contradictory idea.

This is precisely what has happened in the Christian Church ever since Nicaea.

IOW, other since Roman paganism took over the Christian Church.

@GratefulDisciple The first error is to classify Swedenborg as a Theosophist at all. Beyond that, in the segment you quoted there is some truth and some misunderstanding. Swedenborg actually did have clear teachings about the Fall and rebirth. He mentions transmutation, but only as a passing illustration. "Reintegration" is not a major theme in his writings, except as it relates to redemption and regeneration leading to a renewed relationship between God and humans.

But he doesn't use the word "reintegration." He uses the classical Christian term "atonement."

@GratefulDisciple It is true that Swedenborg's teachings don't much resemble that of others classed as "Theosophists." He was first and foremost a Christian, and remained so throughout his life. His theological period began with several personal encounters with Jesus Christ. And throughout his theological career, he took little personal credit for anything he wrote, but said that he learned the doctrines of the church from "the Lord," which is his common term for the Lord God Jesus Christ.

Yes, he recorded and published many experiences in the spiritual world. But this, he said, was only to give him the knowledge and experience he needed as background for understanding what the Lord was teaching him. In fact, he stated flatly:

> I also testify that ever since the first day of this calling, I have accepted nothing regarding the teachings of this church from any angel; what I have received has come from the Lord alone while I was reading the Word. (True Christianity #779)

It is common to classify Swedenborg as a "spiritist" who gained his knowledge from "communion with spirits." This is a basic error, if we are to take Swedenborg at his own word. He is therefore not a "spiritualist," just as much as he is not a "Theosophist." He is a Christian theologian.

Calling him "the Father of Spiritualism" or "a major representative of eighteenth-century theosophy" sounds so much sexier, though, for academics who like to sound very smart and cool and academic.

But all of this obscures the actual fact, which was that Swedenborg was first a scientist, then a Christian theologian. Not very sexy, but that is the fact of the matter.

Meanwhile, Christian theologians would very much like to shunt him out of their fold, because they don't like what he taught, and they especially don't like how he exposes their many fundamental errors. So they are just as anxious as the fancy secular academics to call him a "spiritualist" or a "theosophist" or some such thing.

It's all part of the pattern in Nicene Christianity of avoiding the truth by identifying anyone who tells the truth as part of one "heresy" or another.

I read it over and over and over again on the fundamentalist websites and the fancy Christian theologians' websites alike.

But once again, the reality is that the old non-Christian, non-Biblical doctrines that the so-called Christian Church has been clinging to ever since it was captured by the Roman State 1,700 years ago are now dying out in our world.

Meanwhile, as Swedenborg said to the Swedish Lutheran clergyman who attended him on his deathbed, "When you enter eternity you will see everything, and then you and I will have much to talk about."

Kind of annoyed to see none of the BU's have responded to my question on the connection between Malachi and Mark's opening.