The Fabric of Consciousness or Jesus Christ?

When searching out paths to happiness, do people need to choose between Christianity and a more modern approach that locates the source of joy and consciousness within them? Ronnie doesn't think so. He finds the two knit seamlessly together in the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg and elaborates on those concepts below. -Editor

Many people these days are skeptical of God because they have been told that God is some guy who died on a cross 2000 years ago with a set of arbitrary rules that we must follow to get to a prize at the end of our lives. Many of us have found this picture lacking. Because of this, a different kind of salvation has been defined by many post-modern philosophies, self-help books, and even recovery programs. These philosophies have led people to look within and discover the process involved in being “saved.” Not the “saved” we were taught as children, but instead a process in which peace, joy, love, truth, and connection to Divinity could be found, not outside ourselves in the walls of a musty old building, but inside ourselves, a kingdom we were taught little about as children.

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Why Swedenborgians Need to Pay Attention to the Emergent Movement or Similarities Between New Church and Emergent Church

Bronwen became aware of the Emergent Movement in 2010. She brings the reader up to speed on what this movement is and then draws connections between it and the New Church. There is a lot to learn by engaging in this conversation. -Editor.

Being the church is an emphasis found in the emerging church that strongly speaks to me. It reminds me of the passage Divine Providence 101 whereupon arriving in the next world after death “one is not asked ‘What church were you were a member of?’ But ‘How have you lived your life?’” At the same time I find the theological conversations in the Emergent Village to be especially thought provoking and interesting in the context of the impact of the New Church in the world and on Christianity.

In the summer of 2010 I read the book, The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier by Tony Jones. I swallowed this book whole. I read with speed and enthusiasm about an emerging theology that transcended organized and institutionalized religion, and spoke to a Christianity that emphasized being the church. The parallel between this new Christianity and the New Christianity that I had grown up with were impossible to ignore. For the first time I felt that New Church theology was being accepted by other Christians. Is this emerging theology/Christianity a product of the New Church movement?

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Do You Think the World Will End in Your Lifetime? Part 2

In part two (part one may be found here) Judah looks at the bible for evidence of the resurrection being either an absolutely material event, as Millennialists would have it, or a spiritual reality apart from time and space. Judah finds confirmation of the latter, supported by Swedenborg's vision of a concrete spiritual world. -Editor

Why celebrate New Church Day? What makes the New Church different from any other Christian group? I could compare New Church ideas and practices with a variety of other faith traditions in an effort to explain why it is unique, but you’re probably familiar with the results of such a comparison: the New Church believes in a one-person rather than a three-person God; it teaches a life of repentance; it proclaims that heaven’s gates are open to all good people everywhere, whatever their race, their culture, or their religion. But instead of broadly pointing out the teachings that set apart (or at least define) the New Church, I would like to follow up my previous article on the end of the world by contrasting a New Church view of human resurrection with that of Dispensational Premillennialism. I hope this little study gives you a small but specific sense of how an approach shaped by New Church teachings can revitalize Biblical study—and transform the prospect of death into a balanced hope for an afterlife that is at once concrete and spiritual, at once present and future, and entirely grounded in a personal approach to Jesus Christ in sacred scripture.

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What do We have in Common with Other Christians?

By focussing his attention on what the New Church shares with other Christian denominations Solomon augments a sense of oneness, a sense that we are all part of Lord's church on earth. - Editor

Sometimes it seems like we spend a lot of time distinguishing ourselves from other Christian churches, and in the process we end up distinguishing ourselves from other Christian people, almost as if we were somehow better people. I think this is a bit like eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; believing that we know better than other people.

Swedenborg has some great things to say about this

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