1. Survey of Teachings of the New Church Meant by the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation

[Author’s Preface]

AFTER publishing, within the span of a few years, several larger and smaller works on the New Jerusalem (which means the new church that the Lord is going to establish), and after unveiling the Book of Revelation, I resolved to publish and bring to light the teachings of the [new] church in their fullness, and thus to present a body of teaching that was whole. But because this work was going to take several years, I developed a plan to publish an outline of it, to give people an initial, general picture of this church and its teachings. When a general overview precedes, all the details that follow, of however wide a range, stand forth in a clear light, because they each have their own place within the overall structure alongside things of the same type.

This briefing does not include detailed argumentation; it is shared as advance notice, because the points it contains will be fully demonstrated in the work itself.

First, however, I must present the teachings concerning justification as they exist today, in order to highlight the differences between the tenets of today’s church and those of the new church.

21. 3 The leading reformers — Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin — retained all the dogmas regarding the trinity of persons in the Divine, original sin, the assigning of Christ’s merit to us, and our being justified by faith, in the same past and present form they had had among Roman Catholics. The reformers separated goodwill or good works from that faith, however, and declared that our good works contribute nothing to our salvation, for the purpose of clearly differentiating themselves from Roman Catholics with regard to the essentials of the church, which are faith and goodwill.

48. Brief Analysis

Before I demonstrate this proposition, I will first lay before the intellect what goodwill is and where it comes from, what faith is and where it comes from, and therefore what the good works called “fruits” are and where they come from.

Faith is truth. Therefore teachings of faith are the same as teachings of truth. Teachings of truth affect our intellect, and therefore how we think, and what we say as a result. They teach us what we should will and what we should do. They teach that some things are evil and we should abstain from them; they teach that some things are good and we should do them. When we follow these teachings and actually do what is good, our good actions enter into a partnership with the truths we understand, because in these actions our will works together with our intellect. (Good actions have to do with our will and truth has to do with our intellect.) This partnership leads us to a love for what is good, which is the essence of goodwill, and a love for what is true, which is the essence of faith. When combined, these two form a marriage. Good works are the offspring born of this marriage, just as pieces of fruit are the offspring produced by a tree. As a result, there are fruits that are born of goodness and fruits that are born of truth. In the Word, the latter are represented as grapes and the former as olives.