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.

57. I foresee that many people who are now steeped in the absurdities of this faith are going to say, “How can the intellect grasp theological teachings at all? Isn’t something spiritual a thing that is by definition transcendent? Go ahead, though, and see if you can open up the mysteries of redemption and justification so that human reason may see them and finally satisfy its curiosity!”

Anticipating this challenge, I will indeed open up these mysteries, as follows.

As everyone surely knows, there is one God; there is no God other than him. God is love itself and wisdom itself, or goodness itself and truth itself. God himself came down in the form of divine truth, which is the Word, and took on a human manifestation for the purpose of removing the hells, and therefore damnation, from the human race. He accomplished this through battles with and victories over the Devil, that is, over all the hells that were then attacking and trying to spiritually kill every person who came into the world. Afterward he glorified his human manifestation; he did this by uniting divine truth to divine goodness within himself. In this way he returned to the Father from whom he had come forth.

Once we realize this, we understand the following statement in John: “The Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh” (John 1:1, 14). And in the same Gospel, “I came forth from the Father and have come into the world. Again, I leave the world and go to the Father” (John 16:28). From the points just made it should also be clear that if the Lord had not come into the world, no one could have been saved, and that the people who are saved are the people who believe in him and live good lives.

This is the face of faith. It appears before our [inner] sight when we have allowed the Word to bring us into the light of day. It is the face of the faith of the new church. (See the faith of the new heaven and the new church in universal form and in a specific form below, §§116, 117.)

20. Brief Analysis

Although scarcely anyone has realized it, on these four points Protestants agree with Roman Catholics so closely that there is hardly any meaningful difference between them, except that Catholics unite faith to goodwill but Protestants separate the two. In fact, the agreement between them is so little known that even theology professors are going to be astounded by this statement.

The reason why this is unknown is that Roman Catholics rarely turn to God our Savior; they turn instead to the pope as Christ’s vicar, and also to the saints. Therefore they have let their tenets regarding the assigning of Christ’s merit and our being justified by faith lie dormant. Nevertheless, the points above in §§3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 taken from the Council of Trent (which were ratified by Pope Pius IV, as shown in §2) make it abundantly clear that these are among the tenets that are received and acknowledged by Catholics. Compare these with the tenets from the Augsburg Confession and the Formula of Concord in §§9, 10, 11, and 12, and you can see that the distinctions between them are not substantial; they are merely verbal. By reading and carefully comparing the quotations earlier in this work, the church’s theology professors will indeed be able to see (although not fully) the agreement between the Protestant and the Catholic views on these points. Some further illustrations of the agreement will be given in the following sections, so that theology professors, and also less highly educated clergy and lay people, will be able to see it.