50. Goodwill cannot be united to the faith of the modern-day church; there is no marriage there that could give birth to a good work. This is because the assigning of Christ’s merit is thought to do everything for us. It is thought to forgive our crimes, to make us just, to regenerate us, to sanctify us, and to give us salvation and the life of heaven — and all for free with no effort on our part. If this is true, though, what is goodwill and what is its supposed marriage with faith? It is pointless and meaningless. What is goodwill but an accessory or an adjunct to the assigning of Christ’s merit and to the process whereby we are made just? Goodwill is good for nothing.

Furthermore, a faith based on the idea that there are three gods is wrong, as I have shown above (see §§39, 40). How can true goodwill have a relationship with a wrongheaded faith?

There are two reasons people give for believing that the modern-day faith has no bond with goodwill. One is that they describe this faith as spiritual in nature, but they see goodwill as merely earthly and moral in nature; and in their opinion no relationship is possible between what is spiritual and what is earthly. The second reason they give is to keep anything that comes from ourselves, and therefore any desire for reward, from becoming mixed up with our faith, since faith is the only thing that saves us.

It is in fact true that there is no bond between goodwill and that faith; but there is a bond between goodwill and the new faith, as described in §§116, 117.

40. Brief Analysis

The teachings of today’s Christian theology are based on an idea of three gods, an idea that resulted from taking the teaching that there is a trinity of persons at face value. We see the wrongness of those teachings only after we have accepted in their place the idea that there is one God and that the divine trinity exists within him, because seeing how wrong those teachings are is not possible before making that switch.

Before that, we are like people at night who are looking at various objects in the light of only a few stars; we see statues and mistake them for living human beings. Or we are like people lying in bed in the twilight before dawn, seeing something like ghosts in the air above them and thinking the apparitions are angels. Or we are like people who see any number of things in the dim, deceptive light of their own imagination and believe them to be real. It is well known that the true nature of things like that is not detected and does not become apparent until we come into the light of day — that is, the light of intellectual wakefulness. When genuine truths come forth to be seen in their own light, which is the light of heaven, the same thing happens to teachings of the church that have been mistakenly or falsely understood and reinforced.

Surely everyone is capable of understanding that all teachings based on the idea of three gods are inwardly wrong and false. I say “inwardly” because the idea of God is central to everything having to do with the church, religious practice, and worship. Theological concepts dwell at a higher level in the human mind than all other concepts, and the highest theological concept is the idea of God. Therefore if our idea of God is false, everything else that follows from it derives a falseness from or becomes falsified by the source from which it originates. Whatever is highest (which is also what is inmost) acts as the essence of the things that result from it lower down. That essence, like a soul, forms those lower things into a kind of body that is an image of itself. If that essence is false, and it descends and encounters truths lower down, it taints them with its own blight and error.

Our having the idea of three gods in our theological concepts can be compared to patients’ having a disease that persists in their hearts or lungs, but the patients consider themselves healthy because their doctor, unaware of their underlying condition, has convinced them they are well. A doctor who knows about their disease, however, and still convinces them they are well deserves to be and should be charged with causing immeasurable harm.