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.

27. At first glance, these pairs of statements make it appear as though there is complete agreement between Protestants and Catholics. Protestants, to prevent this from actually being the case, drew a distinction between the works of the law, which flow forth from our own will and are part of our own plan, and the works of the Spirit, which flow forth from faith as a free and spontaneous source; these good works they call the fruits of faith; see §§11 h, k; 13 a, i, k; 15 k.

If you put the statements of both parties side by side and look deeply at them, you will observe that the two see no difference in the works themselves; all the difference lies in how the works come about. That is, Protestants see us as playing a passive role in the production of these good works, whereas Catholics see us as playing an active role in them. Therefore the Protestant view is that good works occur spontaneously as if they were coming from our intellect but not at the same time from our will. They say this because people cannot help being aware of good works when they are occurring, since the people themselves are doing them, and becoming aware is a function of the intellect.

Nevertheless, Protestants also preach that we are to practice repentance and to battle against [the desires of] our own flesh; see §13 d, e, f, g, h, j. Since we cannot do these things without having a plan and exercising our own will — that is, acting seemingly as if we were doing so on our own — therefore the two positions agree in actuality.