Swedenborgianism / New Church

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Swedenborgianism is the religious movement built on the theological writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), the Swedish natural philosopher who reported, in middle age, that his spiritual sight had been opened and that he had been charged with disclosing the inner meaning of Scripture. The church his readers organized after his death — the New Church, or Church of the New Jerusalem — remains its institutional form. The founder left no congregation, no clergy, no liturgy, and no instruction to build any of these. What he left was a library, and the movement is, before anything else, the act of reading it together.

A revelation in books, not a church

Swedenborg came to revelation late and from an unusual direction. For three decades he was a working scientist and an assessor on the Swedish Board of Mines, the Bergskollegium, publishing on metallurgy, anatomy, and cosmology and pressing an empiricist’s method toward the seat of the soul. Then, in the mid-1740s — a year of intense dreams recorded in his own Journal of Dreams, a night vision of Christ at Delft in April 1744, and a decisive call experience at an inn near Salisbury Court in London in April 1745 — he turned from research to exegesis. In 1747 he resigned his post, refusing the promotion offered him, and gave the remaining quarter-century of his life to a Latin theological corpus of roughly thirty volumes, traveling repeatedly to London and Amsterdam because Swedish censorship made domestic publication impossible. He published almost everything anonymously, signing a title page for the first time only in 1768.

The corpus is the foundation on which everything institutional later rests. Its keystone is the Arcana Coelestia (London, 1749–1756), eight quarto volumes running to some seven thousand pages — a sentence-by-sentence reading of Genesis and Exodus that recovers, beneath the historical letter, what Swedenborg called the internal sense, interleaved with first-person accounts of the spiritual world. A cluster of short London tracts in 1758 set out the cosmology, among them De Caelo et Inferno — Heaven and Hell, the only one of his books to reach a wide lay readership in his lifetime — and De Nova Hierosolyma, the small treatise on the New Jerusalem and its heavenly doctrine from which the church would later take its name. The Amsterdam years of 1763–1771 produced the systematic statements: the four Doctrines of 1763, the metaphysical Divine Love and Wisdom (1763) and Divine Providence (1764), the Apocalypse Revealed (1766), and, as capstone, Vera Christiana Religio — The True Christian Religion (1771), the summa of the system, written partly in answer to a heresy proceeding then moving against his followers in Sweden. These books, taken together as a single inspired body, are what the New Church means when it speaks of the Writings.

What the church inherited as doctrine

The teaching that the New Church organized itself to hold turns on a few linked claims, presented within the tradition not as speculation but as the report of one who had been shown. God is one in person, not three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit name soul, body, and operative power within the single Divine Person of the Lord, fully present in Jesus Christ. From this Christological monism the rest follows — the rejection of a Trinity of persons, of vicarious atonement, of imputed righteousness, and of justification by faith alone. Salvation is the life of charity; faith without charity is, in Swedenborg’s terms, no faith at all.

Beneath this stands the doctrine of correspondences: every object and process in the natural world is the precise sensible expression of a spiritual reality, so that creation entire is a coherent visible language of the spiritual cosmos. The corollary is hermeneutic. Each verse of the Hebrew canon and of the Gospels and Revelation carries, beneath its letter, an internal sense decipherable through the correspondences, making Scripture the encoded record of the soul’s regeneration and the history of the church. The cosmology that frames the reading is exact: three discrete heavens and three corresponding hells, sorted by the ruling love of their inhabitants, and between them a world of spirits where the newly dead orient themselves.

Two further claims gave the church its sense of being genuinely new. The first is that the Last Judgment had already taken place — not in physical history but in the world of spirits, in 1757, dissolving the accumulated false churches of the intermediate realm and clearing the way for the descent of the New Jerusalem. The second reframes the Second Coming: it is no future spectacle in the clouds but the unveiling of the Word’s inner sense, already accomplished in Swedenborg’s own books. The New Church is, on its own understanding, the church of that advent — the body raised to live by the disclosed internal sense of the Bible. The founder neither preached nor gathered a single congregation; on the contrary, he discouraged the idea of a sect bearing his name.

The readers organize

The institution began fifteen years after his death, and it began with printers and readers rather than with a prophet. In London the engraver and printer Robert Hindmarsh (1759–1835), who had read Heaven and Hell in 1782, advertised a meeting at the London Coffee House on Ludgate Hill in December 1783; out of it grew a society for translating and printing the Latin works. In May 1787 a separating minority constituted a worshipping body under the ungainly but exact name “The New Church, signified by the New Jerusalem in the Revelation,” held its first sacraments on 31 July 1787, and from November of that year rented a chapel in Eastcheap under the motto Nunc Licet — “Now it is allowable” — drawn from Swedenborg’s report of an inscription seen over a temple in the spiritual world. The first General Conference met at Eastcheap over five days in April 1789 and adopted thirty-two doctrinal resolutions. Among the roughly seventy-five who attended and signed the minute book were William Blake and his wife Catherine. Blake’s allegiance was brief; within a few years The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was turning Swedenborg’s own titles against what Blake judged his moralism and his failure to converse with the energetic principle, and the later Milton would name him a shorn Samson, strongest of men, betrayed by the churches. The General Conference of the New Church in Great Britain has nonetheless met annually, with brief interruptions, ever since.

In America the line opened with a single lecture: James Glen spoke on Swedenborg at a Philadelphia bookstore in June 1784. John Hargrove led the formation of the Baltimore society and was ordained in 1798 as the first New Church minister in the United States, preaching before President Jefferson and Congress in the years that followed. Seventeen scattered societies combined in 1817 to form the General Convention of the New Jerusalem in the United States, the body legally incorporated in 1861 and known today as the Swedenborgian Church of North America. It is the older and more theologically liberal of the two principal American branches, content to read the Writings as authoritative inspired exposition without raising them to the canonical level of Scripture.

The split over the Writings

The decisive nineteenth-century division grew from a question the founder had not settled: whether the theological Writings themselves are the Word of the Lord, on the same plane as the Old and New Testaments. The Academy movement, led by William Henry Benade (1816–1905), took the higher view and founded the Academy of the New Church in Philadelphia in 1876 — the date chosen for Swedenborg’s report that on 19 June 1770 the Lord had sent his twelve disciples through the whole spiritual world to proclaim the New Church. Doctrinal and disciplinary friction with the Convention deepened until, in 1890, leading Academy clergy resigned to form a separate body, reorganized in 1897 as the General Church of the New Jerusalem.

Its seat became Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia, on farmland the Pittsburgh Plate Glass industrialist John Pitcairn began acquiring in 1889; the settlement was named Bryn Athyn in 1899 and incorporated as a borough in 1916. There Ralph Adams Cram and the patron-builder Raymond Pitcairn raised Bryn Athyn Cathedral, begun in 1914 and dedicated in 1919 — a Gothic-revival cathedral built by a denomination of a few thousand, with its own workshops for glass and stone, and the visible center of the General Church to this day. The General Church and its Academy treat the Writings as a Third Testament, read liturgically from the lectern alongside Scripture; the Convention treats them as inspired commentary that interprets Scripture without becoming it. A third, smaller body, the Lord’s New Church Which Is Nova Hierosolyma, separated from the General Church in 1937 — gathered around the Dutch “Hague Position” of the periodical De Hemelsche Leer and around Theodore Pitcairn, son of John — by radicalizing the General Church view: it holds that the Writings themselves contain an internal sense, progressively unfolded by the regenerate church.

Membership has always been small, and the conventional aggregate of some twenty-five to thirty thousand worldwide is a soft figure that includes baptized adherents. The North American Convention counts perhaps a thousand to two thousand, the General Church several thousand more, the British Conference roughly a thousand, the Lord’s New Church about a thousand. The fastest-growing congregations are no longer in the North Atlantic at all but in West and Southern Africa — South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Burkina Faso — where the General Church’s African membership may already exceed its founding base. The roll of named readers has always outrun the rolls of the societies: the frontier nurseryman John Chapman, “Johnny Appleseed,” carried Swedenborgian tracts west with his apple seed, and Helen Keller, given the books in Braille in the 1890s, wrote a profession of the faith that became the most widely read New Church book of the twentieth century.

The outsized reception

The movement’s influence runs far beyond its rolls, mostly through readers who never joined and never would. The earliest serious philosophical reader was Immanuel Kant, who in 1763 paid a steep seven pounds for the eight volumes of the Arcana, investigated the seer’s reported clairvoyance through Stockholm correspondents, and then published the apparently satirical Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766), which mocked the Arcana as so many quarto volumes stuffed with nonsense. Mainstream Kant scholarship reads it as a turn against speculative metaphysics; a revisionist line treats it as ironic cover for a genuine engagement that fed the phenomenal–noumenal distinction of the critical philosophy. In Württemberg the pietist Friedrich Christoph Oetinger became the chief early German transmitter, comparing Swedenborg with Newton and Ezekiel and carrying his motifs into the theosophical stream adjacent to the Swabian biblical realism of the Bengel school. In America the line ran through Sampson Reed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose chapter “Swedenborg; or, the Mystic” in Representative Men (1850) ranked him among the representative men of history while charging him with a theological cramp that bound a great inquiry to dogma — a classification the Boston New Church protested, unwilling to see its founder filed among the mystics.

The most consequential export was the afterlife. Through the Poughkeepsie Seer Andrew Jackson Davis, whose 1847 Principles of Nature borrows heavily from Heaven and Hell, Swedenborg’s graduated spheres and progressive post-mortem education passed into nineteenth-century spiritualism and the séance culture that followed, and from there into the diffuse afterlife literature of the later occult revival. The same material reached the Theosophy of Blavatsky, which granted Swedenborg’s seership while subordinating it to a perennialist scheme, and the Christian-esoteric synthesis of Rudolf Steiner. The New Church has consistently held this traffic to be a distortion: open commerce with spirits through mediums is, in its reading, precisely the danger Swedenborg warned against, for he taught that the living are unconsciously surrounded by spirits already and that deliberately opening that channel courts deception. The disclosure of the Word’s inner sense and the marketing of messages from the dead are, on this view, opposite things.

The pattern by which the movement formed is now a familiar one across the modern religious landscape — a revelation received by one person, fixed in books, and institutionalized after his death by readers who never met him. The voicing of messages from non-physical sources in new-age channeling shows the spiritualist branch of that genealogy at full extension; the Bengal reformer Rammohan Roy, whose monotheist reading of scripture was organized into a church by the readers who came after him, shows the institutional branch in a wholly different tradition. Within Swedenborgianism the order runs the other way around, and the priority is doctrinal rather than sociological. The books themselves are the Second Coming; the church is only what gathered to read them.

Texts and scholarship

The primary corpus is the Latin theology, long out of copyright and widely available in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century English translation. Robert Hindmarsh’s own Rise and Progress of the New Jerusalem Church (posthumously published 1861) is the foundational insider chronicle of the London beginnings, written by the printer who convened the first meetings. Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, in the Goerwitz translation, and Emerson’s Swedenborg; or, the Mystic are the two texts under which Swedenborg was received into Anglophone philosophy and letters; the Ager translation of Heaven and Hell, the book that carried the doctrine into the nineteenth century, circulates in full at the Internet Sacred Text Archive.

The modern academic apparatus treats the movement across several registers. Wouter Hanegraaff’s Esotericism and the Academy (Cambridge University Press, 2012) locates Swedenborg within the disciplinary formation of the study of Western esotericism, and his Swedenborg, Oetinger, Kant (Swedenborg Foundation, 2007) anchors the revisionist reading of Kant’s Dreams. Jane Williams-Hogan’s sociology of the New Church — her dissertation A New Church in a Disenchanted World (1985) and her chapter on the movement’s “charisma of the book” in Scribe of Heaven (2005) — is the principal study of how a body of readers became a church. Marguerite Beck Block’s The New Church in the New World (Henry Holt, 1932) remains the standard narrative history of the American branches and their divisions, and Devin Zuber’s A Language of Things (University of Virginia Press, 2019) reconstructs the American literary reception. The in-house critical venue is the Swedenborg Scientific Association’s journal The New Philosophy (Bryn Athyn, 1898–present).

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