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Is There A God?

A faith or a set of beliefs that does not inspire the holder to try and live up to his beliefs is a dead faith. If one’s beliefs are merely on the lips, but not heartfelt, they serve no useful purpose. As St. Paul put it, with much more passion, in his epistle to the Corinthians:-


What is it that makes a faith live?  What makes it heartfelt rather than just intellectual? There may be a number of answers to these questions, but I think that what is essential in a living faith is that the beliefs make sense. There are so many elements of Christian doctrine that require one to suspend one’s critical faculties that it is not surprising that there are today so many in the Western world who are agnostics and outright atheists.        

So what are the stumbling blocks in Christian doctrine that lead so many to doubt the existence of God?

Can God’s existence be proved?  

This is probably the main concern of agnostics and atheists. The answer is, of course, no. Everybody will agree that there must have been a prime cause for the coming into being of the universe. But to say that it was God, immediately provokes the question, ‘but who made God?’. But this is an improper question. A prime cause is a prime cause and there cannot be a prime cause of a prime cause. If there is a spiritual world, it is on a quite different level of reality from the material world. Nothing material or physical can prove the existence of a spiritual reality. But if it is to be convincing the spiritual world has to be in a context that makes sense.
    
I propose to identify what seem to me to be the main stumbling blocks in Christian doctrine, and then come back to them and see if they can be answered in a way which does make sense.

What are we saved for?

If our beliefs have an objective - that is to be saved - it would help to make sense of it if we could know what it is we are being saved for. Most Christians really don’t seem to have an answer. Most of the bereaved I meet in my local Anglican church seem to believe that their loved ones “are somewhere up there”. But the Church does not even give an assurance of an after life. It gives a hope, but not a categorical assurance. The Rev. Dr. Sir John Polkinghorne, one of today’s leading theologians, has published a book with the significant title “The God of Hope and the End of the World”. In it he says he can give no more than the ‘hope’ that our personalities will be ‘resurrected’ in human form at the time of ‘the new creation’, which he sees following on from the end of the possibility of life in this universe, which he believes will ultimately be the case in many billions of years time.

This implies that after death we might be in some kind of limbo for billions of years. But what does he think it will be like when we are ‘embodied’ in the ‘new creation? He says “Even the man who said that when he went to heaven he would play golf everyday, might sicken of the game after a few thousand years. Even less attractive is the caricature notion of sitting on a cloud, eternally strumming a harp”. But what does he put in its place?  “What awaits us”, he says, “ is the unending exploration of the inexhaustible riches of God, a pilgrim journey into deepest reality that will always be thrilling and life enhancing.”  I really don’t know what that means and it does not seem to provide much of an incentive to resist temptation and strive to become regenerate.

People in other religions often seem to have a clearer idea of what to expect after death. Muslims (males at least) expect a paradise with nubile houris. Most Buddhists expect to have a new life on earth, reincarnated in a higher form of life if they have lived well and, eventually, perhaps, Nirvana, or as a lowly animal if they have not.

Who is God?

Christians are told that the First Great Commandment is that there is one God and that we are to love him with all our heart, all our mind and all our strength. But then the Nicene Creed that was drawn up in the 4th Century AD quite clearly distinguishes God into three persons and even addresses the Holy Spirit as “the Lord whom we worship”. Moreover , the modern wording of the Nicene creed describes Jesus as “the eternally begotten son”. That is to say that Christians are expected to believe that there were both a God the Father and  a God the Son in heaven when the universe began and that it was that Son who was incarnate as Jesus and that after the Ascension, as a separate person,  “he sits on the right hand of God the Father”.

I am not sure that this doctrinal problem is of much concern to most churchgoers who are not, for the most part, particularly intellectual. They are quite happy to worship Jesus as God. And I doubt whether many, when reciting the creed,  think at all about the deep implications of believing in “an eternally begotten Son”. But I think it may be a real problem for the many of the clergy. And yet, even for Charles Wesley, whose faith certainly seems to have been a living faith, the Christian doctrines did not make sense. Consider verse 2 of his hymn “And can it be ... “


Where was God at Auschwitz?

For many people the working of Divine Providence is probably the biggest stumbling block. How could a loving God allow millions of Jews to be slaughtered in the gas chambers? How could he stand by and allow thousands to be killed in the Boxing Day tsunami in 2005?
How can he explain the millions of little children who have died of starvation over the years?
And what was providential about the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York? We sometimes say “that must have been providential”, but almost always in connection with good news. When, against all the odds, there’s a happy outcome, then God’s providence may get the credit.

The Church nevertheless assures us that God is with us always. Although we may not be able to see Providence at work we have to believe that somehow He has a purpose in everything that happens. An Anglican bishop when asked what was the essence of the Christian faith replied, “that’s simple: Don’t Panic!” A very good answer, but it still leaves one with nagging doubts. We know that Jesus said that the ‘very hairs of your head are numbered’, but what was his purpose in allowing all these tragedies to occur?

And what is the origin of evil? A loving God could surely not have created evil. But we see it all around us. Man, we are told, is the cause of evil. But why could not an omnipotent God ensure that men always behaved well?

How did Jesus “save us from our sins”?

I think it was John Humphrys in an article in the Daily Telegraph who said that for his part he could not understand how Jesus could be said to have saved us from our sins. The Church is quite clear about this. This is the doctrine of Atonement. God the Father was so incensed by the wickedness of mankind that his anger could only be appeased by the sacrifice of his son Jesus. This requires a stupendous suspension of one’s critical faculties. Does it really make sense that a loving God who is Mercy itself should not only condone a human sacrifice, but actually demand it. This was the God who very deliberately stopped Abraham from sacrificing Isaac. But even if this were  true,  it is hard to see what is meant by ‘saving us from our sins’. Are only Christians saved? And are our sins removed however badly we behave? We are saved ‘only by God’s grace’ - that suggests that He can save us on our deathbed, whatever we may have done with our lives. On the other hand, there are lots of references in the Book of Common Prayer and the Bible to the necessity of “repenting”, which clearly calls for turning away from evil and striving to lead a new and good life.

Does God punish the wicked?

The Bible is quite clear. The wicked suffer for their sins. There is a Hell. Jehovah, in the Old Testament, appears as a very angry God given to fierce punishments; he wipes out Sodom and Gomorrah, men, women and children for their wickedness. And yet, in the New Testament, apart from the ‘human sacrifice’, God and Jesus appear full of mercy and kindness. But even then the existence of Hell is posited.
 
Many people, even some Christians, find it hard to believe in Hell. Not that many of them have any very clear idea of what exactly Hell is. Are we really to believe that the wicked suffer to eternity in burning fires? And is that we would expect a loving God to demand?
But there are Christians who believe in Hell. John Polkinghorne, whom I have already mentioned, says in the same book


The Second Coming

This essential element in the Christian creed raises a number of questions for enquiring minds. We are asked to believe that at some date in the future - the Apostles thought that it would be in their lifetime; Polkinghorne thinks it will be in several billion years time - the world will come to an end and the Son of  Man will be seen “coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory”. It is not at all clear why Jesus, who came into the world just over 2000 years ago, should need to come again in material form - and clearly not as a baby this time. It is then assumed that Jesus will establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth - obviously not this earth, because it will have come to an end, but on a new earth. All human beings who have lived and died over all those years will be re-embodied in human form and the Son of Man on his throne will separate the sheep from the goats; “and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.” And to the sheep he will say “Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” And to the goats he will say “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels”. The kingdom is presumably Heaven and the everlasting fire, Hell. It all leaves a lot of unanswered  questions.

A Body of Christian Doctrine that Does Make Sense

There is a body of Christian doctrine that does make sense. It doesn’t answer all the questions. If God is omnipotent and omnipresent it should not be expected that mere mortals would understand everything. There are still mysteries, but the general body of doctrine makes sense - to me at least. This doctrine is derived from the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish polymath, scientist and theologian, who lived from 1688 to 1772. He published many books; in his earlier years they were all on scientific subjects, but he went on to write a vast number of religious books - they were all published in Amsterdam or London. His last book, published after he was 80, was The True Christian Religion. His ideas were taken up initially by a number of people in England, including William Blake. They established a church, which still exists today and is known in England and many parts of he world as The New Church or The Church of the New Jerusalem. In the United States one of the branches is known as The Swedenborgian Church.

Swedenborg claimed in middle life that he had seen the Lord Jesus Christ in a vision and had been commanded to reveal to mankind the spiritual meaning of the Holy Word, which the Lord would reveal to him. He was granted spiritual sight, like the prophets in the Old Testament, and for many years up to his death in London was able, whilst conscious in his physical body, to be in the company of angels in heaven and and devils in hell. His first religious work was Arcana Caelestia (all his books were written in Latin), which explains the spiritual meaning in every verse of the books of Genesis and Exodus. Another well-known book was Heaven and Hell. He also wrote books on Divine Providence and on Divine Love and Wisdom.

I am going to try and set out these doctrines, in a very abbreviated form, specifically designed to try and answer some of the stumbling blocks identified above. This presentation is very personal and I use language in ways which cannot always be found in Swedenborg’s writings.

It obviously helps to see sense in these doctrines if you initially believe Swedenborg’s claims to have been in the company of angels for some thirty years. But I don’t think it is essential. John Howard Spalding wrote an interesting book nearly 100 years ago called  An Introduction to Swedenborg’s Metaphysics.  He started out with serious doubts about Swedenborg, but found what he wrote so compelling that he no longer had any doubts. The following extract from his book shows how convinced he became.


[In what follows I use the term Man to mean mankind, which, of course, includes women and children]

Man is the only self-conscious creature. Only man can reflect on his feelings and his thoughts. He can make resolutions, which he can keep or fail to keep. Man is unique in being able to converse with himself. We can appeal to our inner self and comment on our thoughts and feelings. This is an important  point to remember when we come to discuss Who God is. Man is capable of love which puts other people’s needs above his own. He can hate and be concerned only with his own self interest. In other words he enjoys the gift from God of Free Will. Man is intrinsically self-centred and puts his own needs first. But God has granted him the ability to fight against this evil and learn to love God and to love his neighbour. The Lord asks us to make some progress in this life in overcoming our hereditary evil. We are not born equal in this respect; some have more hereditary evil than others. What is required of us all, so as to establish the ruling love or desire in our hearts, is at least to have made some progress in this life in reducing our debit balance. Even those whose debit balance is substantial can be saved, provided they go some way to reducing the debit balance they were born with.

God created the universe for man. But man is born for heaven. God’s love means nothing unless it can be reciprocated. Blind obedience is not love. So Free Will is the essential element in fulfilling God’s purpose. And God’s purpose was for man to inhabit Heaven to eternity.   

Man’s mind has two faculties - will and understanding, or emotion and thought. We cannot do anything or change the way we live unless we want to. The will and the understanding have to be in harmony. We are in a very real sense what we want.  But the real person is whatever is his ruling passion . There are three loves, the love of God, self-love and love of the world. There is nothing wrong with looking after one’s own interests or enjoying the good things of the world. But the three loves have to be in the right order and are only good if the love of God predominates. If self-love or love of the world predominate the hereditary evil takes over. Man has the capacity to simulate, to pretend to be what he is not. Fear of the law, worldly prudence, concern for one’s reputation can hide the real inner man.

Atheists, for the most part deny that there is free will.     Professor Provine of Cornell University, for example, says - “ .. the freedom to make un-coerced and unpredictable choices among alternative courses of action simply does not exist. There is no way that the evolutionary process as currently conceived can produce a being that is truly free to make choices.”

And yet atheists, Richard Dawkins, for example, behave as if there was free will. In his The Blind Watchmaker - 1986  -  he says, “It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody  who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that )”. He surely, here, is attributing blame to a non-believer. But if there is not free will surely no one can be blamed - they cannot help it, their beliefs and actions are genetically determined. Moreover, if there is no free will, can anybody really be said to be wicked?
   
“Free Will’ for a Christian, on the other hand,  is the freedom to choose to obey God’s commandments or to reject them. In other words the freedom to choose between good and evil. One’s choices are, of course, heavily influenced by heredity and environment, but the Christian doctrine of regeneration means that man is judged by his works. We can either give in to hereditary desires or we can, with God’s help, resist them and seek to love God and to love our neighbour.

What are we being saved for?

Man’s mind with the feeling faculty and the thinking faculty is the soul, which lives on after death in a human body. On the third day after death we awake in the next world, which is neither Heaven nor Hell but the World of Spirits which is in equilibrium between the good and the evil. Swedenborg’s in his book - Heaven and Hell - says:-


Swedenborg also tells us that angels, at whatever age they may have been when they died, in the next world they gradually assume the look of a person in the prime of life.

It is in the World of Spirits that we are judged; there is no trial, no prosecutor and no defence counsel. In the spiritual world we find ourselves no longer able to dissimulate and our ruling passion - what we have made of ourselves over our life - becomes clear, to us and to others. There is no space and no time in the spiritual world, so that we find ourselves naturally together with other people of a similar disposition. 

This is very nicely put in the following extract from a sermon on the Lord’s Prayer by the Rev. John Presland published in 1874:


Those who have have reduced their ‘debit balance’ in life, now have to be rid of the many false ideas they have accumulated before they can go to Heaven as angels, for no evil and no falsity can be in Heaven. This can be a painful process; Swedenborg calls it ‘vastation’. All this takes place following immediately on reawakening after the death of the material body; not at the end of the world or in several billion years’ time. The evil on the other hand have to be rid of any truths which they still have - for the very same reason, no good or truth can exist in Hell. The evil are not punished by God; they go to Hell of their own free will, because they cannot stand the company of good people. There is no one Satan or fallen angel. God rules the hells to keep the devils from attacking good spirits and trying to overthrow heaven. They have to be restrained by punishments, inflicted under control by other devils. Unpleasant though these punishments may be the inhabitants still prefer Hell to Heaven.

We are to eternity what we have made ourselves in our short life on earth. Those whose ruling passion at the end of their lives is self love and love of the world cannot go to heaven. If God were to extinguish their sins - because ‘Jesus died for us’ - it would be a contradiction of Divine order; the free will granted to them in their lifetime would have been nullified.
   
Swedenborg tells us that all children who die go straight to Heaven. They have not had time to become regenerate or depraved. They are taught and cared for and brought to adulthood before becoming angels.
   
The value of life lies in use.  Swedenborg tells us that Heaven is in a sense one Man, the Grand Man, in which we all have our being in the next life  We are created with gifts or talents which are needed in any human society. And Heaven is a living organism in which we play (sometimes only a small) but nevertheless an essential part. We have our place there, are received into our heavenly society or family to serve not only those immediately around us, but the whole heaven.    An idle life of leisure does not bring happiness. Every angel has a job. There are after all billions of angels, living in houses and cities and in the country and all this requires some practical administration. There is also regular worship and newcomers to the World of Spirits need to be taught about Jesus. Even the wicked have a use; they tempt us, and overcoming temptation is the core of the process of regeneration.


Does this mean that only Christians can be saved? The answer is ‘no’. Every single human being can be saved. No one can enter Heaven unless he accepts the divinity of the Lord Jesus. But after death we all enter the World of Spirits and there those who never knew Jesus, but who have led a good life, whose ruling passion is to do good because it is the right thing to do and not for any personal advantage, learn to love Jesus and can enter heaven. The Swedenborgian doctrine is, I believe, the most inclusive religious doctrine.

Who is God? And How did “Jesus save us from our sins?

These two questions have to be taken together. When God made man and gave him free will, he knew that man would abuse that gift and become progressively more wicked. Swedenborg tells us that the very first men were very unselfish and spiritual; so much so that they were able to converse with angels. This is the origin of the very common legend of a Golden Age. Man’s free will depends upon God maintaining  an equilibrium between the powers of evil (Hell) and the powers of  good (Heaven). As man became progressively more wicked this equilibrium became threatened; the powers of hell became increasingly strong and man’s free will could no longer be maintained without some action from God. This finally became necessary some 2000 years ago; it had been foreseen from the very beginning and the Old Testament is full of predictions of the incarnation. God, omnipotent though he is, can only act according to Divine Order. It was not open to Him to overpower the hells by fiat. Unless there was some mutual interaction with the powers of hell, their power would remain intact. So God came into the world to achieve two things, the Redemption of mankind (restoring the equilibrium between heaven and hell) and the Glorification of the Divine Human.

The hells had to be defeated on their own battleground, temptation. But God cannot be tempted, so God had to take on a human nature so that he could be tempted. The Divine Essence, Jehovah, Father, call him what you will, impregnated Mary and she conceived and bore a son, Jesus. This now is perhaps the hardest thing to understand, the soul of Jesus was Jehovah, even when he was a babe in arms; but it makes sense. But having taken on a human nature by heredity from Mary, like all humans he started out in complete ignorance. He was not capable of reflecting on his thoughts and feelings until he matured. Nor, initially, could he even be tempted. Nor at this stage could he appeal to his inner nature - the Divine Essence.

Swedenborg, in his Arcana Caelestia (para 1999) says:-

   
The Lord’s task on earth was to fight and defeat the hells by overcoming every temptation he encountered.  And the temptations were very severe. God wanted to save mankind; the hells wanted desperately to defeat God. He was constantly tempted to overuse his power and to follow the role apparently foretold for him in the Jewish Scriptures as the Messiah, to take command and establish a kingdom on earth, which of course he could have done. But where then would free will be? Gone and of no avail.
   
Jesus experienced states of both exinanition (humility) and exaltation. In the low states he felt at a distance from his inner self (the Father) and seemed to speak of him as if he were another person; in periods of exaltation he knew that he was the Father, as in John Chap.14.(verses 7 to 11)


The temptations continued throughout his life and culminated with the dreadful events of Good Friday. He had shown that he could command the waves and the wind, could walk on water, could raise Lazarus from the dead. Jesus could have come down from the cross and ruled the world. As he resisted every temptation, so he gradually transformed his human nature into the Divine Human; even his human body became Divine and he and the Father were reunited. Jesus is the only person ever to have been born in this world who was his own father and left no mortal remains behind. After the resurrection he was at pains to show the disciples that his now Divine body was the very same body that they had seen upon the cross with the mark of the nails and the wound in his side. Having overcome every single temptation the hells were now for ever under control and the equilibrium between Heaven and Hell could never again be threatened. This what is meant by the Redemption.
And what about the Glorification? God had always been human in form. 

Genesis Chap 1

When Abraham and the prophets saw God, and indeed Mary, at the Annunciation, God appeared in the guise of an angel. Until Jesus came into the world God was invisible. By Glorifying his human and making it Divine he gave man a God who could be approached like a father and prayed to as a person. When Paul says in his Epistle to Timothy ( chapter 2 )  “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”  - by mediator, he does not mean Jesus as a different person, but that by making his human divine, he had made it possible for men to approach God personally. And that is what the Glorification means.
   
The meaning of the Glorification has been well expressed in a sermon by John Maine, Pastor of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Kitchener, Ontario:-
This is the ‘good news’, but what are we to make of it? God came to us in human form, in Jesus, so that we could know God as never before. None of us can relate to some notion of an infinite, all-knowing and all-powerful Being. But we can relate to a person - a person who lives, and who only loves us and wants the very best for us. That’s a very powerful relationship to have; and like any relationship based on love, the experience of it enriches     us. For we learn a lot about ourselves as we love in return, and this changes us. And so over the years we grow into someone that we were not before -  someone that we couldn’t have been except for that love we’ve known”.

At this point it is also necessary to say that Jesus does not literally sit on a throne at God’s “right hand”. ”Right hand’ has always meant having power, and Jesus as the Word, or Divine Truth, is how God’s power is exercised.

Where was God at Auschwitz?
       
We tend to take a very short term view of events. Perhaps only palaeontologists, cosmologists and climatologists take anything like a long term view. A few years ago I heard a climatologist on the radio say “I wish people would realise that we are in a brief interval between two ice ages” - by brief interval he meant 24,000 years!. But God takes an even longer point of view. Eternity means for ever. We are still at the very dawn of the history of mankind. I don’t know what the consensus is among the experts, but it seems to me that mankind has probably not been around for more than some 50,000 years., and even if it were a million years, this is nothing compared to eternity.     
       
What matters to God is the state of the human soul to eternity. Although Providence is concerned with everything that happens in this world, it looks beyond this world and is concerned only with eternity. At every stage, however much evil there is, God always ensures the best possible outcome for the eternal souls of all those involved; God is always restraining the evil and, although it is against Divine order for God, at the end of a wicked person’s life, instantly to purify him, He is always restraining the evil and will ensure that the person concerned goes to the least bad hell. When I almost despair at the evil in the world, I have to keep reminding myself that Providence is concerned  with eternity.
   
God is with every human being at all times, even at Auschwitz and the tsunami. But he is not concerned with the material outcome of what they suffer; his sole interest is to give them the best possible outcome in the next world. Not all who died in the concentration camps will have gone to heaven; their ruling passion at the time of death will have determined that. But we can be sure that God has given them the best possible outcome in the spiritual world. And those who survived, did so because it was best for their eternal souls, not for their remaining years on earth.

The Second Coming


Most Christians, believe that the world will one day come to an end as predicted in Matthew. All scientists support that belief. The whole universe, they say, will eventually become so cold that no life would be possible in it. Moreover, well before then the sun, they say, will become a giant red star and burn up the earth. This forecast is likely to be as unreliable as the forecast of man-made global warming. From what Swedenborg tells us we know that this is profoundly wrong. The spiritual universe and the material universe have, he says, a kind of symbiotic relationship and neither can continue without the other. In Heaven and Hell  (para. 304), he says:


Since Heaven will continue to eternity, so will the world and the universe. It is unthinkable that the Lord should allow the planet on which he was born and lived for 30 years to be destroyed. Moreover the deep symbolism of the Holy Land will endure.
   
This means that the Second Coming expected by the established Christian churches will never come to pass. So what are we to make of the words of Jesus? Swedenborg tells us that the Second Coming took place in 1770. “The Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory” means that the time had come for the Lord to reveal to mankind the inner spiritual meaning of the Word. The ‘literal’ meaning, which can be obscure and apparently contradictory, is meant by “ the clouds of heaven’ and the spiritual meaning by “the power and the glory”.
   
Swedenborg was the instrument the Lord used for making this revelation. Early man knew the significance of every creature, plant and natural phenomenon - “the whole natural order is a theatre representative of the Lord’s Kingdom” - a quotation from Arcana Caelestia. As that knowledge faded, so they came to be treated not as representatives of truths and goods, but to be worshipped as Gods. Animism and polytheism are degenerate forms of that early spiritual knowledge. They were not the first steps in developing religion to “meet man’s spiritual needs”. Religion was not made by man, but given to man by God. At the appropriate moment God began to restore that knowledge to man. Abraham did not know Jehovah until he was revealed to him. Moses too did not know Jehovah and had to be instructed. Two thousand years ago God became man. Divine Truth is the Word and always existed. It was the Word which created the universe and everything in it. 2000 years ago “the Word was made flesh”. And 1770 years later, the Lord decided that man was ready to have a deeper understanding of the Word. The Bible is, and always has been, the vital link between Heaven and the world. When men read the Bible in its literal sense, the angels who are with them understand the spiritual sense.

Does this make sense to you?

God is truly one. He loves us all. Every single human being has the possibility of being “saved”. The next world is a wonderful place to be. We all have the opportunity to live to eternity as human being angels with all our senses, performing uses and becoming ever more loving and wise. Death is not the end; it is a new beginning. God punishes no one; those who turn their faces away from him, punish themselves. We all die at the moment best suited to our eternal welfare. I cannot think of a more beautiful and loving body of doctrine.

The Swedenborg Society
20 Bloomsbury Way WC1A 2TH
translates, prints and publishes works by Emanuel Swedenborg.

The Society is based  in the heart of Bloomsbury in Central London, just a short walk from the British Museum. The building holds a well-stocked and comfortable bookshop, which sells the complete works of Swedenborg and other related materials. Visitors are welcome from Monday to Friday between 9.30am and 5.00pm.
The Society's publications include the English and Latin editions of Swedenborg’s works, major reference works related to Swedenborg and editions in foreign languages, including most European and some Asiatic and African languages. It also publishes an annual Academic Journal and a regular Newsletter.


Guy de Moubray
Buxlow Manor
May 2007