Theopedia

Emanuel Swedenborg

Overview

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a Swedish scientist who, late in life, took up theology and claimed to have been called by God to reveal the Bible’s hidden meaning and found a new church.1 His system denied that God is three persons, holding instead that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one divine person under three aspects, and denied that Christ’s death satisfies God’s justice for sin.2 Charles Hodge grouped Swedenborg’s Christology, on account of that denial of a real Trinity of persons, among the “later forms” antitrinitarian doctrine had taken since the Reformation, next to Socinianism.1

Life and Ministry

Swedenborg was the son of a Swedish bishop.1 Hodge describes him as a man of “extraordinary precocity” who “made such attainments in every branch of learning as to gain the highest rank among the literati of that day,” writing numerous scientific works before he turned to religion.1 Late in life, “believing that the existing Church in all its forms had failed to arrive at the true sense of Scripture, he regarded himself as called by God, in an extraordinary or miraculous manner, to reveal the hidden meaning of the Word of God and found a new Church.”1 Herman Bavinck notes that Swedenborg was among a number of eighteenth-century figures, including Jung-Stilling and Oberlin, who “believed they were in direct contact with the spirits of the dead”; Swedenborg took the beings he conversed with to be angels, by which he meant the departed souls of other human beings, since he admitted no other order of created spirit.3 Hodge concludes that “the doctrine of Swedenborg is so mystical that it is very difficult to be clearly understood,” and that it “has been modified in a greater or less degree by his recognized disciples,”1 the movement that became known as Swedenborgianism or the New Church.

Theological Contribution

Swedenborg taught that God is not only essence but form, and that this form is human; he called God “the eternal God-man.”1 On his account, every person has two bodies, one material and one internal and spiritual, and at death “the outer body is laid aside, and the soul thereafter acts through the ethereal or spiritual vestment” rather than being raised again in the flesh, which Hodge notes was the only resurrection Swedenborg admitted.1

Because he held that there is only one divine essence, Swedenborg concluded there can be only one divine person, and he regarded the church’s doctrine of three persons as effectively tritheistic. He allowed a “Trinity of principles” within that one person: as soul and body together make one human person, so in God “the divine and human are the Father and the Son, as one person, and the Holy Spirit is their efficiency or sanctifying influence.”2 Bavinck classes this kind of trinitarian speculation, shared with Jakob Böhme and Zinzendorf, as “gnostic and theosophical,” part of a line of thought he says helped pave the way for the philosophical reworkings of the Trinity later offered by Kant, Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel, and Strauss.4

Swedenborg held Christ to be Jehovah himself, “the only living and true God, the creator, preserver, and ruler of the world,” whose incarnation consisted in assuming a material body in the womb of the Virgin Mary. In his account, that material body was not left behind at death, as an ordinary body is, but was “gradually refined and glorified until it was lost in that which is spiritual and eternal.”2 Hodge notes Swedenborg was not alone in that twofold-body idea: the Quaker theologian Robert Barclay and the French mystic Pierre Poiret both taught comparable versions of it.2

On redemption, Swedenborg rejected any notion that Christ’s death was a satisfaction of divine justice for human sin. “The work of salvation is entirely subjective,” in Hodge’s summary: sinners are pardoned on their own repentance and made inwardly righteous, and it is that inward holiness, not an imputed righteousness secured by Christ’s atoning death, that admits them to heaven.5

Historical Significance

Swedenborg’s followers organized his teaching into the New Church, more commonly known as Swedenborgianism. Augustus Strong grouped it with Spiritualism and Mormonism as a movement to be tested, per 1 John 4:1 and Ephesians 5:10, against the truth already revealed in Scripture.6 Strong was also critical of the emanationist cosmology built into Swedenborg’s doctrine of God, in which the created world flows by “continual mediations” out of the divine substance itself: he called the resulting system “materialism driven deep and clinched on the inside,” and argued instead for a doctrine of creation as a free, purposeful act of “divine energizing in space and time” rather than a material overflow from God.7

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 419. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  2. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:420. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 23, “The Intermediate State.” ↩

  4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩

  5. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:421. ↩

  6. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907), 147. ↩

  7. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907), 70. ↩