The Gist of Swedenborg

Excerpt

ONE AND INFINITE

God is One, and Infinite. The true quality of the Infinite does not appear; for the human mind, however highly analytical and exalted, is itself finite, and the finiteness in it cannot be laid aside. It is not fitted, therefore, to see the Infinity of God, and thus God, as He is in Himself, but can see God from behind in shadow; as it is said of Moses, when he asked to see God, that he was placed in a cleft of the rock, and saw His hinder side. It is enough to acknowledge God from things finite, that is, created, in which He is infinitely.

—True Christian Religion, n. 28

We read in the Word that Jehovah God dwells in light inaccessible. Who, then, could approach Him, unless He had come to dwell in accessible light, that is, unless He had descended and assumed a Humanity and in it had become the Light of the world? Who cannot see that to approach Jehovah the Father in His light is as impossible as to take the wings of the morning and to fly with them to the sun?

—True Christian Religion, n. 176

THE CHRIST-GOD

We ought to have faith in God the Saviour, Jesus Christ, because that is faith in the visible God in Whom is the Invisible; and faith in the visible God, Who is at once Man and God, enters into man. For while faith is spiritual in essence it is natural in form, for everything spiritual, in order to be anything with a man, is received by him in what is natural.

—True Christian Religion, n. 339

Man's conjunction with the Lord is not with His supreme Divine Being itself, but with His Divine Humanity, and by this with the supreme Divine Being; for man can have no idea whatever of the supreme Divine Being of the Lord, utterly transcending his thought as it does; but of His Divine Human Being he can have an idea. Hence the Gospel according to John says that no one has at any time seen God except the only-begotten Son, and that there is no approach to the Father save by Him. For the same reason He is called a Mediator.

—Arcana Coelestia, n. 4211

In the Lord, God and Man are not two but one Person, yea, altogether one, as soul and body are. This is plain in many of the Lord's own utterances; as that the Father and He are one; that all things of the Father are His, and all His the Father's; that He is in the Father, and the Father in Him; that all things are given into His hand; that He has all power; that whosoever believes in Him has eternal life; that He is God of heaven and earth.

—Doctrine Concerning the Lord, n. 60

There is one God, and the Lord is He, His Divinity and Humanity being one Person.

—Divine Providence, n. 122

They who think of the Lord's Humanity, and not at the same time of His Divinity, by no means allow the expression "Divine Humanity"; for they think of the Humanity by itself and of the Divinity by itself, which is like thinking of man apart from his soul or life, which, however, is no conception of man, still less of the Lord.

—Apocalypse Explained, n. 26

WHY HE CAME

The Lord from eternity, Who is Jehovah, came into the world to subdue the hells and to glorify His Humanity....