| The Swedenborg Church was a progressive response to intellectual change, especially the impact of science, whilst maintaining the Christian tradition. It also displayed the turn to individualism and liberty. Thus it was Enlightenment influenced. Whereas once the spiritual was the sacred canopy of this world, the spiritual becomes instead deep meaning and essence. The unity of God is stressed although the Trinity receives a tradition preserving nod. In more contemporary times this deeper essence, the individualism and the humanist optimism (no original sin) has translated into a spiritual psychology. The importance of the soul as essence means that there is a karma-like nature to living life in this world, to continue to develop in the next, though the next world is an active place where decisions can be made to improve there even if there is little headway here. The Church is a transitory one in terms of supernatural belief and material form, liberal rather than radical. As a liberal option, with beliefs set at a time of transition, it does not respond in its basic tenets to the later and ever fiercer attack on religious meaning, the this-worldly nature of everything (mind in the brain rather than a soul beyond) and postmodern criticism (the question of truths and truth itself). Certainly I do not believe in a spiritual world after brain death where there is work and development; even the liberal Church needs its views radicalising, and here spiritual psychology does seem the way forward even if the soul-realism was ever relegated. |
Adrian Worsfold
Pluralist - Liberal and Thoughtful
See http://www.swedenborg.org