The Enlightenment & Awakening Era · 1780s-1815 · England, America
Swedenborgian New Church
An open theological question
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
About This Movement
Emanuel Swedenborg was a Swedish mining engineer, anatomist and member of the House of Nobles who, in his mid-fifties, began having visions and spent the rest of his life writing an enormous body of theological work in Latin — accounts of heaven and hell, of the inner meaning of Scripture, and of a Christianity in which God is one person, Jesus Christ, rather than three. He never founded a church and died in London in 1772; the church came afterwards, and it was made by readers. Reading societies formed in Manchester and London in the 1780s, a separate New Church congregation organized in London in 1787, the first General Conference met in 1789, and the books crossed the Atlantic, where societies formed in Baltimore and Philadelphia in the 1790s.
Sources
- Swedenborg's corpus: Arcana Coelestia (1749-56), Heaven and Hell (1758), True Christian Religion (1771) - New Century Edition (Swedenborg Foundation) (primary) — The claimed revelatory corpus and its non-trinitarian reading of Christianity, in its own words.
- The church's own organizational record: the London reading circle, the 1787 separation, first General Conference minutes (1789), the New Church liturgy (1790); Hindmarsh's Rise and Progress (pub. 1861) (primary) — Shows the readers' movement becoming an organized church only after the founder's death - the founder's own writings are not the same as the church's own record. Hindmarsh's account is a participant memoir written fifty years after the events it describes.
- The reception network: New-Jerusalem Magazine, reading societies (Manchester printing society, 1782; James Glen's American lectures, 1784; Baltimore society, 1792) (primary) — Shows how a book-borne church actually spread; ordinary readers' voices survive here and there.
- Jane Williams-Hogan's New Church scholarship, with Rose et al. (eds.), Scribe of Heaven: Swedenborg's Life, Work, and Impact (Swedenborg Foundation, 2005) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 7: nearest coverage in the 'Christian Enlightenment' (Rosenblatt) and 'Enlightenment critique of Christianity' (Jacob) chapters (reference) — Swedenborg's work sits on the seam between Christian orthodoxy and Enlightenment religious critique.