Sunday, October 14, 2012

One more on Swedenborg


I am playing organ tomorrow morning, but here I sit.

Today, as I listened to the Brahm's Requiem once more and sang through it in the score, I realized that the entire very wonderful and scriptural piece makes no mention of Christ--at all, anywhere.  We have some things that allude to the resurrection.  That's as close as we get.

Things like that are done deliberately and we come across this Christless "Christianity" many places.  You would think that those who do not like the Biblical message would just leave it alone.  But not so.  They must have a "spirituality" also and be discarding "religion" they become the most "spiritual".

Or with our fruitcake Swedenborg, we must remove the letter, so that we are properly "spiritual".


Swedenborg now devoted himself to the science of Scripture: biblical exegesis. From1748 to 1756 he worked on his magnum opus: a gigantic,eight-volume commentary on Genesis and Exodus interspersed with amazingly detailed accounts of visionary travels to heaven and hell, including long  discussions  with angels and the spirits of the deceased. The thesis central to this work as a whole, known as the Arcana coelestia, is formulated in its first sentence:
 The Word in the Old Testament contains the mysteries of heaven, and every single aspect of it has to do with the Lord, his heaven, the church, faith, and all the tenets of faith; but not a single person sees this in the letter.
 In other words, underneath  the  literal text of the Bible lies a hidden meaning. And just as the soul cannot be found in matter, on the level of biblical exegesis too, it is categorically  impossible  to  discover  this spiritual  meaning on the basis of the literal text as such: this meaning can only  be disclosed  by  immediate divine revelation. Swedenborg now claims to have been chosen as the unique recipient of the latter: since 1744, he writes, God had granted him the privilege of freely moving around in the world of spirits and angels, and the true meaning of Scripture has been revealed to him by Christ himself.  (quote from here.)   

Out, out, out, out, out with the text. -- In with the immediate divine revelation.

They use the text simply as a jumping off point for their own musings.  And it is those musings with are "spiritual."  Those of us who believe the text are "profane" and even "idolatrous", so I've been called myself.  Christ has now become a revealer of the true, hidden meaning.  He is no longer the revelation himself.

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