Salvation and Jesus: A Challenge

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Coleman Glenn

I want this blog post to be a challenge. In the New Church, we embrace the teaching that God does not condemn anyone for ignorance of Him; that people who do not know Him as the Lord Jesus Christ, who are ignorant of His Word, can be saved, because if they have lived as well as they can in love to the neighbor and love to God, they will embrace Him as God after death, since “those who do the truth come to the light” (John 3:21).

These are beautiful teachings, illustrating God’s mercy.  And yet. I think we overemphasize these teachings. I think these teachings are about the Lord’s mercy for those who are in ignorance – but they are not about people who have the Word and are in some sense “within the Church,” or “within Christianity,” or “within the Christian world.” Now, there are a lot of other passages and teachings to take into account. I wrote a longer blog post including some of these, but decided not to publish it. For now, I simply want to present these passages, without caveats (although with emphasis added by me).

In the following work, by the name Lord is meant the Savior of the world, Jesus Christ, and Him only; and He is called “the Lord” without the addition of other names. Throughout the universal heaven He it is who is acknowledged and adored as Lord, because He has all sovereign power in the heavens and on earth. He also commanded His disciples so to call Him, saying, “Ye call Me Lord, and ye say well, for I am” (John 13:13). And after His resurrection His disciples called Him “the Lord.” (Arcana Coelestia 14)

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Waiting on the Lord

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Coleman Glenn

Yesterday, I preached in Dawson Creek and Grande Prairie on waiting for the Lord, based on the story of Saul’s unlawful sacrifice (1 Samuel 13:1-15). The thing that struck me about the story is the fact that Saul did wait for the Lord, for seven whole days, while his army scattered; it was only after Samuel failed to show up that Saul offered the sacrifice. I can relate to that feeling – I’ve already waited and waited for the Lord, and He seems to be failing; I’m going to do things my way before things completely fall to pieces.  Anyway, here’s the sermon; the readings were 1 Samuel 13:1-15; Luke 12:35-48; Divine Providence 73:6, 7.

“Our soul waits for Jehovah; He is our help and our shield.” (Psalm 33:20)

Wait on the Lord. Throughout the Word, this message is given over and over again. In Psalm 27 we read, “Wait for Jehovah; hold firm, and He shall encourage your heart; and wait for Jehovah” (Psalm 27:14). In the book of Isaiah, we read, “The youths shall faint and tire, and the young men stumbling shall stumble; but they that wait upon Jehovah shall renew their power” (Isaiah 40:30, 31). In these passages, we see a promise – that those who wait for the Lord shall be given strength and encouragement. The Lord will give hope to those who wait faithfully for him.

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How I View Swedenborg’s Writings

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Coleman Glenn

New Church Perspective has finished publishing my two-part essay on how I read the Writings: Part I, Part II.

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The Little Way

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Coleman Glenn

There’s something about St. Thérèse. Until a year or two ago I’d never heard of Thérèse of Lisieux.  I was introduced to her by Tomas Halik in his book Patience with God. There he wrote about her “dark night of the soul” leading up to her death, where she seemed to have lost her faith almost completely. But he also wrote about the things that had later led to the Catholic church canonizing her as a saint, especially her devotion to what she called “the little way.” Since then, I’ve heard her name come up in several different contexts: a few blogs I read have mentioned her in passing, two different friends on separate occasions have told me that she’s an inspiration; and most recently, Richard Beck has been blogging about “the little way” on his Experimental Theology blog. I still haven’t read the book she is remembered for, her autobiography The Story of a Soul (L’histoire d’une âme), but I want to take a closer look at what “the little way” is all about.

As Beck describes it, Thérèse had a desire to do great things, to be a martyr, to find a great and high vocation. And yet, she did not see that as a possibility for her life, and she desperately sought to know what God was calling her to do. The answer she received was that He was calling her to do something on a much smaller level, but just as great in importance: to become love in the simple, small, everyday things of her life. Beck describes it this way:

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The Seventh Blind Man of Indostan

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Coleman Glenn

Recently I ran across a reference to the poem “The Blind Men and the Elephant” by John Godfrey Saxe (although for the life of me I can’t remember where), and it reminded me of the little-known final stanza of the poem.  It’s little known because it’s never been published; I discovered it written in invisible ink on the back of Saxe’s original manuscript, hidden away in the depths of a dark, deserted Indostani library and protected by a wall, a man with a  spear, a snake, a tree, and (for some reason) a guy wielding a rope and a fan.  Or at least, I think it was.  Like I said, it was dark.  Anyway, here ’tis, published for the first time:

The seventh man of Indostan
Just listened to them brawl,
And sighed, “These fools cannot agree,
Their minds are far too small.
From their dispute it’s plain that there’s
No elephant at all!”

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The Christmas Tableaux

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Coleman Glenn

On Sunday evening, the Dawson Creek Church of the New Jerusalem held their annual Christmas tableaux service – the first I’ve participated in as resident pastor.  ”Tableaux” is short for “tableaux vivants,” meaning “living pictures.”  In a tableau vivant, the actors stand completely still to form a still picture; when it’s done well, it can almost look like a three-dimensional photograph.  The service this year here in Dawson Creek was simple and beautiful.  The woman organizing it had a vision of something that would create a space for peaceful reflection, a place for calm in the busy Christmas season. At the front of the church we hung a dark blue curtain. All the costumes and props were bright white, and the only light came from some soft blue flood lights in the corners and a bright white spotlight. The effect of the white against the blue was beautiful. For the final scene, we opened the curtain to reveal an open copy of the Lord’s Word, sitting on the altar, with lit candles beside it and a light shining down on it; and I read out the opening passages of the gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word…”

Churches everywhere put on Christmas pageants, but Christmas tableaux seem to be a special tradition of the New Church, and especially the General Church, the denomination that I belong to. I’m not sure the reason for this; doing a little research in “New Church Life” magazine, I found that New Church congregations have been having Christmas tableaux services as far back as 1884 – which is about as far back as the New Church Life records go. It seems that tableaux were much more common everywhere at the time; but while they faded throughout the rest of America, they became a tradition in New Church congregations.

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Glory to God in the Highest

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Coleman Glenn

This past Sunday, I preached on the appearance of the angels to the shepherds, declaring the good news, the gospel, that the Lord had been born.  The essential teachings about who the Lord is and what the gospel is are contained in the angel’s words: “I announce good​ ​tidings to you of great joy that shall be to all the people. For to you is born today a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord, in the city of David” (Luke 2:10,11).  Here’s the sermon; the readings are Jeremiah 23:1-8, Luke 2:1-20, and Arcana Coelestia 468.

“And I will bring together the remnant of My flock out of all lands whither I have driven them, and will return them to their homes; and they shall be fruitful and multiply.” (Jeremiah 23:3)

The remnant will return, and be made fruitful.  The word “remnant” means those who remain.  It’s a promise at the heart of the Old Testament.  Every time the people is captured by an enemy and carried away from their homeland, the Lord promises that he will preserve those few who remain faithful.  He will take that remnant and return them to their land, and will rebuild His people from that small remnant.  Even before the time of Israel, we see the same thing play out in the story of Noah.  The entire world had become evil, and so the Lord sent a flood to destroy the world – but he preserved a few, those who had not completely shut off their interiors against Him.  A remnant was saved, and from them, the earth was repopulated.

The Writings for the New Church explain that in a deeper sense, these stories about remnants being protected and restored represents the way that even in the darkest times of a church, the Lord preserves a few who have not completely destroyed their faith and love in Him.  When the Lord raises up a New Church, it is raised up with that remnant of the old church, along with a people from outside of the church, who had not been able to twist the Lord’s Word because they had never heard it before.

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Book Review: The Hidden Levels of the Mind by Douglas Taylor

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Coleman Glenn

At some point in college, I got fed up with theological charts and diagrams.  Attending religion classes at the Academy of the New Church high school and Bryn Athyn College of the New Church, I saw plenty of them.  There were a few reasons I got fed up with them, but mostly it had to do with me: I realized that in thinking I could understand spirituality with charts and diagrams, I had been mistaking the map for the territory.

The Hidden Levels of the Mind by Douglas Taylor – featured this month at the Patheos Book Club – has lots of theological diagrams of the mind.  And yet, I didn’t hate it.  In fact, I loved it.  The thing is, even if they oversimplify things, diagrams of spiritual concepts help provide a framework that you can hang things on.  Even as you come across things that don’t seem to quite fit into the neat boxes in the diagram, without that framework you don’t have much of a picture at all.  And in The Hidden Levels of the Mind, Taylor does an excellent job of presenting that framework of the structure of the human mind according to the theological writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.

If you’re planning to read Swedenborg – and especially if you’re planning to read something in Swedenborg without reading a whole work – I’d recommend checking out this book first.  It explains the basic New Church concept of the mind as it exists in its different levels – celestial, spiritual, and natural – and in its two sides, the will and the intellect.  If you’re looking for a clear, concise explanation of how Swedenborg views the mind, this is it.

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Babies Love Justice

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Coleman Glenn

[Edit: Note that this blog has a new URL: www.patheos.com/blogs/goodandtruth/ (changed from www.patheos.com/community/goodandtruth/).  RSS feed: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/goodandtruth/feed/.  Links from the old URL and its RSS feed should still work, but it's probably a good idea to update your bookmarks anyway.]

Stephanie Pappas, senior writer at LiveScience, writes of a new study indicating that infants as young as 8 months old like to see wrongdoers punished.  Excerpt:

Babies as young as 8 months want to see wrongdoers punished, a new study finds.

In contrast, younger babies prefer to see individuals being nice to one another — even when that means that someone is nice to a character who deserves a slap on the wrist.

“This study helps to answer questions that have puzzled evolutionary psychologists for decades,” Kiley Hamlin, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, said in a statement. “Namely, how have we survived as intensely social creatures if our sociability makes us vulnerable to being cheated and exploited? These findings suggest that, from as early as eight months, we are watching for people who might put us in danger.”

Pappas describes the series of experiments that led to the new findings:

So the researchers set up a series of experiments using puppets to act out scenarios of helping and harming while each of 32 5-month-olds and 32 8-month-olds watched separately. After each experiment, the infants indicated their preference for the puppets’ behaviors by picking their favorite puppet to hold.

The puppets — a series of cheerful characters, including moose, elephants and a yellow duck — were first shown interacting in either nice or mean ways. One puppet would struggle to open a box containing a toy, while another either jumped in to help or cruelly slammed the lid shut.

Next, the infants watched as the puppet that had helped or hindered played with a ball and dropped it. A third puppet then came into the scene, either to take the puppet’s ball away or to hand it back. …

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The Deeper Meaning in Tiffany’s Swedenborgian Angels

Posted on November 25, 2011 by Coleman Glenn

On Monday I received my copy of Tiffany’s Swedenborgian Angels by Mary Lou Bertucci and Joanna Hill, currently featured on the Patheos Book Club. I’ve been reading it in bits and pieces over the last few days.  It’s not a long book, but it’s one that invites pausing and reflecting.

First and foremost: this is a beautiful book.  Its tall, narrow dimensions make the perfect frame for the angel windows, a set of seven stained-glass windows commissioned in 1902 by the New Church in Glendale, Ohio, and designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, depicting the seven angels of the churches in Asia from the Book of Revelation.  And Douglas Lockard’s photography of the windows themselves – backlit against solid black backgrounds – brings out the luminescence of the stained glass in way that makes the pictures almost seem to glow.

I expected the book to focus more on the story of the windows – how they were commissioned, the Swedenborgian input into their design, the story of their recovery after years of neglect.  The book does touch on those things in the introduction and in an afterword, but that’s not the main focus of the book – the primary purpose, it seems, is to encourage contemplation on the meaning of the windows, with each chapter exploring one of the letters to the churches from second and third chapters of Revelation.  There’s a good balance between historical / scholarly interpretation, and explanations of the spiritual sense of the stories as described by Swedenborg in Apocalypse Revealed (or Revelation Unveiled in the forthcoming New Century translation).

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