A few New Church / Swedenborgian articles and videos that I enjoyed this week:
1.) An article by Joel Glenn (who happens to share my last name because he happens to be my brother) at New Church Perspective on a recent insight he had into the way he’s viewed the Father and the Son. Excerpt:
We think of Jesus as love because in Jesus we can, for the first time, see what love should really look like. It is a love that we can actually comprehend. We don’t just take it on faith that Jesus is loving; we know from His very words and actions that He is.
And here’s where we come back to that insight into what truth and goodness are. Truth is not about facts or information or knowledge. It’s about expressing love. When truth is actual truth, it is a perfect representation of love. Without truth, love ends up being confusing, harsh, irritable, fickle. If we try to be loving without truth, sometimes it may work, but we’ll end up missing the mark many times. Truth is the tool that links the love that we intend to the reception of that love in another. When truth is in its proper place, all a person will see is the love that is being expressed by the truth. And so when we look at the Lord, all we see is love, because the truth is so clear that love shines through its every facet.
2.)
A new video from Curtis Childs, touching on the Swedenborgian concept of “the Grand Man” or “the Greatest Human” – the idea that the entirety of the human race can be seen as a human being, and that all those who make up God’s kingdom perform a role that perfectly corresponds to some part of the body. It’s a deepening and broadening of the concept of the Church as the Body of Christ. (And, nitpicking, I do wish the video had included something about all the goodness in the human body belonging to the Lord – but I have a tendency to want to throw the kitchen sink into everything). Check out his other videos, too, if you haven’t seen them.
3.)
A new video from Brian David on the New Church idea of who Jesus – a simple explanation with fun whiteboard drawings. (And again, I don’t want to nitpick, but this is a fairly important thing: I wish rather than suggesting that Jesus completely replaced His humanity with Divinity, the video expressed more accurately that Jesus replaced what was merely human, inherited from His mother, with a Divine Humanity. The New Church does NOT deny that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human – in fact, that’s sort of its whole founding principle. Other than that detail, though, the video is great.) Check out his other videos too – they manage to be pack a lot of theology into short, engaging packages.