Book Review: “Johnny Appleseed: The Man, the Myth, and the American Story” by Howard Means

April 18, 2011 By Coleman Glenn 9 Comments

Howard Means’s new biography of John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) has been garnering some publicity since its publication on April 12, including generally favourable reviews in the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe, and an interview with the author on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” The reviews all discuss the book’s focus on John Chapman’s Swedenborgianism as the driving force behind his itinerant lifestyle.

Means calls Chapman “the New Church’s most famous North American disciple.”  That’s disputable: Helen Keller was a New Church disciple (I plan on reviewing her essay “How I Would Help the World,” originally part the introduction for an edition of Swedenborg’s True Christian Religion, and published earlier this month by the Swedenborg Foundation as a standalone book).  A search for her name results in more than triple the number of hits for “Johnny Appleseed.”  But Chapman was probably the more ardent evangelist of the two, and his Swedenborgianism may be more widely known.

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What’s In A Name?

January 28, 2011 By Coleman Glenn 3 Comments

First of all, welcome to my blog, and welcome to the new site for those who’ve already been following me!  I’m excited to work with Patheos – they host several of my favourite blogs (e.g. Jesus Creed, The Deacon’s Bench, The Bible and Culture), and I look forward to getting involved in the conversations that happen at this site.

In getting this blog set up, I’ve run into a conundrum that I’ve faced several times before – how do I refer to myself in terms of my religion?  The tagline of this blog is “Reflections of a New Church (Swedenborgian) Minister.”  Why not just say a New Church minister?  Because people could easily read that as the blog of a church minister who is newly ordained – i.e. a new church-minister (which, incidentally, I am).  Why not just “Swedenborgian”?  Ah – there’s where it gets a little interesting.

Swedenborg was adamant that the revelation he wrote down did not come from himself.  He himself didn’t like the term Swedenborgianism – but his solution provides a few problems of its own.  In a letter to his friend Dr. Beyer, he wrote, “This doctrine they there call ‘Swedenborgianism’; but for my part I call it Genuine Christianity.”  Problem solved!  I’ll call myself a Genuine Christian!  That should clear up any confusion…

I don’t think I even have to go into the problems that would cause.  And using New Church as an adjective actually works fine most of the time where the capitalization is noticeable (e.g. New Church doctrine, New Church cathedral, New Church minister).  The problem is when we go to refer to ourselves – the noun form.  In the old days, New Church adherents used to call themselves “New Churchmen” and, less frequently, “New Churchwomen.”  But in the old days you could also refer to Chinese as “Chinamen” without being offensive.  These ain’t the old days.  Calling ourselves Swedenborgians works better, but I’d rather not, for the reasons I mentioned above.  New Christians isn’t bad, but our religion is called the New Church, and rarely The New Christian Church (although it is called that occasionally).  So, until we come up with something better, I’ll unhappily vacillate between the clunky “New Church people” and the less-than-ideal “Swedenborgians.”

Incidentally, this may be only a problem for those of us in the more conservative branch of the New Church, the General Church of the New Jerusalem.  The other major North American branch, which used to be known as the General Convention of the New Jerusalem, changed its name years ago to the Swedenborgian Church of North America.

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Changes Since Swedenborg: Dispensationalism

May 13, 2010 By Coleman Glenn 2 Comments

Last year I spent a fair amount of time answering emails sent to the outreach department at newchurch.org, and out of necessity I learned about current Christian beliefs in America – and in the process discovered dispensationalism. Dispensationalism is HUGE in American Christianity (although less so internationally, as far as I know) – and it didn’t exist in Swedenborg’s time.

The basic idea of dispensationalism is that there were several unique “dispensations” to the human race. The divisions vary, but all dispensationalists agree that there was one dispensation for the Jews, one dispensation for Christians, and a final dispensation for “the Kingdom” (Christ’s reign after His second coming). Of course, most Christians agree that Jesus gave a new revelation that in some ways changed the Law of the Old Testament (e.g. no more need for sacrifices) – but dispensationalists believe that there are still separate dispensations for Israel and for everyone else. From Wikipedia:

The relationship between the ancient nations of Israel and Judah (sometimes collectively referred to as Israel or the Jewish people) and the church as the people of God is the key discriminator between Dispensationalism and other views. In the dispensational view, the time in which the church operates, known as the church age or the Christian dispensation, represents a “parenthesis”. That is, it is an interruption in God’s dealings with the Jewish people as a nation as described in the Old Testament, and it is the time when the Gospel was preached and salvation in the present age is offered to the Gentiles and Jews alike. During the present dispensation a small Jewish remnant along with a large Gentile number are to be saved and become part of the Church. Israel as a nation is partially blinded until the fullness of the Gentiles has come. Afterwards however, God’s continued care for the Jewish people as a nation will be revealed after the end of the church age when Israel will be restored to their land and will accept Jesus as their messiah (compare Zech 12:8-10[6]) and therefore “all Israel shall be saved.”

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Are All Religions the Same?

May 4, 2010 By Coleman Glenn 4 Comments

Are all religions the same?  Last week religion professor Stephen Prothero published an article in the Boston Globe arguing that “it is misleading — and dangerous — to think that religions are different paths to the same wisdom.” (HT Rod Dreher).  An excerpt:

To claim that all religions are basically the same, therefore, is not to deny the differences between a Buddhist who believes in no god, a Jew who believes in one God, and a Hindu who believes in many gods. It is to deny that those differences matter, however. From this perspective, whether God has a body (yes, say Mormons; no, say Muslims) or whether human beings have souls (yes, say Hindus; no, say Buddhists) is of no account because, as Hindu teacher Swami Sivananda writes, “The fundamentals or essentials of all religions are the same. There is difference only in the nonessentials.”  This is a lovely sentiment but it is untrue, disrespectful, and dangerous.

Prothero makes several good points.  To deny that there are serious, fundamental differences between religions takes away the beauty and uniqueness of each of them.  But he seems to miss out on the fact that whether the fundamentals of all religions are the same depends entirely on what you consider to be fundamental – and that itself depends on your religious viewpoint.

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The Lord In Everything

May 1, 2010 By Coleman Glenn 2 Comments

Last week I posted a quote that I love from True Christian Religion, which says, “God alone acts; man permits himself to be acted upon, and cooperates to all appearance as if of himself, although interiorly from God” (TCR 588).  To me, everything comes down to this.  When I am able to get some kind of sense of this, the world makes sense to me, I love people, I love the Lord, I see clearly, and I am happy.  That’s how big it is.  It’s tempting to get caught up in all the questions it raises: where is freedom, then?  Good questions to ask, but endlessly trying to understand, running through a debate in my head, just makes me understand it less.  Living it, I learn to understand it more.

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