Emanuel Swedenborg: Invitation to the New Church ca. 1760–1712

Emanuel Swedenborg's Invitation to the New Church was not a published work but a draft in Latin that was begun sometime in the 1760s but left unfinished at his death and found among his papers. The concept of the “New Church” was introduced and explored at length in Swedenborg's long book The True Christian Religion: Containing the Universal Theology of the New Church, published in Latin in Amsterdam in 1771. The Invitation is a summary of some of the salient teachings set out in the work he saw published. The Invitation contains some of the author's most important conclusions, namely, that God is one and is recognized in a human form as the Lord Jesus Christ, that the former church must be “consummated” before the new church can be formed, and that reliance on miracles has destroyed the Christian church. The new church will be founded not on miracles but through revelation of the spiritual sense of the Word. Controversially, Swedenborg believed that his body and spirit had been permitted by God to enter the world beyond death so as to know what heaven and hell are and that he was inspired by God to reveal the spiritual sense of the Word, that is, the scriptures. In the “New Church,” which accords with the New Jerusalem described by Saint John the Divine in chapters 21 and 22 of the book of Revelation, men and women would no longer be called Evangelicals or Reformed, still less Lutherans or Calvinists, but would simply be Christians.