Such is Doug Webber’s fascinating story on page 173, A Search for Truth.
It recounts his own determination to seek answers to haunting questions about
God and faith, and how he found them in the Writings of Swedenborg. But it
was not an epiphany. He had to work at it.
He came to the Writings with both hope and doubt, piqued by curiosity
about this man he had heard of, Emanuel Swedenborg. As he started to read
True Christian Religion – his introduction to the Writings – he says: “I thought,
for sure, as with many New Age religions, that Swedenborg was going to say
that Jesus Christ was just a ‘good teacher’ of some sort. Once he made that
error I was going to close that book. To my surprise, not only did he declare
that Jesus was Jehovah in human form, but he also solved the problem of the
Trinity.”
All of this resonates with a wonderful little book, The Bible That Was Lost
and Is Found, written by John Bigelow in the mid-19th century.
Bigelow was a prominent journalist, lawyer and statesman. Among a long
list of accomplishments, he had taken on the corruption of Boss Tweed in New
York City, was the United States ambassador in Paris, and helped to establish
the New York Public Library.
During his travels as a newspaper editor, he was stranded for several weeks
on the island of Haiti during an outbreak of yellow fever and cholera. There
was just one other man in his hotel – a Danish lawyer named Mr. Kjerulff.
Bigelow was a devoted reader of the Bible. As the two men sat together in
the hotel lobby, Bigelow complained out loud while reading Genesis 12, where
Abram, an honorable man, tells his wife to lie and say that she was his sister.
His Danish friend asked if he had ever read Swedenborg. He handed
Bigelow the first volume of Arcana Coelestia, pointing him to the description
of the internal sense of this passage.
Bigelow recognized immediately that there was something special here
and began reading everything of Swedenborg’s that he could get his hands on.
But he was also skeptical, “expecting to drop the book as soon as I came to
something – and I did not in the least doubt I soon should – that would be so
absurd, or improbable, or illogical, as would justify me, without rudeness, in
returning the book to my Danish friend with thanks.”
But, he confessed, “Although I understood imperfectly what I read, I did
not find what I was looking for; I found nothing that I could point to with
confidence and say, ‘There, you see, your man Swedenborg must have been
either a fool or an imposter, if not both.’” And the more he read, the more he
became convinced that this could not be the product of a mortal mind; it had
to be Divine revelation.
The experiences of Mr. Bigelow and Mr. Webber, and so many good
New Church people we know, should inspire us with the charge of the Great
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