n e w c h u r c h l i f e : m ay / j u n e 2 0 1 4
on science and why it should declare the cultivation of the natural sciences
unnecessary and injurious. The church ought not to reject and condemn
natural science, but it ought to despoil the modern ‘Egyptians’ and thus make
the vessels of natural science, vessels of truth, instead of falsity.
What one reads here is a supremely confident statement of intent, and
it is clear that the New Church saw itself as a power in the world by showing
how the spiritual grows out of the natural, in the face of a natural that, like the
Egypt of Exodus, is intent to keep reality religion-free.
In the opening pages of Exodus, Pharaoh doubles the work load upon the
Hebrew nation in order to purge them of their desire to practice their religion.
One can easily see how this relates to our world today, in which religion is
being marginalized.
But it is true that spirituality must be grounded in the physical. The kind
of religion that shines through the Bible and which is taught in Swedenborg’s
Writings is firmly rooted in the natural. Here is the novel idea: spirituality
must rest upon physical reality, which is illustrated by the Lord’s incarnation.
On the surface, many of the ideas proposed and investigated by
Swedenborg may seem difficult to grasp, yet experience makes them quite
easy to understand. For instance, we can see how influx works by considering
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