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self and the world, then that original form, the image and likeness of God in
us, needs to be restored.
It is innocence that made our reception of the human form from the Lord
possible in the first place, and it is only by a return to innocence – by becoming
again as a little child, willing to be led by the Lord – that it can it be restored.
Because “every church in process of time declines,” churches also need to
return to the form they had at their beginning – not in every detail, of course,
but as to the essential loves and first principles that gave form to them. Times
change, first principles do not.
History shows us that reform movements are based, not so much on new
ideas, as on a resolve to return to the truths that inspired the founding of the
Church in the first place.
The Lord Himself, in founding the Christian Church, referred back to the
Law and the Prophets of the Old Testament. Centuries later, the Protestant
Reformation insisted upon a return to the authority and teachings of the Bible,
and the principle of giving the people direct access to it.
The New Church, also, involved a return to form – the pure form of the
Christian Church in its infancy, when charity ruled. The doctrine of the New
Church was given to Swedenborg while he read the prior revelations given
in the Word of the Old and New Testaments. In fact, the doctrine looks even
further back, to the spiritual wisdom of the Ancient Church, the simple
goodness of the Most Ancient Church, and to heaven itself.
In the history of the New Church, the greatest advance, the Academy
movement, was based on a view of the Writings that had been present in the
Church from its very beginning; and even more deeply, the attitude behind (or
prior to) that view, by which that ostensibly “new” view was formed.
In the letters to the churches in Revelation (representing those who
are called to the New Church), the church at Ephesus was praised for its
perseverance, patience and untiring labor for the Lord – but it was called to
account for having “left your first love,” and the people were admonished to
remember where they had come from and return to it. (Revelation 2:2-5)
Our reformation as individuals begins with turning back to God, since
it is God who formed us in the first place. In the Church, every genuine
reformation involves a return to something; some previous condition that was
purer and more vital, but which the organization had drifted away from.
The New Church is perpetually new because it worships a visible God, the
Lord Jesus Christ. “Behold,” the Lord says in the New Jerusalem chapter at the
end of the Book of Revelation, “I make all things new.” It is our beholding of Him
that makes all things new. And that perpetual newness is what distinguishes
the New Church and makes it “the crown of all the churches that have hitherto
existed on the earth.” (True Christian Religion 787)
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