Not a Bride Until a Holy City
Conjunction with the Lord is Exclusively Through the Heavenly Doctrines of the New Church
Our culture asks us to dismiss differences as equally valid choices. Even in our church organization, there is a growing impression that the New Church is little different from “other” Christian churches, since we basically believe the same thing and how a person lives is more important than what a person believes.
But there is one critical difference: the source of our ideas. Christian churches are all based on merely human inference from the literal stories of the Word. The New Church is based on a spiritual understanding of the internal meaning of those stories revealed by the Lord through Emanuel Swedenborg.
Of course, what makes a church is the life according to faith, a life represented by the holy city prepared as a bride; life is what conjoins a person to the Lord. However the New Church is first described as a holy city because the system of doctrine must come first in time, since doctrine teaches how to live rightly.
In a culture dominated by self-intelligence, it is hard to appeal to a higher truth, an absolute and unchanging truth. The acknowledgement of the Lord Jesus Christ in His Divine Human revealed in the Word is what makes the New Church different.
