by Friedrich Christoph Oetinger
I was once asked how, from a philosopher, I became a theologian; and I answered, “In the same manner that fishermen were made disciples and apostles by the Lord: and that I also had from early youth been a spiritual fisherman.” On this, my questioner asked, “What is a spiritual fisherman?” I replied, “A fisherman, in the Word, in its spiritual sense, signifies a man who investigates and teaches natural truths, and afterwards spiritual truths, in a rational manner.”
by Alfred Action
As your Chairman has stated, we are met together to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Arcana Caelestia. Swedenborg commenced the writing of this work in November 1748, at a place not far distant from the very centre of this city, and it was published in the following summer. This publication was the culmination of an event which had happened three years before. In April 1745, the Lord appeared to Swedenborg and announced that he was to be appointed the servant of the Lord to reveal to the Christian world the spiritual sense of the Word and the nature of the spiritual world, and that for this purpose he was to be admitted into the spiritual world at the same time that he was present in the natural world.
by Reuben P. Bell
In the Prologue to his second major work on human anatomy and physiology, Emanuel Swedenborg made an uncharacteristically emotional appeal to his readers. Filled with the excitement of his Age of Reason, and inspired by the limitless promise of his day, he proclaims that the time has come to take the scientific method out of the old world of orthodoxy, and free it to sail into the future. Old ideas and prejudices were being overcome, and new, scientific principles were taking their place, formed not just by careful observation alone, but with reason to lead the way. In an urgent appeal to the learned world, Swedenborg announced that it is time to put this New Philosophy into use.
by Reuben P. Bell
The scientific and theological works of Emanuel Swedenborg have been artificially divided by an abyss of revelation. Because of the obvious abrupt change in both the style and content of the books published after his spiritual crisis of 1744–45, it is easy to presume that the two collections are essentially unrelated. In a stark transition from the rigorous analytical method of his scientific works, we find in Swedenborg’s theological Writings an exegetical style, dependent no longer on the reproducible sensory data of the scientific method alone, but on spiritual experience, with the added authority of divine revelation. Such is the nature of these Writings, as clearly described by Swedenborg himself.
by The Rev. Glendower C. Ottley
It is the oft-repeated teaching of the Heavenly Doctrines that the first is in all the series, even as the end is in the cause and in the effect—a statement so philosophically true as to admit of no doubt whatever in the mind of a rational being.
