133. This idea of God and redemption has reduced the whole of theology from the spiritual to the lowest natural level, by attributing to God purely natural properties. Yet everything in the church depends upon the idea of God, and the idea of redemption, which makes one with salvation. For that idea is like the head which controls all actions in the body. So long as it is spiritual, everything in the church becomes spiritual too, and as long as it is natural, everything in the church becomes natural too. Therefore, since the ideas of God and redemption have become purely natural, that is, under the influence of the bodily senses, everything too is purely natural which the heads and members of the church have made traditional in their statements of dogma. The reason why this can produce nothing but falsity is that the natural man is continually acting in opposition to the spiritual, and so looks upon spiritual things as ghosts and illusions in the air. So it can be said that that sensual idea of redemption, and thus of God, has rendered the roads to heaven, leading to the Lord God the Saviour, beset by thieves and robbers (John 10:1, 8, 9); and that the doors of the temples have been thrown down, allowing dragons, owls, tziim and iyim* to come in and howl in discordant chorus.
[2] It is well known that this idea about redemption and God has been foisted into present-day faith. This prescribes that one should pray to God the Father to forgive sins on account of the crucifixion and the shedding of His Son's blood, and to God the Son to pray and intercede for one, and to God the Holy Spirit to make one righteous and sanctified. What else is this but praying to three Gods, one after the other? How then can one think of the rule of God except in terms of aristocratic or hierarchical rule, or as it were a triumvirate such as there once was at Rome, only that instead of a triumvirate it should be called a triumpersonate?** What then is easier for the devil than, as the saying goes, to divide and rule - that is to destroy unanimity and stir up rebellious movements, at one time against one God, at others against another, as has actually happened from the time of Arius*** down to the present? And thus to dethrone the Lord God the Saviour, who has all power in heaven and on earth (Matt. 28:18), and enthrone instead one of one's own supporters and give him worship, or, because it is taken away from him, to take away worship from the Lord Himself.
* Hebrew words perhaps meaning 'howling creatures,' used, e.g., in Isa. 34:14, Jer. 50:9, understood by the author as birds (CL 264.4). ** On two occasions in the first century BC Rome was governed by a triumvirate or committee of three; Swedenborg here invents the word 'triumpersonate' on the model of triumvirate. *** i.e. the early fourth century.
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