Neighborly Love, Faith, And What The Philistines Represent | NCE Spotlight

Featured quotations from Emanuel Swedenborg's Secrets of Heaven:


3324:4


People who have no love for others cannot acknowledge the Lord,
so they cannot acknowledge religious truth. If they claim to
believe, they are being either superficial or hypocritical
(2354). There is absolutely no faith without neighborly love
(654, 1162, 1176, 2417).


3325:3


In the church, though, there are more people who are not
regenerating than who are, and people who are not regenerating
draw conclusions on the basis of appearances. So there was a
controversy going back to ancient times about the relative
priority of truth and goodness. The prevailing opinion among
people who had not been reborn (and among people who had not been
fully reborn) was that truth came first. They were not yet able
to perceive what was good, and as long as we cannot perceive
goodness, we live in shadows of ignorance on the subject. People
who have been reborn, though, are actually immersed in goodness,
which brings them understanding and wisdom, so they are able to
discern what is good. They can also tell that what is good comes
from the Lord, that it flows in by way of the inner self into the
outer, that it flows in constantly, without any awareness on our
part, that it links up with doctrinal truth in the memory, and
consequently that goodness by its very nature is prior, even
though it had not seemed so before.


3412:2


Here is the situation with deep truth that comes from the Divine
and is wiped out by the people called Philistines: In the ancient
church and after its time, “Philistines” referred to people who
had little energy for learning how to live but a great deal of
energy for learning theology. Eventually they even rejected life
issues and acknowledged belief issues as the essence of the
church, detaching them from life.