Emanuel Swedenborg and Time Magazine

On July 1, 1935 Time Magazine ran an article, The New Jerusalem, stating:

Son of a Lutheran bishop, Emanuel Swedenborg spent his time between the ages of four and ten in "thought upon God, salvation and the spiritual experience of men." Some of his precocious revelations made his father & mother conclude that angels were speaking through him, decide to put a stop to "these celestial excursions." But at 57 his anatomical search for man's soul turned Swedenborg once more to supernatural intercourse. This time he had no doubt that the angels and spirits were real. They scattered sweet or disagreeable odors on his body, produced pain, heat, cold. One night some evil spirits got into his scalp, fled at dawn "with a slight hissing sound, like when some little distended vesicle is perforated." For the next 27 years Swedenborg made almost daily excursions through Heaven and Hell, heard the meaning of the Scriptures expounded by angels, spirits and the Lord Himself. All that he saw & heard he dutifully set down in 29 fat Latin volumes.

Christ, he firmly believed, had chosen Emanuel Swedenborg as the vehicle of His second coming. But for all his complex system of theology, he did not attempt to preach or found a sect. His New Church was to embrace all Christendom, revitalized by his revelations.

Emanuel Swedenborg would again resurface in the magazine on February 7, 1938 in an article, For Swedenborg, about notable Swedenborgians and on June 28, 1954 in an article, The Great Swede, once again discussing his long list of personal achievements. And finally, on June 26, 1964, in an article about The New Jerusalem where the author notes the Second Advent of Jesus Christ:

Who was the most brilliant mind of the 18th century? A good case could be made for Newton, Voltaire, Samuel Johnson—or for Emanuel Swedenborg, the polymathic scientist and seer whose fame lingers on not just in literature but in churches that honor his writing as the vehicle for the second coming of God's word.

In all, the Time Magazine Archive lists 22 articles and letters that mention Emanuel Swedenborg dating back as far as 1925 with the last one published as recently as 1985, an article titled In Search of Immortality the Tree of Life which notes that John "Johnny Appleseed" Chapman believed in Emanuel Swedenborg's revelation.

But here is the interesting piece for me, why is it that in all of these articles Emanuel Swedenborg's science, philsophy, engineering, and personal achievements overwhelm the fact that he was chosen by Jesus Christ Himself to publish the completion of the Word of God in bearing witness to the Second Coming of Christ? Surely the Second Advent of our Lord is bigger news than some guy inventing a prototype airplane, or figuring out how the human body works.

I can assume the answer is summed up by the author of the July 1, 1935 article who observed:

...the fact remains that in most U. S. minds Emanuel Swedenborg and his doctrines are sadly confused with advice to the married, physical culture, Rosicrucianism and patent can-openers. That is because most citizens have met the great Scandinavian savant only as a tiny picture in the back pages of popular magazines, tucked away in one-inch advertisements offering HEAVEN AND HELL, "632 page book treating of the Life after Death," for 5¢.

For some reason, people who have been reading the theology written by Emanuel Swedenborg, for the last 200+ years have missed their most crucial message - that Jesus Christ rose from the dead fully united with His soul, "the Father" - i.e. the risen Jesus Christ is the one and only God. By making the details about the afterlife to be the main thrust of their message and belief, the movement which could have been working new life into Christianity sidelined itself out of the mainstream and into mysticism, spiritism, agnosticism, and philosophy. Making the Second Advent of Jesus Christ wait for over 200 years to be announced and realized in mainstream culture.

In the article, The Great Swede, the author reports the President of a Swedenborgian denomination saying:

"The Second Coming of the Lord is a process already going on, changing the very environment ... of all mankind. It is not to be a bodily Coming . . . That Second Coming is as the very spirit of truth . . . We feel Swedenborg has been a chosen instrument ... to make the truth concerning the Second Coming better known."

This is as close as any of the 22 articles that Time published come to actually getting the full truth, that Jesus Christ returned to earth in 1745 when He appeared to Emanuel Swedenborg and asked him to write and to publish everything that he was about to learn. The Second Coming of Christ was real, it was historical, it happened between 1745 and 1772 and the full story can be found in the books that Emanuel Swedenborg wrote and published during that time.