Swedenborg, Emanuel

Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772), Swedish scientist and mystical thinker. While employed at the Swedish Board of Mines (1716–47), he anticipated various later scientific hypotheses and discoveries; he was also increasingly concerned to show by scientific analysis that the Universe had a fundamentally spiritual structure. In 1743–5 he became conscious of direct contact with the spiritual world and felt that he was commissioned to make known his doctrines to the world at large. The agency was to be the New Church, organized not as a body separate from the existing Churches, but as a spiritual fraternity of all those, of whatever ecclesiastical allegiance, who accepted his doctrines. The basis of his system was a ‘doctrine of correspondence’ between the physical and spiritual worlds. He envisaged the spiritual world as containing various groupings of deceased human beings which made up a single great human being. He accepted Christ as the greatest manifestation of humanity, but rejected the doctrine of the Atonement.

Among the earliest disseminators of his teaching were two C of E clergymen, but the formal creation of a separate body, known as the New Jerusalem Church, was the work of five ex-Wesleyan preachers in London in 1787. In the USA the first congregation was formed in Baltimore in 1792. There are also bodies of Sweden-borgians in mainland Europe, Africa, Australia, Canada, Japan, and South America. They claim world membership of c.65,000.