by Emanuel Swedenborg
God the Savior is a short, unfinished manuscript found among Emanuel Swedenborg's papers after his death — a bare outline of forty-eight numbered propositions on the unity of God and the Lord's glorification of His Human, never expanded by Swedenborg into full paragraphs. It restates, in skeleton form, the central New Church teaching that Jesus Christ is God Himself, not a second Person alongside the Father, and that the Human He took on in the world was made fully divine.
Because it is a working outline rather than a finished treatise, most of its points are a single sentence each, evidently jotted down as headings for arguments Swedenborg intended to develop later. This edition presents that outline exactly as left, without expansion or invented connective material. This is one of several posthumous drafts by Swedenborg being added to this shelf together; readers looking for his finished, published statement of this same teaching should turn to The Four Doctrines (Doctrine of the Lord) elsewhere on this shelf.
This edition reproduces John Whitehead's English translation, first published in 1914.
1. The theology of the whole Christian world is founded on the worship of three Gods.
2. God is one in essence and Person.
3. In Him is a Trinity, and this must not be distinguished into Persons.
4. The Divine attributes constitute His essence.
5. These are many, and also succeeding.
6. The succeeding Divine attributes are creation and preservation, redemption and salvation, reformation and regeneration.
7. These are Divine, but that they are not as God is in Himself.
8. The one God willed to become a natural Man, and thus a full Man, for many reasons, the primary of which was the redemption of angels and men.
9. Passages from Scripture showing that there is one God.
10. He is the Redeemer and Savior.
11. He came into the world.
12. As to His Human, He called Himself Jesus Christ.
13. Jehovah Himself came into the world and became the Savior and Redeemer.
14. The one God is not only the Creator, but also the Redeemer and Regenerator.
15. As to the Divine truth, He descended and took upon Himself the Human, is confirmed in John, Chap. 1. Also, that He was from eternity, also from His nativity, Luke 1.
16. Passages from the sacred Scripture showing that He is the truth and the light; also, that He is the Word and that He fulfilled the whole of it.
17. All things were made by him.
18. In the spiritual sense, Divine truth is called the Son of God.
19. Divine truth is meant by Messiah, Christ, King, the Anointed, and David.
20. Divine truth is meant by angel and by one sent.
21. Divine truth is meant by glory.
22. In no other way could all things in the heavens and in the hells have been reduced into order.
23. In no other way could He destroy the old church and institute a new church.
24. In no other way could He admit temptations into Himself, and suffer.
25. In no other way could He be in the state of exinanition and pray to God the Father as though absent.
26. In no other way could He become Redemption and Justice from His own power.
27. Thus, in no other way could He unite the Human to the Divine and the reverse, and thus add the Human in time to the Divine from eternity.
28. In no other way could He be and become one with the Father.
29. All things which are in the Divine are together in the Human.
30. The Lord glorified His Human in the order in which He makes man spiritual, or an angel. Concerning the two states of man's regeneration.
31. Thus He made His Human Divine.
32. Thus He became the First and the Last, thus the all in all.
33. The Divine operation is from firsts through lasts, and because, in the church, lasts had failed, therefore, He made Himself the Last.
34. Man cannot be conjoined with God except by means of a visible and accessible Human.
35. Every male is born, as to his spiritual origin, from truth as a seed.
36. The reason why men have not hitherto perceived this, and why consequently there have been so many opinions about the human nature of Christ, is because men have had no distinct understanding concerning the nature of good and truth and of their marriage, nor concerning the nature of the will and the understanding, nor of the soul and the body.
37. The virgin also, of whom He was born, signifies the church as to the affection of truth.
38. It was necessary for Him to be born of a virgin in legitimate marriage with Joseph.
39. Christ alone is man from eternity and natural man in time.
40. In Him everything is Divine from the Divine in itself.
41. He alone is to be approached, that there may be salvation.
42. He must be approached immediately, and if He is approached mediately, communication is intercepted.
43. Here may be adduced those passages, which treat of the "great affliction," and the things which follow.
44. To worship three Gods is to worship none.
45. No one comes to God or is conjoined to Him, unless the Human be approached; otherwise God is not accessible.
46. Because God the Father is the Redeemer as to the Human.
47. In order that there may be conjunction, there must be a visible God, thus one accessible and fixed; this is not so apparent to Christians, but it is to all others.
48. The Divine truth suffered.
Colophon
Digitized text of the sacred-texts.com archive, from the library's local mirror: John Whitehead's 1914 English translation of Emanuel Swedenborg's manuscript fragment "God the Savior" (written 1768, published posthumously). Both Swedenborg's original text and Whitehead's translation are in the public domain.
This work carries no internal section divisions in the source, and no footnotes. It is a flat sequence of forty-eight short numbered propositions, several no more than a single clause, and is presented here exactly as left in Swedenborg's manuscript — no headings have been added, and no attempt has been made to expand or explain the terse points. The numbered sequence is complete and continuous (1–48) with no gaps found in the mirror's text.
Prepared for the Good Work Library by the Tianmu Anglican Church with AI-assisted research, transcription, and editorial work as applicable.
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