What Alternative Spiritual Systems Get Wrong About Jesus’s Divinity

For a number of years, I also subscribed to the idea that Jesus was not God but a highly advanced person. It was not until I came across Emanuel Swedenborg’s work that I started to seriously reconsider my worldview. I was completely fascinated by his interpretation of Jesus, the Bible, and Christianity as many of the contradictions in traditional Christianity I initially felt disillusioned with seemed resolved by his theology.

And yet, still I was confused about the nature of God.

Although I believed in a God, up until that point I had seen God like an energy, the Universe, a universal intelligence, Source, etc.

Could it be that God was a spiritual being and, more so, one with a human character?

I know many think that believing in the Universe/Source Energy is the same thing as believing in a God, but they are worlds apart.

When I believed God was a universal intelligence, God seemed like an impersonal force that one acknowledged but couldn’t entirely be sure was there.

When I read this passage from True Christianity, section 339, I came to see why this was my experience. Some excerpts:

“In brief, faith in an invisible God is in fact blind faith, since the human mind cannot see its God; and the light of this faith, not being spiritual-natural, is a false light. This light resembles that of a glowworm, or the light seen at night on marshes or sulphurous ground, or that from rotting wood. Nothing can come of such light but pure imagination, which make appearances seem real when they are not.

Faith in an invisible God sheds only this kind of light; especially so, when one reflects that God is a spirit, and thinks of spirit as the ether. What result can this have except to make a person look on God as he does the ether? So he looks for God in the universe, and not finding Him there, believes that Nature is God. This is the source of the nature-worship which is prevalent at the present time….”

“It is, however, different with faith in the Lord God the Saviour. Since He is God and man, and can be approached and seen in the mind's eye, this faith is not without a goal, but has a goal from which it proceeds and to which it is directed; and once accepted, it remains.

It is as when one has seen an emperor or king; whenever one recalls them, their likeness recurs to the mind. The vision that faith gives is like looking at a shining cloud, with an angel in its midst, calling the person to himself so that he can be raised to heaven. That is how the Lord appears to those who have faith in Him, and He comes near to each individual, to the extent that he knows and acknowledges Him.”

Additionally, in True Christianity, section 11:

Therefore people whose mental sight was dependent on their physical senses and who nevertheless wished to see God made idols for themselves out of gold, silver, stone, and wood. They intended to adore God in those forms as objects of sight. Others with the same desires but with religious principles that forbade idols pictured the sun and moon, the stars, and various things on earth as images of God.

Those who believed themselves to be wiser than most but who remained earthly were led by the immensity and omnipresence God displayed in creating the world to acknowledge nature as God, in some cases in its innermost, in others in its outermost aspects.

And some who wished to see God as separate from nature thought up some thing that was as all-encompassing as possible and that they called the Entity of All; but because they know nothing more of God than this, this "Entity of All" turns out to be an entity of their minds alone, utterly without any real meaning.”

Here, Swedenborg expresses that if we see God like energy/the Universe or “the Entity of All” (which may be called Source in contemporary terms), we are relating to God like nature or a figment of our imagination.

On the contrary, if we believe God is a divine human, then we can “see” God and have true faith in Him. This is partly why Jesus Christ came to this Earth, so we can conceptualize God as a spirit-man and worship Him in true faith.

“When God became human and then a human became God, he became able to draw near us in this adapted form and, as a human God and a divine Human, forge a partnership with us.”

- True Christianity, section 370

I will say that it was not an overnight shift where I went from believing God was an impersonal intelligence to a human spirit nor from believing Jesus was a man to the Lord in the flesh. I did not have a dramatic conversion experience or vision that confirmed these truths to me.

However, certain illusions I had about God and Jesus started to be removed from my spiritual eyes and other truths began to manifest.

For example, though it may make sense to believe God is a universal intelligence, if we dig deeper, we will see that God as an impersonal force cannot have a grander plan for humanity, cannot work intimately in our lives to bring about out regeneration, and cannot have morality.

Attributes like holiness are human characteristics, which signifies that God is a divine human. People often take virtues for granted thinking that man can come up with these virtues by his reason. The common atheist maxim goes: “We’re good because it’s the right thing to do.” But we can only gain a sense of morality because it is from God. Our brains alone cannot give us a sense of morality. Neither can we in our animal instincts.

It is simple truths like these that become obscured by false rationality and the conditioning of this world.

In my personal life, I noticed a marked difference relating to God as a spiritual being with a human character instead of a universal intelligence. This is because I started praying as though I was praying to a person as opposed to an impersonal energy I could not know.

Another thing I experienced was breaking out into tears when I would hear things like “God is living,” “God is alive.” To me, these experiences were evidence of something my spirit knew that my earthly self did not understand.

Many skeptical people fear that if they believe Jesus is Lord, they will be under deception and outsource their authority. This is an understandable fear, but I believe what people fear is false religious indoctrination over a partnership with Jesus.

If you study Jesus apart from the negative aspects of religion, you will find He is pure and just. When Jesus appeared harsh in the Bible, this was in accordance to the level of spiritual understanding individuals were responsible for. Jesus also treated women with fairness and dignity as opposed to religious people in his times and even today. This may be surprising considering how patriarchal the Christian religion can be, but if we consider the fact that Jesus was Lord, this changes the context of everything.

This post is part of a larger article, which you can read in full here.