ORIGINAL SIN – Are we being punished for Adam and Eve’s mistake?

THE LITERAL FALL has been one of the cornerstone doctrines of the Christian church for centuries. What’s remarkable about Swedenborg’s commentary upon the Bible is not so much the idea that the early stories are clearly symbolic, but that the historical stories are also symbolic. We tend to have the idea that a story is EITHER literally true OR it is symbolic. But no such distinction exists in Swedenborg’s estimation. The Word is fully constructed of correspondences, that is his very definition of what the Word IS. Whether it is literally true is another matter entirely, and actually not all that important at the end of the day. If we’re busy debating whether this or that story literally took place, we’re actually missing the point of the text entirely.

We draw today upon Michael Stanley’s book, Eve: The Bone of Contention, and dwell particularly upon the words, “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.” (Genesis 3:6)

From New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine, paragraph 279.

The divine design: [2] To the extent that we live according to the design-that is, to the extent that we are devoted to doing what is good in response to the divine truths that are the laws of the design-to that extent we are human: 4839. The more we live this way, the more perfectly proportioned and beautiful we will look in the other life; the less we live this way, the more monstrous we will look: 4839, 6605, 6626. [3] We are born not with goodness and truth but with evil and falsity, so we are not born into the divine design but into something contrary to that design. That is why we are born in utter ignorance and why, in order to be brought into the divine design and thus become human, we must of necessity be born again-that is, regenerated-which is accomplished by means of divine truths from the Lord and by a life in accord with them: 1047, 2307, 2308, 3518, 3812, 8480, 8550, 10283, 10284, 10731. When the Lord is regenerating us, he arranges everything in us according to the divine design-that is, according to the form of heaven: 5700, 6690, 9931, 10303. The more we live according to the divine design, the more intelligence and wisdom we have: 2592.

Recorded on Sunday 28th November 2021.

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