Emanuel Swedenborg - Veracity

Veracity

Swedenborg's transition from scientist to revelator or mystic has fascinated many people ever since it occurred (see list of some of the people involved above, in introduction).

Swedenborg has had a variety of biographers, favorable and critical. Some propose that he did not in fact have a revelation at all, but rather developed his theological ideas from sources ranging from his father to earlier figures in the history of thought, notably Plotinus.This position was first and most notably taken by the Swedish writer Martin Lamm, who wrote a biography of Swedenborg in 1915, which is still in print. Olof Lagercrantz, the Swedish critic and publicist, had a similar point of view, calling Swedenborg's theological writing "a poem about a foreign country with peculiar laws and customs".

Swedenborg's approach to demonstrating the veracity of his theological teachings was to find and use voluminous quotations from the Old Testament and New Testament to demonstrate agreement between the Bible or Word of God and his theological teachings. The demonstration of this agreement is found throughout his theological writings, since he rejected blind faith and declared true faith is an internal acknowledgment of the truth. The vast and consistent use of Biblical confirmations in Swedenborg's theological writings led a Swedish Royal Council in 1771, examining the heresy charges of 1770 against two Swedish supporters of his theological writings, to declare "there is much that is true and useful in Swedenborg's writings."

Beginning in the 20th century, the medical community began to notice similarities between the accounts of Swedenborg concerning the afterlife and the experiences of those who were revived after their heart had stopped. Among hundreds and then later thousands of witness accounts, the experiences of these people shared common traits which eventually became known as the "Near Death Experience" (NDE). Raymond Moody, a psychologist and medical doctor who first coined the term for NDE, noted that similar to these accounts, Swedenborg described death as a pulling away from the physical body, followed by encounters with departed ones and a life review drawn from the person's memory. Most notably, many of these witnesses describe encountering a supreme Being of Light, or a light at the end of a tunnel, which Swedenborg had also described as the Sun of heaven in which the Lord resided. These experiences are still being studied by various researchers.