Heaven and Hell
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) makes no claim that his descriptions of the afterlife are drawn from the Bible. On the title page of his best-known book, Heaven and Hell—a book in which he provides a comprehensive description of heaven, hell, and the area in between that he calls “the world of spirits”—his subtitle is Ex Auditis et Visis, “Drawn from Things Heard and Seen.”
Yet even in this book, the very first thing he does in his Preface is to quote Scripture. Specifically, he quotes Matthew 24:29–31, where Jesus speaks of the coming of the Son of Man. Swedenborg goes on to explain that this is not meant to be read as being about literal events in the physical world, but about spiritual events in the spiritual world.
This highlights a key issue in drawing beliefs about the afterlife from the Bible. The Bible says very little about the afterlife. The entire Old Testament contains almost nothing about the afterlife, because the ancient Jews had no specific beliefs about any afterlife. Even the New Testament is mostly about how to believe and live here on earth in order to go to heaven. And most of what it does say about the afterlife is in the form of parable, metaphor, and vision rather than being literal descriptions of the afterlife.
This is why so many different Christians and Christian churches have drawn so many different and even conflicting beliefs about the afterlife from the Bible. Most of these beliefs come from reading literally passages that were never meant to be taken literally. Based on conflicting interpretations of the Bible, Christianity as a whole cannot even agree on whether we are reunited with our physical body and live to eternity on this physical earth, or whether we leave our body behind permanently and live to eternity in heaven.
When traditional Christians challenge believers in Swedenborg’s Christian teachings to provide a biblical basis for this or that belief, they do so from the position of a church that is itself highly fractured when it comes to what the Bible says about many different subjects, including what happens to us after death.
Nevertheless, Swedenborg’s key teachings about the afterlife do have a basis in the Bible, even if they cannot be drawn from the Bible in detail. Swedenborg was a careful and thorough student of the Bible. He studied it intensively in its original languages. If he had believed that any of his teachings about the afterlife were in conflict with the Bible, he would not have held to those teachings.
Here are some of his key teachings about the afterlife, and their biblical basis.
For more the Bible and Swedenborg’s afterlife, please click here to read on.
Now Abraham moved on from there into the region of the Negev and lived between Kadesh and Shur. For a while he stayed in Gerar, and there Abraham said of his wife Sarah, “She is my sister.” Then Abimelech king of Gerar sent for Sarah and took her. (Genesis 20:1–2)
