Is there a Biblical Basis for Swedenborg’s Teaching on What Happens After Death?

Posted on October 25, 2026 by Lee — Leave a comment

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.

Tagged with: Emanuel Swedenborg, heaven, Heaven and Hell, hell, Jesus, judgment, physical body, spiritual body, the afterlife, the world of spirits
Posted in The Afterlife, The Bible Re-Viewed

Which Body Will Trans People Have in the Afterlife?

Posted on October 12, 2026 by Lee — 2 Comments

Transsexual woman July Schultz displaying her palm with the letters "XY" written on it at an outdoor demonstration

July Schultz – credit: Wikipedia

A reader named Steve S. recently submitted a Spiritual Conundrum to Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life asking a series of questions about the spiritual side of the transsexual issue, focusing especially on this one:

I am truly interested in whether the inner/soul gender would be changed to conform to the outer birth gender in the afterlife, or vice versa.

I’ll post Steve’s full question in a moment.

Neither the Bible nor Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) directly addresses today’s transgender and transsexual issues. In those eras, practically speaking, even if gender transition were an idea in people’s minds, the level of physiological knowledge and surgical technique would have made physical transitioning impossible. And conceptually, today’s complex ideas about gender identity had not yet been developed. There was male, and there was female. That was the beginning and the end of it. About as close as the Bible gets to this topic is a verse in Deuteronomy forbidding men and women from wearing each other’s clothing. We’ll get to that later.

Today, we recognize that this world is not as simple as we might wish it to be. Yes, over 99% of the human population is either male inside and out or female inside and out. But we now recognize that there are edge cases that do not fit this neat male/female divide. And the existence of people born intersex makes it impossible to ignore the reality that sex is not quite as black and white as was traditionally believed.

Swedenborg did see humans as being either fully male or fully female. He addressed that verse from Deuteronomy from this perspective. However, though he didn’t say anything about which body a trans person would have in the afterlife, he did provide some concepts about the spiritual world, the material world, and what happens to us in the afterlife that can help us arrive at an answer.

The most relevant of these is that even though the material universe operates by its own laws that often resist spiritual influences, so that the outward appearance doesn’t always match the inner reality, in the spiritual world we soon transition to a state in which our outer self, including our spiritual body, perfectly matches and expresses the character of our mind.

For more on the sex of our body in the afterlife, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: cross-dressing, gender, gender dysphoria, material world, sex, sex change, spiritual world, the afterlife, trans, transgender, transsexual
Posted in Sex Marriage Relationships, The Afterlife

A Psychological and Spiritual Review of Many Lives, Many Masters, by Brian Weiss

Posted on September 27, 2026 by Lee — Leave a comment

Recently a reader named Steve asked for my perspective on Dr. Brian Weiss’s book Many Lives, Many Masters. Specifically, he asked about the “past lives” of Dr. Weiss’s pseudonymous patient “Catherine.” This is my response after reading the book. (Note: I will receive a commission if you buy the book from Amazon using any of the title links in this article.)

Overall, Dr. Weiss seems to be a good and well-intentioned person, albeit somewhat full of his own importance. His “past-life regression” therapy does seem to help people, though probably not for the reason he thinks. And in general, recognizing that we are embedded in spiritual reality, and that this is the source of much of our mental disorder and dysfunction, is a good thing.

Materialistic psychology, psychiatry, and psychiatric medication can get you only so far. Some mental illnesses do result from physical, chemical, or cellular damage or dysfunction in the brain and nervous system. However, psychiatric drugs commonly only control symptoms rather than curing the patient, and they have many undesirable side effects. Further, much mental illness is not physical at all. It is the result of traumatic life experiences, yes, but mainly the result of evil spirits assailing people from the spiritual realm using these traumatic life experiences and various individual character traits as “hooks” by which they grab onto the person’s psyche so that they can pour in their dark, deleterious influence.

I am well aware that the idea of spirits being involved in mental illness is rejected as superstitious nonsense by secular psychologists and psychiatrists. Nevertheless, Dr. Weiss successfully used spiritual methods to achieve full healing for a patient who was not responding to traditional psychiatric treatment. And this is far from the only case in which recognizing the reality of spiritual influences has helped people achieve mental and emotional healing when traditional psychiatric and pharmaceutical methods were failing. At the end of this post, I’ll put an Off The Left Eye video featuring interview segments with Dr. Jerry Marzinsky along these lines.

Overall, though I think Dr. Weiss is mistaken in his belief that Catherine’s visions under hypnosis are from past lives she has lived, I do appreciate his willingness to open his mind to methods of treatment that go beyond the strictly material and biological level, and explore the spiritual realities behind people’s mental and emotional struggles.

For more on Many Lives, Many Masters, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: Brian L. Weiss, Brian Weiss, Many Lives, Many Masters, past life regression, past-life therapy, reincarnation, spiritism, spirits, spiritualism, the spiritual world
Posted in Spiritual Growth, The Afterlife

What Does “Purification for Sins” Mean in Hebrews 1:3?

Posted on September 20, 2026 by Lee — 2 Comments

He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. (Hebrews 1:3, New Revised Standard Version)

Christ in Gethsemane, by Heinrich Hofmann (1824–1911)

Recently on Christianity StackExchange a question was posted asking how a Swedenborgian understands the words in Hebrews 1:3 about “purification for sins.” Below is an edited version of my answer.

As with some of my other StackExchange answers, this one gets a bit technical. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea. But it is part of a growing collection of articles here on Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life offering a Swedenborgian understanding (really, simply a truly Christian understanding) of the Acts and the Epistles, which historically have been covered relatively lightly in Swedenborgian literature because they are not part of Swedenborg’s canon of the Bible. I post it here for readers who might find it helpful in understanding the complex landscape of the Protestant Bible.

For more on Hebrews 1:3, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: atonement, evil, glorification, God's right hand, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Mary, purification from sin, regeneration, sin, spiritual rebirth
Posted in All About God, The Bible Re-Viewed

Superficial Religion

Posted on September 13, 2026 by Lee — Leave a comment

So both of Lot’s daughters became pregnant by their father. (Genesis 19:36)

Lot and his daughters

With this article in our series on Genesis, mercifully, we complete the sorry tale of Genesis 19. If the Bible skeptics want a chapter to turn to in casting doubt on the divine and spiritual nature of the Bible, this would be the one. It reads almost like a compendium of human sexual and behavioral corruption—not to mention the descriptions of destructive divine wrath. It is no wonder that even the Swedenborgian commentaries largely pass by this chapter in silence, or give it only the most cursory treatment.

Even Swedenborg himself seems to weary of the chapter as he enters into this final section: Genesis 19:30–38. Yes, he does interpret it. But he does so in summary fashion, referring to earlier and later explanations for some of the details. In partial explanation of this, he mentions the obvious: these things “shock people’s minds and offend their ears” (Arcana Coelestia #2466). And here I would mention once more that when we actually read the Bible, it turns out not to be a “nice book full of nice stories,” but rather, a hard-hitting human book full of human stories, including the good, the bad, and the ugly of human life.

For more on the good, the bad, and the ugly, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: Ammon, corruption, Lot, Moab, Scribes and Pharisees, Sodom, Sodom and Gomorrah
Posted in The Bible Re-Viewed

Why did God take 14 Billion Years to Create Human Beings?

Posted on August 9, 2026 by Lee — 6 Comments

Towards the end of my earlier article, “Why did God take 14 Billion Years to Create the Physical World?” I said:

The development of complex, rational, spiritually aware beings under material-universe conditions is a long, complex task that had to go step-by-step from the primeval amoeba all the way to the human body and the mind it contains.

In this follow-up article, prompted by further questions in the comments section by the reader named World Questioner whose questions sparked the previous article, we’ll dig into one more aspect of why God took so long to create the universe.

Albinus / Wandelaar, Musculature illustration, 1740

Traditional Christians who lean towards the literalist side believe that God created humans in less than a day. Today’s science says that it took several billion years for biological evolution to produce human beings, and nine or ten billion years before that for physics to produce our habitable earth.

Personally, I’ll go for the timescale presented by modern science. As I said in the previous article, if God is truly infinite and omnipotent, this vast, ancient universe is a much better reflection and illustration of God than a small universe that’s only a few thousand years old.

Besides, human beings are immensely complex creatures both physically and psychologically. Few people realize just how complex we are. Let’s take a closer look at the wondrous creation that is us.

For more on the wonders of a human being, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: cars, computers, God, human brain, International Space Station, Large Hadron Collider, life in the universe, organelles, pale blue dot, science, the human body, the universe
Posted in Science Philosophy and History

Hebrew, Greek, and Swedenborg’s Explanation of Propitiation

Posted on August 2, 2026 by Lee — Leave a comment

Note: This article is an even more technical follow-up to my earlier article, “How did Swedenborg interpret 1 John 2:2: ‘He is the propitiation for our sins’?” Both articles were originally responses to questions posted on Christianity StackExchange. See the end of this article for links to the original question and the original version of my answer. This version is slightly edited from the StackExchange version. If you read the earlier article first, this one will make more sense.

The question answered in this article was expressing doubt about the connection between the word for “mercy seat” in the Old Testament and Swedenborg’s understanding of “propitiation” in the New Testament based on Swedenborg connecting the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament with the word traditionally translated “propitiation” in the New Testament.

This article may not be everyone’s cup of tea. However, there are a few spiritual gems scattered among all the vocabulary and linguistics. For readers not interested in the technicalities, I would suggest skimming over the vocabulary lists and looking for the paragraphs of explanation.

I am also posting it here on Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life to show that when it comes to Hebrew and Greek, Swedenborg was no slouch! His teachings and Bible interpretations are based on extensive study of the Bible in its original languages. For the Swedenborg nerds, there are a few tidbits in the appendix at the end that you might find interesting.

Here we go!

For more on Hebrew, Greek, and propitiation, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: Ark of the Covenant, atonement, Emanuel Swedenborg, Greek, Greek New Testament, Hebrew, Hebrew Bible, Jesus Christ, mercy, mercy seat, propitiation, Septuagint, the Bible
Posted in The Bible Re-Viewed

Was Jesus a Literalist?

Posted on July 28, 2026 by Lee — 4 Comments

Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing. (Matthew 13:34)

With many such parables he spoke the word to them as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples. (Mark 4:33–34)

And yet, some Christians claim that Jesus was a literalist!

On his “Answers in Genesis” website, the famous or infamous Ken Ham writes:

What Jesus says about creation reminds us that, if we want to be faithful to his Word, we must take Genesis as literal history—just like he did! (quoted from Creation Basics: What Did Jesus Say About Creation? by Ken Ham)

So let me get this straight: Jesus, who always spoke to the crowds in parables, was a strict literalist in his reading of Scripture?

Well then, if we’re going to faithful to Jesus, maybe we should do the same for the whole Bible. Maybe we should read Jesus literally, too!

For more Jesus and literalism, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: Biblical literalism, Christianity, Creation, Creationism, fundamentalism, Jesus, Jesus Christ, literalism, spiritual meaning, the Bible, typology, young Earth creationism
Posted in The Bible Re-Viewed

Can I Ask God to Extinguish My Consciousness?

Posted on July 19, 2026 by Lee — 10 Comments

We are created so that our inner self cannot die. We can believe in God and love God, which means we can have a relationship with God through faith and love. And having a relationship with God is living to eternity. (The New Jerusalem #223)

Okay, that answers the latest Spiritual Conundrum submitted to Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life before a reader named Lucas even had a chance to ask it! Here’s the short version:

Similar to others in this blog, I too detest the idea of reincarnation. However, where I differ from others is that my ideal wish, so to speak, is not heaven or an afterlife, but permanent cessation of consciousness, annihilation of my being.

I’ll post Lucas’s full spiritual conundrum in a moment.

But the short, no-beating-around-the-bush answer is: I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to keep on living to eternity. Once a human consciousness is created, it can never be extinguished. That’s because, as Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) says, our human consciousness can form a relationship with God. And since God is eternal, any conscious relationship with God is also eternal.

What if we decide to reject God and reject any relationship with God. Then can our consciousness cease?

Sorry, but the answer is still “No.” Since we have the capability of having a relationship with God, that puts us in the “eternal” category even if we choose not to exercise that capability. Besides, even people who reject God still have a relationship with God. It’s just a bad relationship with God.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that eternity is a lot better than you think! It’s not “living forever” in an earthly, timebound sense. In fact, angels and spirits don’t even know what time is. Though we loosely say that we “live forever,” really, in the other world we live in an eternal now, just as animals do here on earth.

For more on asking God for oblivion, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: angels, animal afterlife, animals, annihilationism, death, eternal now, eternity, heaven, hell, the afterlife, time and space
Posted in The Afterlife

How Did the People of Eden Live?

Posted on July 12, 2026 by Lee — Leave a comment

In a question posted on Christianity StackExchange a few years ago, a person named Ambrosia asked:

I’ve lately been interested in the life of the people in Eden. According to Emanuel Swedenborg, how separated is it from the life we are living today? How did husbands and wives interact? What were their daily routines or lifestyles?

You can see the original question on StackExchange here, and the StackExchange version of my answer here. The rest of this post is an edited and slightly expanded version of my answer.

In addition to providing a detailed verse-by-verse commentary on the two Creation stories in Genesis (not to mention the rest of the books of Genesis and Exodus), Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) wrote a fair amount about the people represented by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. He even said that he was able to visit some of them in the part of heaven where they are still living today. Most of what he wrote is about their spiritual life. He didn’t say so much about their daily routines or lifestyles. However, what he did write about their lifestyles focuses on what their marriages were like, and on their social structures.

But first, we must clear up a common misconception: the idea that Adam and Eve were two literal people.

For more on the people of Eden, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: Adam, Adam and Eve, Emanuel Swedenborg, Garden of Eden, humanity, innocence, love, marriage, peace, spiritual marriage, spiritual meaning, the Bible
Posted in Sex Marriage Relationships, The Bible Re-Viewed

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