New Century Edition Blog

Emanuel Swedenborg believed that conventional Christian theology sets an impossible challenge for believers. Though Christians are traditionally called upon by church doctrine to acknowledge the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as three persons, their religion forbids them to refer to these persons as “three gods.”

Over the years that the New Century Edition (NCE) project has been underway, the translators and editors have been asked several questions that may hold interest for the NCE audience in general. Here are answers to a few of these NCE “Frequently Asked Questions” (FAQs).

As people become interested in Swedenborg and what he wrote, a natural question is, “Where do I start?” Should you just begin at the beginning and read sequentially, or is there an alternative?

The New Century Edition of the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg (NCE ) extends to twenty-eight volumes. To date, six of those volumes have been published—Heaven and Hell, Divine Love and Wisdom, Divine Providence, True Christianity volume 1, and Secrets of Heaven volume 1, along with the essay volume that accompanies the set (also known as Scribe of Heaven). Our readers naturally wonder—where are the rest of the volumes? So here is a status update. But to explain that status, first we offer a refresher on some history that every American schoolchild learns.

They say that perfection is, like happiness, something that can be pursued but never permanently attained. Or as Swedenborg says, even throughout all eternity we can never be so completely regenerated as to be called perfect (Secrets of Heaven 5122:3). And if we ourselves are not perfect, neither are the products of our hands and minds.

One of the principles of the New Century Edition is to make the English translation of Swedenborg’s Latin as gender-inclusive as the original. For the most part, this is not too difficult. The simplest solution is usually to use plurals; “they” has no gender, and “we” is often even more satisfactory.

All parts of the Word contain an orderly sequence of thoughts, but the actual sequence cannot expose itself in its true nature when each word is explained by itself. Such an explanation makes the words seem disconnected and breaks up the continuity of meaning.

Swedenborg published two theological overviews, one early in his revelatory career and one at its close. The two works are strikingly consistent in substance and strikingly different in form, but Swedenborgians seem to have paid more attention to the simi­larity than to the difference.

We are accustomed to think of meaning being “lost in translation,” but sometimes it is found instead. One of the felicities of being a translator of Swedenborg’s works is discovering some nuance in the meaning of a passage that, for one reason or another, no one has discovered before—or at least, a nuance that none of the previous translators has captured. Usually these discoveries are trivial, but occasionally they com­pletely change the way we understand an important passage.