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Different groups of people, each with its own prior perspective,
have drawn different conclusions about Swedenborg's mental status during
the events of 1743 and 1744 and beyond. Those who accept his
religious writings as a source of appealing, coherent, spiritual principles find
it surprising that they have thus far received so little recognition from students of religion. In their minds, his religious writings are a
Divine revelation that unfolds the previously hidden spiritual sense of the
Old and New Testaments, constitute the Second Coming, and validate
his claim to have been called by God. Some spiritists who have first
heard Swedenborg described as a mystic or spiritist have also accepted his
work, but from that perspective. On the other hand, some Christian
believers, who accept that spiritual events occurred with the Old Testament
prophets, Jesus Christ and John, when he wrote the biblical Book of
Revelation, consider Swedenborg's doctrines heresy, propounded by one of the
false prophets that Christ warned about.
Of particular interest here, however, is the interpretation of yet
others, notably mental professionals, who view the experiences that
Swedenborg described as spiritual as due to
psychosis6 or, possibly, epileptic
seizures.7 In this point of view, any theistic framework is seen as narrow, with
only non-theistic ones assumed to be objective, as demonstrated by the
letter from Johnson cited by Talbot.8 (Both
Johnson's9 and Talbot's articles are reprinted in this issue.)
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