359. (iv) But still faith, charity or life in either of them is not in the least created by man, but only by the Lord.

For we read that man cannot take anything, unless it is given him from heaven (John 3:27). And Jesus said:

He who remains in me, and I in him, brings forth much fruit, because without me you can do nothing, John 15:5.

This, however, must be understood to mean that a person can only acquire by his own efforts natural faith, which is a firm belief that a thing is so because an authoritative person so declared it. He can also acquire only natural charity, which is working in someone's favour for the sake of some reward. These two contain man's self, and there is no life as yet from the Lord. Still a person by either of these prepares himself to receive the Lord. In so far as he prepares himself, so far does the Lord come in and make his natural faith spiritual, and likewise his charity, and so make both living. These results follow when a person approaches the Lord as the God of heaven and earth.

Since man was created an image of God, he was created to be a dwelling for God. Therefore the Lord says:

He who has my commandments and does them, he it is who loves me; and I shall love him, and come to him and make my dwelling with him, John 14:21, 23.

Also:

Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with me, Revelation 3:20.

From these statements the conclusion follows, that in so far as a person prepares himself on the natural level to receive the Lord, so does the Lord come in and make everything within him spiritual, so giving everything life. On the other hand, however, in so far as a person does not prepare himself, to that extent he distances the Lord from himself, and does everything of himself; and what a person does of himself has no life in it. But it is impossible to cast much light on this subject until I have discussed charity and free will, and I shall come back to it later in the chapter on reformation and regeneration.

273. XIV. If the Word did not exist, no one would know of the existence of God, heaven and hell, and life after death, even less of the Lord.

As for those who decide and have proved to themselves that without the Word a person could know of the existence of God, and also of heaven and hell, as well as all the other things the Word teaches, it is not possible to argue with them from the Word, but only from the natural enlightenment of reason, since they do not believe the Word, but only themselves. Use the enlightenment of reason to enquire into it, and you will find that a person has two life-faculties, called the understanding and the will, and that the understanding is subject to the will, and not the will to the understanding. For the understanding merely shows and indicates what the will decides must be done. That is why many people with keen minds excel others in their grasp of moral issues, yet do not follow these principles in the way they live; it would be otherwise, if these were what they willed. Enquire again and you will find that a person's will is his self ¹ , and the self is evil from birth, and the source of false ideas in the understanding.

[2] When you have reached these conclusions, you will see that a person left to himself is unwilling to grasp intellectually anything that is not from the self in his will; and that if there were no other source for that knowledge, the self in his will would be unwilling to grasp anything intellectually other than selfish and worldly interests. Anything above this level is shrouded in darkness. For instance, when he looks upon the sun, the moon and the stars, if he happens to think about their origin, he can only suppose that they arose by themselves. Is this thinking any deeper than that of many experts in the world, who despite knowing from the Word that all things were created by God, still attribute their origin to nature? What then would these same people think, if they had learned nothing from the Word? Do you believe that the ancient sages, such as Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and others, who wrote about God and the immortality of the soul, got this idea first from their own understanding? No, they derived it by borrowing from others, who learned it first from the ancient Word, which I mentioned above. Nor do the writers on natural theology draw any such ideas from themselves; they merely support by rational arguments what they learn from the church, which possesses the Word. There may too be those among them who support these ideas without actually believing them.

Footnotes: