Part of the Christian message is the concept of redemption. What does it mean, to say that the Lord redeemed people?

Here are the key concepts about redemption in New Christian thought, as excerpted from Swedenborg's works (written in the 1700s):

"Jehovah God came down and took upon Himself a human form, in order to redeem and save mankind.

Christian churches today believe that God the Creator of the universe fathered a Son from eternity, who came down and took upon Himself human form to redeem and save mankind. But this is an error and collapses of its own accord, so long as the mind concentrates on the oneness of God, and the reason looks upon as fiction or worse the idea that the one God fathered a Son from eternity, and also that God the Father together with the Son and the Holy Spirit, each of whom is severally God, is one God. This fiction is utterly exploded, like a meteorite in the atmosphere, when it is shown from the Word that it was Jehovah God Himself who came down and became man and also was the Redeemer." (True Christian Religion 82)

"In the process of taking on a human manifestation, God followed his own divine design.... Now, because God came down, and because he is the design..., there was no other way for him to become an actual human being than to be conceived, to be carried in the womb, to be born, to be brought up, and to acquire more and more knowledge so as to become intelligent and wise. Therefore in his human manifestation he was an infant like any infant, a child like any child, and so on with just one difference: he completed the process more quickly, more fully, and more perfectly than the rest of us do." (True Christian Religion 89)

"There is a belief that the Lord in his human manifestation not only was but still is the Son of Mary. This is a blunder, though, on the part of the Christian world. It is true that he was the Son of Mary; it is not true that he still is. As the Lord carried out the acts of redemption, he put off the human nature from his mother and put on a human nature from his Father. This is how it came about that the Lord's human nature is divine and that in him God is human and a human is God.' (True Christian Religion 102)

"Suffering on the cross was the final trial the Lord underwent as the greatest prophet. It was a means of glorifying his human nature, that is, of uniting that nature to his Father's divine nature. It was not redemption. There are two things for which the Lord came into the world and through which he saved people and angels: redemption, and the glorification of his human aspect. These two things are distinct from each other, but they become one in contributing to salvation.

In the preceding points we have shown what redemption was: battling the hells, gaining control over them, and then restructuring the heavens. Glorification, however, was the uniting of the Lord's human nature with the divine nature of his Father. This process occurred in successive stages and was completed by the suffering on the cross." (True Christian Religion 126)

"Redemption consisted in the conquest of the hells, the ordering of the heavens and the establishment of a new church, because without them no one could have been saved. This is their proper order: the hells had first to be conquered, before a new heaven of angels could be formed, and this had to be formed before a new church could be established on earth. For people in the world are so linked with the angels in heaven and the spirits in hell, that in the interiors of their minds they are identified with one party or the other." (True Christian Religion 115)

"Without that redemption no man could have been saved, nor could the angels have continued in a state of integrity. It shall be told first what redemption is. To redeem means to liberate from damnation, to deliver from eternal death, to rescue from hell, and to release from the hand of the devil the captive and the bound. This the Lord did by subjugating the hells and establishing a new heaven." (True Christian Religion 118)

119. The reason why, but for redemption by the Lord, neither could the angels have remained unharmed is that the whole heaven of the angels together with the church on earth forms in the Lord's sight a single person. The heaven of the angels makes up his internal, the church his external; or in more detail, the highest heaven makes up his head, the second and lowest heavens his chest and the middle region of his body, and the church on earth his loins, legs and feet. The Lord Himself is the soul and life of this whole person. So if the Lord had not performed the act of redemption, this person would have been destroyed. The eclipse of the church on earth entails destruction of the feet, legs and loins, that of the lowest heaven the gastric region, that of the second heaven the chest, and then the head, having no correspondence with the body, loses consciousness.

[2] This can be illustrated by similes. It is as when mortification of the flesh attacks the feet, and this necrosis progressively climbs up, infecting first the loins, then the abdominal viscera, and finally the region of the heart. As everyone knows, this causes death. Another illustration is when the viscera beneath the diaphragm are diseased, and their failure produces palpitation of the heart, difficulty in respiration, and eventually the heart and lungs fail too. There is another possible simile with the internal and external man; the internal flourishes so long as the external obediently discharges its functions; but if the external man disobeys and resists, and even more if it attacks the internal, then the internal eventually is undermined, and at length is carried away by the pleasures of the external, until it takes its part and agrees with it. Another possible simile is with a man standing on top of a mountain, watching a flood cover the land below him, as the water rises stage by stage; and when it reaches the level at which he stands, he too is submerged, unless a boat comes for him across the waves to allow him to escape. Likewise if anyone standing on a mountain sees a dense fog rising higher and higher above the ground, hiding fields, villages and towns; and then when the fog reaches his level, he can see nothing, not even where he is.

[3] The lot of the angels is like this when the church on earth fails, for then the lower heavens too fade out. The reason is that the heavens are composed of human beings from the earth; and when there is no longer any good left in their hearts nor any truth from the Word, the heavens are flooded by the rising tide of evil and drowned by it as if by the waters of the Styx. However, they are taken to safety elsewhere by the Lord, and kept until the day of the Last judgment, when they are raised to a new heaven. It is these who are meant in this passage of Revelation:

I saw underneath the altar the souls of those put to death on account of God's Word and the witness they bore. And they shouted in a loud voice, saying, How long, Lord, you who are holy and true, before you give judgment and take vengeance for our blood from the inhabitants of the earth? And each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to rest yet a little while, until the numbers should be made up of their fellow servants and brothers, who were to be put to death as they were, Revelation 6:9-11.