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)

90. People who are not aware that Divine omnipotence proceeds and works in accordance with order can be led by their imagination to form many ideas contrary to sound reason, and even contradictory ones. For instance, why did God not take upon Himself human form immediately, without advancing through these stages? Why did He not gather the elements from the four quarters of the world to create and make up a body, so that He could display Himself as God-Man to the Jewish people, or rather to the whole world? Or, if He wished to be born, why did He not pour His whole divinity into the embryo or Himself as a child; or why did He not at once after being born raise Himself to adult stature, and speak from Divine Wisdom? Those who think about Divine omnipotence devoid of order, may conceive and bring forth these and similar ideas, and so fill the church with nonsense and rubbish; which is what has happened. For instance, the idea that God could have fathered a Son from eternity, and arranged for a third God to proceed even at that point in time from Himself and His Son. Or that He could become angry with the human race, consign it to destruction, and be willing to be brought back to pitying it through the Son, and to do this through His intercession and the memory of His crucifixion;

[2] and then go on to put His Son's righteousness into a person, and plant it in his heart like Wolff's ¹ simple substance, in which according to that author all the Son's merits are present, but which cannot be divided, since if it were, it would collapse to nothing. Or further that He can remit anyone's sins He wishes, as it were by a Papal bull, or cleanse the worst sinner from his black wickedness, and thus turn a swarthy devil into a shining angel of light, without a person shifting himself any more than a stone, but standing still like a statue or an idol. Not to mention many other crazy notions, which those who set up Divine power as absolute, unhindered by the knowledge or acknowledgment of any order, may toss out like a winnower tossing chaff into the air. These people may in spiritual matters, those, that is, which concern heaven, the church and so everlasting life, stray from Divine truths like a blind man in a wood, who at one time stumbles over rocks, at another hits his forehead on a tree, at another gets his hair entangled in its branches.

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