What if God is one of us?

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This is actually one of the keystones of Swedenborgian theology. God is a human. This takes some careful thinking to reconcile.

For me, I can’t help but think of the principle of convergent evolution. If one were to generate a cosmology out of it, we’d look at the physical world as the best possible one, and evolution as perfectly tuned, and us as the results of that evolution. As evolution is the generation of viable ‘things’, such as life itself, from preconditions without agency, this provides a blueprint for how we can consider God Himself to have been created. God is the first entity created that could create more worlds.

The logic works out the longer you think about it. God created us “in his own image.” When we create beings, we do it in all kinds of different images. Just think of the different archetypes of role playing character. Elves, orcs, dwarves, there’s all sorts of different categories, that form kind of a map, one you can traverse hilariously here:

All are just kinda somewhat human. Well, God would act on a somewhat… larger scale. And because He’s omnipotent the only real concern is assisting us with our growth, so that one day we can have worlds of our own design.

So what about Swedenborg? Swedenborg spoke of a “divine design.” What this means is that Heaven, the eternal place where we can go that’s defined by all of us working together in concert to further all of our interests, is modeled, again, after a human being. We enter through the mouth, get processed through the digestive system to remove impurities, then our new, cleansed selves find a place in the body to become a part of. It’s not a literal human body, spirituality is all about learning correspondences, the little ways in which outward form can be mapped onto spiritual structure.

God may not look like a human anymore, but there’s good reason to believe that God had a human form when He was still material.