Swedenborg's argument is that the human form is not a contingent or creaturely form but the form of love and wisdom themselves. Since God is divine love and divine wisdom, God is — in his very nature — the source and paradigm of the human form. The human being is not made in the image of God in a vague sense; it is precisely and structurally the image of God because it is modelled on the form of divine love and wisdom.
This claim allows Swedenborg to reinterpret the Christian Trinity. He explicitly rejects the doctrine of three divine persons (which he considers polytheism) and argues instead that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three aspects of the single Divine Human: the Father is the inmost divine itself (the esse or being of God); the Son is the divine human manifest (the existere or coming-forth of God); the Holy Spirit is the divine proceeding — the active outflow of divine love into creation. All three are one God, one person, one Divine Human.
The Incarnation, in Swedenborg's account, was not primarily about substitutionary atonement but about glorification — the process by which Jesus transformed the human nature he took on, step by step, from the merely natural to the divine. Through temptation, suffering, and death, Jesus progressively made his human nature divine, until at the Resurrection it was fully glorified and he became the Divine Human in his complete nature. This glorified humanity is what the risen Christ is — and what he offers to share with those who are regenerated.
The doctrine of the Divine Human is systematically argued in True Christian Religion and underlies Swedenborg's Christology throughout his work. His rejection of the traditional doctrine of the Trinity brought him into sharp conflict with Lutheran orthodoxy and was one of the reasons his theology was received with suspicion in his lifetime.
