Here we are in the 21st century. We know that the universe is an enormous place. We're just bursting with scientific knowledge. But how are we doing with the even-bigger ideas? Our human societies seem to be erasing them, or ignoring them - maybe we think we're too busy for them.

Here on the New Christian Bible Study site, we'll buck the trend. We want to explore the big ideas that give us a framework for living better lives. Here's a start on a list of big ideas from a New Christian perspective. For each idea, there is a footnote that lists some references in Swedenborg's theological works:

1. God exists. Just one God, who created and sustains the entire universe in all its dimensions, spiritual and physical. ¹

2. God's essence is love itself. It's the force that drives everything. ²

3. God's essence comes into being, that is, it exists, in and through creation. ³

4. There are levels, or degrees, of creation - ranging from spiritual ones that we can't detect with our physical senses or sensors, to the level of the physical universe where most of our awareness is when we're alive here. ⁴

5. The created universe emanates from God, and it's sustained by God, but in an important way it is separate from God. He wants it to be separate, so that freedom can exist. ⁵

6. God operates from love through wisdom - willing good things, and understanding how to bring them about. ⁶

7. The physical level of creation exists to provide human beings with an opportunity to choose in freedom, with rationality, whether or not to acknowledge and cooperate with God. ⁷

8. God provides all people everywhere, regardless of their religion, the freedom to choose to live a life of love to God and to the neighbor. ⁸

9. God loves everyone. He knows that true happiness only comes when we're unselfish; when we're truly motivated by a love of the Lord which is grounded out in a love of the neighbor. He seeks to lead everyone, but will not force us to follow against our will. ⁹

10. God doesn't judge us. He tells us what's good, and what's evil, and flows into our minds to lead us towards good. However, we're free to reject his leading, and instead opt to love ourselves most. Day by day, we create habits of generosity or of selfishness, and live out a life in accordance with those habits. Those habits become the real "us", our ruling love. ¹⁰

11. Our physical bodies die eventually, but the spiritual part of our minds keeps going. It's been operating on a spiritual plane already, but our awareness shifts - so that we become fully aware of spiritual reality. ¹¹

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1880. Additional Remarks -

As regards spirits and angels in general, all of whom are the souls of people living on after the death of the body, they possess far more perfect sensory powers than men, that is, the powers of sight, hearing, smell, and touch, but not of taste. Spirits however are not able, and angels are even less able, to see anything whatever in the world with their sight, that is, with the sight of the spirit. For the light of the world, or of the sun, is to them as pitch darkness, just as man cannot with his sight, that is, with the sight of the body, see anything whatever in the next life; for to him the light of heaven, or the Lord's heavenly light, is as pitch darkness.

[2] Nevertheless, when it pleases the Lord, spirits and angels are able to see the things that exist in the world through the eyes of one in the world, though the Lord does not allow such a thing to happen with anyone except someone for whom the Lord makes it possible to converse with spirits and angels, and to be together with them. Through my own eyes they have been allowed to see the things that are in the world, and to see them as plainly as I myself saw them, and also to hear the people talking to me. On occasions it has come about that through me some have seen their friends whom they had had during their lifetime, as present then as formerly; and at this they have been dumbfounded. They have also seen their married partners and their children, and have wished me to tell them that they were present and could see them, and to report about their state in the next life. But I was forbidden to tell this to them and to reveal to them that they were seen as described, the reason for this being that they would have said I was insane or would have thought that such reports were delirious wanderings of the mind. For I knew very well that although they would say with their lips that spirits exist and that the dead have risen, they would still not believe it in their hearts.

[3] When my interior sight was first opened and through my eyes they saw the world and what was in it, spirits and angels were so astonished that they said it was the greatest miracle of all time, and a new found joy entered into them that in this way a communication now existed of earth with heaven, and of heaven with earth. This delight lasted for several months, but after that it became commonplace, and now they do not wonder at it at all. I have been informed that spirits and angels present with other people do not see anything at all of things in the world, but merely perceive the thoughts and affections of those with whom they are present.

[4] From these considerations it has become clear that man was created in such a way that while living on earth among men he might live at the same time in heaven among angels, and vice versa. He was so created that heaven and earth might co-exist and act as one, with men knowing what was going on in heaven and angels what was going on in the world. And when they departed the earthly life men might accordingly pass from the Lord's kingdom on earth into the Lord's kingdom in the heavens, passing not as into a different kingdom, but as into the same one in which they had been when they lived in the body. But because man has become so bodily-minded he has closed heaven against himself.

545. THE LORD CASTS NO ONE INTO HELL; BUT THIS IS DONE BY THE SPIRIT HIMSELF

An opinion has prevailed with some that God turns away His face from man, rejects man from Himself, and casts him into hell, and is angry with him on account of his evil; and with some the opinion goes further, that God punishes man and does evil to him. They confirm themselves in this opinion from the sense of the letter of the Word, where similar things are said, not knowing that the spiritual sense of the Word, which explains the sense of the letter, is wholly different; and consequently that the genuine doctrine of the Church, which is from the spiritual sense of the Word, teaches otherwise, namely, that God never turns away His face from man, and never rejects man from Himself; that He casts no one into hell and is angry with no one. ¹ Everyone, moreover, whose mind is enlightened, perceives this to be true when he reads the Word, from a perception solely from it, because God is Good Itself, Love Itself, and Mercy Itself; and he has a perception that Good Itself cannot do evil to anyone, and Love Itself and Mercy Itself cannot reject man from itself; because this is contrary to the very essence of mercy and love, thus contrary to the Divine Itself. Therefore those who think from an enlightened mind clearly perceive, when they read the Word, that God never turns Himself away from man; and as He never turns Himself away from him He deals with him from goodness, love, and mercy, that is, wills good to him, loves him, and is merciful to him. And from this they see that the sense of the letter of the Word, in which such things are said, has stored up within itself a spiritual sense, and that these expressions, that are used in the sense of the letter in accommodation to man's apprehension and according to his first and general ideas, are to be explained in accordance with the spiritual sense.

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