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

Notes de bas de page:

321. But these need to be explained in the order just given.

(a) If we convince ourselves of the appearance that wisdom and prudence come from ourselves and are therefore within us as our own possessions, it necessarily seems to us that if this were not the case we would not be human at all, only animals or statues; and yet the truth is just the opposite. A law of divine providence says that we are to think in apparent autonomy and act prudently in apparent autonomy but are to recognize that this comes from the Lord. It follows that if we do in fact think and act in apparent autonomy and also recognize that it is coming from the Lord we are human, but that we are not human if we convince ourselves that everything we think and do comes from ourselves. Nor are we human if we simply wait for something to flow in because we know that wisdom and prudence come from God. In this case, we are like statues, while in the former case we are like animals.

Clearly, if we wait for something to flow in, we are like statues. If all we can do is stand or sit motionless, hands hanging down, eyes either closed or open without blinking, neither thinking nor breathing--how much life do we have then?

[2] We can also see that if we believe that everything we think and do comes from ourselves, we are not all that different from animals. After all, we are then thinking solely with our earthly mind, the mind that we have in common with animals, and not with our spiritual rational mind, which is our truly human mind. It is this latter mind that realizes that only God thinks autonomously and that we think from God. Then too, the only difference our earthly mind can see between us and animals is that we talk and animals make noises. It believes that death is the same for both.

[3] Something more needs to be said about people who wait for something to flow in. The only people of this kind who actually receive anything are the few who deeply long for it. They occasionally receive a kind of answer through a vivid impression or a subtle voice in their thinking, but rarely through anything obvious. In any case, what they receive leaves them to think and act the way they want to and the way they can. If they act wisely they become wise, and if they act stupidly they become stupid. They are never told what to believe or what to do; otherwise their human rationality and freedom would be destroyed. That is, things are managed so that they act freely and rationally, and to all appearances, autonomously.

If some inflow tells us what to believe or what to do, it is not the Lord or any angel of heaven who is telling us but some fanatical spirit, perhaps Quaker or Moravian, and we are being led astray. Everything that flows in from the Lord flows in by an enlightenment of our understanding and by a desire for what is true, actually through the desire into the enlightenment.

[4] (b) It seems as though it would be impossible to believe and think in accord with the truth that everything good and true comes from the Lord and everything evil and false from hell, when in fact to do so is truly human and truly angelic. It seems possible to think and believe that everything good and true comes from the Lord as long as we say no more than that. This is because it is in accord with the official faith, and we are not allowed to think to the contrary. However, it seems impossible to think and believe that everything evil and false comes from hell, because if we believed this we would not be able to think at all. Still, we seem to think for ourselves even if it is coming from hell, because the Lord provides that no matter where our thinking is coming from it seems to be happening within us and to be ours. Otherwise, we would not live like humans. We could not be led out of hell and led into heaven--that is, reformed, as I have explained so often already [96, 114, 174, 210].

[5] So too, the Lord provides that we realize and therefore think we are in hell if we are bent on evil and that our thoughts are coming from hell if they come from evil. He also enables us to think of ways that we can get out of hell and not accept thoughts from hell but instead come into heaven and there think from him. He also gives us a freedom to choose. We can therefore see that we can think what is evil and false in apparent autonomy; and we can also think in apparent autonomy that one thing or another is evil and false. We can think that this autonomy is only the way things seem, and that otherwise we would not be human.

It is essentially human and therefore angelic to base our thoughts on the truth; and the truth is that we do not think on our own but that the Lord enables us to think, to all appearances autonomously.

[6] (c) Believing and thinking like this is impossible for people who do not acknowledge the Lord's divine nature and who do not acknowledge that evils are sins; but it is possible for people who acknowledge these two facts. The reason it is impossible for people who do not acknowledge the Lord's divine nature is that it is only the Lord who enables us to think and to intend, and if we do not acknowledge the Lord's divine nature, in isolation from him we believe that we are thinking on our own. The reason it is also impossible for people who do not acknowledge that evils are sins is that their thoughts are coming from hell, and all the people there believe that they are doing their own thinking.

We can tell from the abundance of material presented in 288-294 above that this is possible for people who acknowledge these two facts.

[7] (d) If we make these two acknowledgments, we simply reflect on the evils within ourselves and, to the extent that we abstain and turn from them as sins, throw them back into the hell they came from. Is there anyone who does not know--or who cannot know--that what is evil comes from hell and what is good comes from heaven? Can anyone, then, fail to see that we abstain from hell and turn away from it to the extent that we abstain and turn away from evil? On this basis, can anyone fail to see that we intend and love what is good to the extent that we abstain and turn away from evil, and that in fact the Lord releases us from hell to that same extent and leads us to heaven? All rational people can see this provided they know that hell and heaven exist and know where evil and good come from. If, then, we reflect on the evils in ourselves, which is the same as self-examination, and abstain from them, then we extricate ourselves from hell, turn our backs on it, and make our way into heaven where we see the Lord face to face. We may say that we are doing this, but we are doing it in apparent autonomy, and therefore from the Lord.

When we acknowledge this truth from a good heart and a devout faith, then it is subtly present from then on in everything we seem to ourselves to be thinking and doing, the way fertility is present in a seed at every step until the formation of a new seed, or the way there is pleasure in our appetite for the food that we realize is good for us. In a word, it is like the heart and soul of everything we think and do.

[8] (e) This means that divine providence is not charging anyone with evil or crediting anyone with good. Rather, our own prudence is making each of these claims. This follows from everything that has just been said. The goal of divine providence is goodness. That is what it is aiming at in everything it does; so it does not credit anyone with goodness, because that would make our goodness self-serving; and it does not charge anyone with evil, because that would make us guilty of evil. We make both of these claims out of our own sense of independence, because this sense of ours is nothing but evil. The claim to independence of our volition is self-love, and the claim to independence of our discernment is pride in our own intelligence; and that is where our own prudence comes from.

796. Luther, Melanchthon and Calvin in the spiritual world.

I have held many conversations with these three leaders, who were the reformers of the Christian church, and thus I learned what has been the condition in which they lived from the beginning down to the present day. As for Luther, as soon as he arrived in the spiritual world, he was at once a keen propagator and defender of his dogmas, and as the numbers of his supporters coming from the earth increased, so did his zeal for those dogmas. He was given a house there similar to the one he had lived in while in the bodily life at Eisleben. In the middle of this he set up a slightly raised platform, where he took his seat. The door was open to admit listeners, whom he arranged in rows, the strongest supporters nearest to him, and those less favourable behind him. Then he spoke continuously, from time to time allowing questions, in order to be able to begin again by picking up the thread of the discourse he had just finished.

[2] As a result of this general support he finally adopted a false conviction; this is so potent in the spiritual world that no one can resist it or speak against what it prescribes. But because this was a kind of incantation as used by the ancients, he was forbidden to go on talking seriously on the basis of that conviction, and after that he taught as before from memory and at the same time the use of his understanding. A conviction of this sort which is a kind of incantation wells up from self-love. This ends up by making a person so disposed that, when anyone contradicts him, he not only attacks the subject under debate, but the other person himself.

[3] He lived like this up to the Last judgment, which took place in the spiritual world in 1757. A year later he was moved from his first house to another, at the same time moving into a different state. On hearing that I, although in the natural world, spoke with those who were in the spiritual world, he was one of a number who came to see me. After some questions had been put and answered, he perceived that the present time is the end of the former church and the beginning of the new church foretold by Daniel's prophecy, and also by the Lord Himself in the Gospels. He also grasped that it is this new church which is meant by the New Jerusalem in Revelation, and by the everlasting gospel which the angel flying in the midst of heaven announced to dwellers upon earth (Revelation 14:6). He became very indignant and abused me; but as he grasped that there was a new heaven, which was and is being made from those who acknowledge the Lord alone as God of heaven and earth, as His words in Matthew 28:18 state, and noticing that the size of his audience grew less day by day, he stopped being abusive, and then came closer to me and began to talk with me in a more intimate fashion. Once he had been convinced that he had drawn his principal dogma about justification by faith alone not from the Word, but from his own intelligence, he allowed himself to be instructed about the Lord, charity, true faith, free will and so on to redemption, all of this from no source but the Word. Finally when he had been convinced, he began to take a favourable view, and more and more to convince himself of the truths on which the new church is being founded.

[4] At this time he was with me daily, and then, whenever he recalled as being those truths, he began to laugh at his previous dogmas, as being something completely opposite to what the Word says. I heard him say: 'You should not be surprised that I seized upon faith alone as justifying, shut off charity from its spiritual essence and also took away from people all free will in spiritual matters, not to mention other things which hang like hooks from a chain on faith alone, once it is accepted. My aim was to make a split with the Roman Catholics, and there was no other way to achieve and accomplish this aim. I am not surprised therefore that I myself went astray, but I am surprised that one madman could drive so many others mad.' He glanced round here at some dogmatic writers who had been famous in his time, faithfully following his teaching, for failing to see the contradictions contained in Holy Scripture, evident though they were.

[5] The examining angels told me that this leader was in a better position to be converted than many others who had convinced themselves of justification by faith alone, because in childhood, before he started making the reformation, he had absorbed the dogma of the preeminence of charity. This was why both in his writings and his sermons he gave excellent teaching about charity. It is to be deduced from these facts that his belief in justification was implanted in his external natural man, not rooted in his internal spiritual man. The case is quite different with those who while young convince themselves that there is no spirituality in charity; and this also happens automatically, when justification by faith alone is well grounded upon arguments.

[6] I talked with the prince of Saxony with whom Luther had been in the world. He told me how he had often criticised him, in particular for separating charity from faith, and declaring faith and not charity as the means to salvation, when Holy Scripture not only links them as the two universal means to salvation, but Paul too puts charity above faith, saying that there are three things, faith, hope and charity, and the greatest of these is charity (1 Corinthians 13:13). Luther, however, replied every time that he could do no other because of the Roman Catholics. This prince is among the blessed.