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

फुटनोट:

32. It is because the divine essence itself is love and wisdom that the universe and everything in it, whether living or not, depends on warmth and light for its survival. Warmth in fact corresponds to love and light corresponds to wisdom, which also means that spiritual warmth is love and spiritual light is wisdom. But more on this as well later [83-84, 89-92].

318. (4) All forms of use have in them some image of the Infinite and Eternal. An image of the Infinite is visible in these forms from their endeavor and power to fill every interval of space in the entire world and in many other worlds as well to infinity. For a single seed produces a tree, bush, or plant, which occupies its own space. Every tree, bush, or plant then produces more seeds - in some cases several thousand - and when these fall to the ground and sprout, they each occupy their own space. If every one of their seeds, then, were to spawn as many new progeny again and again, within years they would fill the whole world; and if they were to continue still to reproduce, they would fill many more worlds, and this to infinity. Reckon from one seed thousands more, and multiply those thousands by the thousands from them ten times, twenty times, up to a hundred times, and you will see.

An image of the Eternal exists similarly in these forms as well. Seeds are produced anew from year to year, and new productions of them never cease. They have not ceased from the creation of the world to this day, nor will they cease to eternity.

These two characteristics are manifest indications and testifying signs that all constituents of the universe have been created by an infinite and eternal God.

[2] In addition to these images of the Infinite and Eternal, there is a further image of the Infinite and Eternal in the varieties of things and the fact that no substance, state, or object can ever occur in the created universe that is identical to another. Not in the atmospheres, not in the substances of the earth, nor in the forms arising from them, thus not in any of the constituents which fill the universe, can anything identical to another be produced to eternity.

The fact of this is visibly apparent in the variety of facial features among all human beings. No one set of facial features is identical to that of another anywhere in the world, nor can there be to eternity. Consequently neither is any mind the same, of which the face is a reflection.