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:

13. The Lord's Divine Nature in Heaven Is Love for Him and Thoughtfulness toward One's Neighbor

In heaven, the divine nature that emanates from the Lord is called divine truth, for reasons that will be given below. This divine truth flows into heaven from the Lord, out of his divine love. Divine love and the divine truth that derives from it are like the sun's fire and the light that comes from it in our world. The love is like the sun's fire, and the derivative truth is like the light from the sun. By reason of correspondence, fire means love and light means the truth that flows from it. ¹

This enables us to determine the character of the divine truth that emanates from divine love: in its essence, it is divine good united to divine truth, and because it is united, it gives life to everything in heaven the way the warmth of the sun, united to its light, makes everything fruitful on earth in spring and summer. It is different when the warmth is not united to light, when the light is therefore cold. Then everything slows down and lies there, snuffed out.

The divine good we have compared to warmth is the good of love within and among angels, and the divine truth we have compared to light is the means and the source of this good of love.

फुटनोट:

3833. 'And so it was in the evening' means when the state was still obscure. This is clear from the meaning of 'the evening' as an obscure state, dealt with in 3056. Furthermore feasts held in the evening, that is, suppers, meant nothing else among the ancients who had appropriate religious observances than the introductory state which comes before an actual joining together, which is obscure compared with that state when the joining together has taken place. Indeed when a person is being introduced into truth and from this into good, everything he learns at that time is obscure. But once good is joined to him and he regards truth from the standpoint of good, everything he learns becomes clear to him, gradually and increasingly so. For he is now no longer in doubt about whether something exists or whether it is true but knows that it exists and is true.

[2] Once a person has reached this state he starts to know countless things, for he now proceeds from the good and truth which he believes and perceives. He proceeds so to speak from the central point out to the peripheral regions; and in the measure that he proceeds from such good and truth, he sees in the same measure the things round about, and gradually more and more widely since he is constantly pushing out and extending the boundaries. Thereafter he also begins from each subject situated in the space within those boundaries, and from those subjects as new centres he pushes out new peripheral regions; and so on in the spaces within these. Consequently the light of truth radiating from good increases enormously and becomes one expanse of light, for he is now bathed in the light of heaven which shines from the Lord. But to people who are prone to doubt and who question whether something exists and is true, those countless, indeed limitless things are not visible at all. To them every single one is totally obscure. Those things are scarcely seen by them as a single whole which definitely exists, only as a single whole whose very existence they are uncertain of. Such is the condition into which human wisdom and intelligence has fallen at the present day. Being able to reason cleverly whether something exists is now the mark of a wise man, and being able to reason that it does not exist is the mark of one wiser still.

[3] Take for example the question whether in the Word an internal sense exists which such people call the mystical sense. Until they believe in the existence of it they cannot know a single one of the countless things existing within that sense, so many that they fill the whole of heaven in unending variety. Take as another example one who reasons about whether Divine Providence is merely universal and does not extend to specific details. That person cannot know the countless arcana which have to do with Providence, as many in number as the occurrences in everyone's life from start to finish and in the world from its creation to its end, and even for ever. Take as yet another example one who reasons whether good can exist in anyone, seeing that the will of man is fundamentally depraved. He cannot possibly be aware of all the arcana that have to do with regeneration, nor even that a new will is implanted by the Lord and the arcana concerning this. And the same is so with everything else. From this one may recognize what obscurity surrounds such people and that they do not even see, let alone reach, the outskirts of wisdom.