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:

17. Afterward I asked where I might run into the scholars with the sharpest wits who stand in favor of a divine Trinity divided into three persons. There happened to be three such people present. I asked them, "How can you divide the divine Trinity into three persons and claim that each person is individually or by himself God and Lord? Surely your verbal confession that there is one God is as distant from your thought as the south is from the north. "

"There is no distance at all," they replied. "Those three persons have one essence, and the divine essence is God. In the world, we were tutors teaching the trinity of persons; the pupil we were responsible for was our faith. In our faith each divine person plays his own role: God the Father's role is to give spiritual credit or blame and to bestow [grace], God the Son's role is to intercede and mediate, and God the Holy Spirit's role is to put into effect the actual credit or blame and the mediation. "

[2] So I asked, "What do you mean by 'divine essence'?"

They said, "We mean omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, immensity, eternity, and equality of majesty. "

To this I said, "If that essence makes many gods one God, couldn't you add even more? How about a fourth god mentioned by Moses, Ezekiel, and Job: God Shaddai? The ancient people in Greece and Italy did something similar. They assigned equal attributes and a similar essence to their gods, such as Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto, Apollo, Juno, Diana, Minerva; and Mercury and Venus as well. But nonetheless they couldn't call all of them one God. In fact, you are three people, and to my mind you seem academically similar, so you have a similar essence as far as scholarship goes; but you couldn't combine yourselves into one scholar. "

They laughed at this, and said, "You're joking! It is different with the divine essence. The divine essence is one thing; it doesn't come in three parts. It is single and undivided. Partition and division don't apply to it. "

[3] When I heard this I retorted, "Then let's go down into the ring and fight. - What do you understand a person to be?" I asked. "What does that mean?"

They answered, "The term person means that which is not a role of, or a quality in, someone else, but an entity subsisting on its own. This is the definition of person used by all - by the leaders of the church and by us as well. "

"Is this truly your definition of person?" I asked.

"It is," they said.

So I replied, "Then the Father and the Son have nothing in common, and neither of them has anything in common with the Holy Spirit. Therefore each one has his own free choice, responsibility, and power. They share nothing, then, other than the fact that each one has a will, which he can communicate if he wishes. Aren't these three persons three distinct gods? And listen to this: You have in fact defined a person as someone who subsists on his or her own. Therefore there are three 'subsistings' or substances into which you have divided the divine essence, and yet you said that the divine essence is indivisible; you said there was one undivided essence. Furthermore you attribute to each substance or person characteristics that are not in the others and could not be shared with them: giving spiritual credit or blame, mediating, and putting into effect. What other conclusion is possible except that the three persons are three gods?"

At my saying this, they drew back and said, "We will discuss these points among ourselves, and after our discussion we will give you our response. "

[4] A wise person was standing nearby. On hearing all this, the wise person said to them, "I do not wish to sift such a sublime topic with such a fine mesh. Setting subtleties aside, I see in a clear light that there are three gods in the ideas of your thought. If you publicized your views before the whole world it would cause you shame, because you would be labeled either insane or stupid. Therefore saying that there is one God helps you avoid losing respect. "

The three scholars, however, held on to their opinion and paid no attention. As they went away they were muttering terms borrowed from metaphysics. This alerted me that metaphysics was the oracle they planned to consult in giving their response.

23. There is one human God from whom springs all else. All powers of human reason join together and center, so to speak, on the existence of one God, the creator of the universe. Consequently any person possessed of reason, owing to the common sense of his intellect, does not and cannot think otherwise. Tell anyone possessed of sound reason that there are two creators of the universe, and you will encounter an antipathy to you because of it, even perhaps from just the sound of the words in his ear. It is apparent from this that all powers of human reason join together and center on the existence of one God.

For this there are two reasons. The first is that the very ability to think rationally regarded in itself is not a person's own, but is God's gift in him. On it depends human reason in general, and that dependence in general causes it to see, as though of itself, the existence of one God.

The second reason is that through that faculty a person either is in the light of heaven or draws the general tendency of his thought from it, and the universal precept of the light of heaven is the existence of one God.

A different circumstance occurs if a person has used that faculty to corrupt the lower constituents of his intellect. He possesses that faculty indeed, but by a twisting of its lower elements he turns it in another direction so that his reason becomes unsound.