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

Note a piè di pagina:

47. Now, since we are dealing with divine providence, and are dealing at this point with the fact that it focuses on what is infinite and eternal in everything it does, and since this can be conveyed clearly only if it is put in a particular sequence, that sequence will be as follows:

1. What is intrinsically infinite and intrinsically eternal is the same as Divinity.

2. What is intrinsically infinite and eternal can only focus on what is infinite from itself in what is finite.

3. In everything it does, divine providence focuses on what is infinite and eternal from itself, especially in the intent to save the human race.

4. There is an image of what is infinite and eternal in the angelic heaven made up of members of the human race who have been saved.

5. The very core of divine providence is its focus on what is infinite and eternal in the forming of the angelic heaven so that it can be a single person in the Lord's sight, a person who is his image.

493. The first state of man after death is like his state in the world, for he is then likewise in externals, having a like face, like speech, and a like "animus", thus a like moral and civil life. So it is that he then does not know but that he is still in the world unless he gives attention to what he encounters and to the things told him by the angels when he was resuscitated-that now he is a spirit (450). Thus is one life continued into the other, and death is merely transition.