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:

67. Next, since we are by creation heavens in smallest form and therefore images of the Lord, and since heaven is made up of as many desires as there are angels, each of which is a person as to its form, it follows that the constant effort in divine providence is for each of us to become a heaven in form and therefore an image of the Lord. Further, since this is accomplished by means of the desire for what is good and true, it is for us to become that desire. This, then, is the constant effort in divine providence.

The very heart of providence, though, is that we should be in some particular place in heaven or in some particular place in the divine heavenly person and therefore in the Lord. This is what happens for people whom the Lord can lead to heaven. Since the Lord foresees this, he also constantly provides for it, with the result that all of us who are allowing ourselves to be led to heaven are being prepared for our own places in heaven.

6322. To all outward appearance the external senses, such as sight and hearing, flow into thought and initiate mental images there. For the appearance is that external objects activate the senses, first the external senses, then the internal ones, and speech too. But no matter how convincing that appearance may be, it is nevertheless a misconception. For what is external, being gross and material, cannot flow in and activate what is internal, which is pure and spiritual; that would be contrary to the nature of things. It is the power of the inward senses, a power belonging to the spirit itself, that perceives things, and it does so by means of the power of the outward senses. It is also the power of the inward senses that disposes an outward sensory organ to receive impressions of objects at its bidding. So it is that outward sensory organs - such as that of sight, which is the eye - instantly adapt themselves to all the objects of the senses. Nothing of this could happen in sensory organs without the inflow they receive from within; for all the fibres and small appendages, which are very many around each sensory organ, are instantly attuned to the nature of the object. Indeed the organ itself is also immediately conditioned to conform.

[2] Discussion regarding this appearance has often taken place among spirits, and on every occasion angels have responded by saying that influx does not take place from external things into internal ones at all, only from internal ones into external. This, they have said, is in accordance with order, contrary to which no influx can take place. Two or three times I have seen spirits who have been separated from association with angels because they have been led by outward appearances to believe that such influx from external things into internal ones does exist, thus that influx is physical, not spiritual. The reason why they had been separated was that they might have come to the conclusion that the hells which concern themselves with external things could flow into the heavens which concern themselves with internal ones. They might also have concluded that life did not flow in from the Lord, when in fact He is the source of all inflowing life, because He exists at the inmost point and in relation to Him everything else is external.