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

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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.

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15. A further reason why people in the church hold such views is that they believe that no one can go to heaven or to hell before the time of the Last Judgment. On this subject they have come to believe that everything visible will then be destroyed and be replaced by new things; that each soul will then return to its proper body, and on joining up the person will resume a personal life. This belief carries with it the other one about angels being created from the beginning. For it is impossible to believe that heaven and hell are from the human race, if it is thought that people go there only at the end of the world.

[2] But I have been allowed, so as to convince people that this is untrue, to associate with angels and to talk with those in hell, and this for many years now, sometimes from morning till evening without a break, and so to learn about heaven and hell. This has been allowed in order to prevent people in the church from persisting in their mistaken belief about resurrection on the day of Judgment, about the state of the soul meanwhile, as well as about angels and the Devil. This being a belief in what is false, brings with it darkness, and plunges into doubt those who use their own intelligence to think about these subjects, so that they end up denying them. For they say to themselves, 'How can the vastness of the sky with all its many constellations, along with the sun and the moon, be destroyed and scattered? How can the stars then fall out of the sky upon the earth, when they are bigger than the earth? And how can bodies which have been eaten by worms, or rotted away and scattered to the four winds, be reconstructed to join their souls? Where do souls live meanwhile, and what are they like if they lack the power of sensation they had in the body?' They add many similar arguments which, being incomprehensible, pass belief, and in many cases destroy belief in personal everlasting life, heaven and hell, and consequently all the rest of the church's beliefs.

[3] The destruction of faith is plain from people who say: 'Who has come to us from heaven and told us that it exists? What about hell? Is there such a place? What about people being tortured in fire for ever? What is the day of Judgment? Have not people been waiting for it for ages, and in vain?' And a great deal more, which leads to a denial of everything. So to prevent those who think like this - and most of those do who have a reputation as educated and learned men as the result of their worldly wisdom - going on upsetting and leading astray those who have a simple belief and affection, throwing the darkness of hell over God, heaven, everlasting life and the other beliefs dependent on these, the Lord has laid open the interiors of my spirit. I have thus been permitted to speak after their death with all the people whom I had known in bodily life. In some cases this has been for days, in others for months, with others for a year, as well as with so many others that a hundred thousand would be an underestimate. Many of these were in the heavens and many in the hells. I have also spoken with some only two days after they died, and told them that their funerals and burial-services were being arranged. In reply they said they were happy to cast off what had served them for a body and its functions in the world, and they wanted me to say that they were not dead, but were living as human beings just as much as they were before, having only passed from one world into another. They said they were unaware of having suffered any loss, since they still had a body and bodily sense-perceptions as before, as well as an intellect and a will as before, so that their thoughts and affections, their sense-perceptions, pleasures and desires were all similar to those they had had in the world.

[4] Most of the recently dead on seeing that they were living as human beings as before were filled with unexpected joy at being alive, saying that they had never believed it would be so. Everyone's state after death is at first like that he experienced in the world; but this gradually changes into heaven or hell. They were very surprised at their previous ignorance and blindness about how they would live after death; and the more so in the case of church members, who ought above all others in the whole world to be enlightened on these subjects. ¹

[5] It was then that they first saw the reason for their ignorance and blindness. It was that external matters, worldly and bodily concerns, had so taken up and filled their minds, that they could not be lifted into the light of heaven, so as to view religious matters beyond the level of the church's teaching. When bodily and worldly concerns are as popular as they are to-day, utter darkness pervades the mind of anyone who wants to think about heavenly matters beyond the scope of the faith taught by his church.

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