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

각주:

43. This brings us to the point where we can see that divine love and wisdom in and of themselves are substance and form. They are essential reality and manifestation, and unless they were as much reality and manifestation as they are substance and form, they would be only theoretical constructs that in and of themselves are nothing.

60. I heard a number of people in the spiritual world speaking round about me, saying that they were quite willing to acknowledge that the Divine is present in each and every constituent of the universe, because they saw in these constituents the wonders of God, and the more deeply they viewed them, the more wonderful they seemed. But yet when I told them that the Divine actually is within each and every constituent of the created universe, they responded with indignation - a sign that they really did not believe what they said.

Therefore I asked them whether they could not see it simply from the marvelous ability that exists in every seed to reproduce its own kind of plant in such a progression of development as to culminate in new seeds. Or from the fact that in every seed there is a reflection of the infinite and eternal, for they have in them a striving to multiply and produce fruit infinitely and to eternity.

[2] Consider also any animal, even the smallest - that it has in it sense organs, a brain, heart, lungs, and all the other organs, including arteries, veins, fibers, muscles, and the functions of these, not to mention the amazing phenomena inherent in their character, on which subject we have available whole books written.

All of these wonders come from God, while the forms in which they are clothed come from materials of the earth. Out of these are formed plants, and in turn human beings. Consequently of man it is said that he was created out of the ground, and that he is dust of the earth, and that the breath of life was breathed into him (Genesis 2:7). From this it is apparent that the Divine is not man's but is something adjoined to him.