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

Bilješke:

523. The Lord never does anything contrary to his design because he himself is the design. The divine truth that emanates from him is what establishes the design, and divine truths are the laws of the design by which the Lord is leading us. Saving people by unmediated mercy is contrary to the divine design, and anything contrary to the divine design is contrary to the divine nature.

The divine design is heaven for us. We have distorted it by living contrary to its laws, which are divine truths. The Lord brings us back into the design out of pure mercy, through the laws of the design; and to the extent that we are brought back, we accept heaven into ourselves. Whoever accepts heaven enters heaven.

This shows again that the Lord's divine mercy is pure mercy but not unmediated. ¹

Bilješke:

363. (1) Love and wisdom, and consequently the will and intellect, constitute a person's very life. Scarcely anyone knows what life is. When anyone thinks about it, it seems as though it were something vaporous, of which no idea is possible. It seems so because people do not know that God alone is life, and that His life is Divine love and wisdom. Consequently it is apparent that nothing else is the life in a person, and that it is the life in him in the degree that he receives it.

People know that the sun radiates heat and light, of which all things in the universe are recipients, and that in the degree that they receive them they are warmed and illuminated. So it is with the sun where the Lord is, the heat radiating from it being love, and the light radiating from it being wisdom, as we showed in Part Two.

Life therefore comes from these two elements which emanate from the Lord as a sun.

[2] That love and wisdom from the Lord are life can also be seen from the fact that as love wanes in a person he becomes listless, and as wisdom fades, dull-witted; and if these were to vanish altogether, he would cease to live.

There are many properties of love which have been given other names, because they are derivations of it, such as affections, lusts, appetites, and their pleasures and delights. There are also many properties of wisdom, such as perception, reflection, recollection, cogitation, and attention to something. In addition there are many properties of both love and wisdom together, such as consent, resolve, and determination to a course of action, among others. Actually, all of these are properties of both, but they are characterized by the one that is predominant and more immediately present.

[3] Deriving finally from these two are sensations, which are those of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, with their delights and gratifications. The appearance is that the eye sees, but it is the intellect which sees through the eye. Consequently seeing is predicated also of the intellect. The appearance is that the ear hears, but it is the intellect which hears by means of the ear. Consequently hearing is predicated also of paying attention and listening, which is a function of the intellect. The appearance is that the nose smells, and that the tongue tastes, but it is the intellect with its perception which smells, and also tastes. Consequently smelling and tasting are predicated also of perception. And so on.

The founts of all of these phenomena are love and wisdom, from which it can be seen that these two constitute a person's life.