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:

525. Many people who arrive in the other life from the Christian world bring with them a faith that they are going to be saved out of straight mercy, because they plead for it. When they are examined, though, it turns out that they have believed that getting into heaven was simply a matter of being let in, and that people who had been admitted were in heavenly joy. They have had no notion of what heaven is or what heavenly joy is. So they are told that the Lord does not deny heaven to anyone. They can be let in if they wish and even stay there. Some who wanted to were actually let in; but at the very threshold, at the touch of heaven's warmth (that is, of the love angels are engaged in) and the inflow of heaven's light (which is divine truth), they were seized with such pain in the heart that they felt themselves in the torments of hell rather than in the joys of heaven. Struck by this, they plunged down headlong. In this way they were taught by firsthand experience that no one can enter heaven out of straight mercy.

5883. 'Draw near to me, I beg you' means a more internal communication. This is clear from the meaning of 'drawing near' as communicating in closer proximity, which, in the context of the external in relation to the internal, is communicating on a more internal level. People have no knowledge of the fact that communication with the natural or external man is both interior and exterior. And the reason why they do not know it is that they have not formed any idea for themselves about the internal man or about the life of the internal, that its life is distinct and separate from that of the external man. The only idea anyone has of the internal man is that it exists inwardly but is in no way distinct and separate from the external man, when in actual fact the two are so distinct that the internal can be separated from the external and lead a life that is the same only purer.

[2] This is also what actually happens when a person dies. The internal is separated from the external, and the internal, which is alive after that separation, is what is then called a spirit. Yet it is the same person that lived in the body; and to himself, and to others in the next life, he looks like a person in the world, fully formed from head to toe. He is also equipped with the same powers that a person in the world has - of sensation when he is touched, of smelling, seeing, hearing, speaking, and thinking. He is equipped with them so completely that when he does not stop to reflect on the fact that he is in the next life, he imagines he is in his body in the world, as I have frequently heard spirits say. From all this one may see what a person's internal and external are. If some idea is gained of them from what has been said, a somewhat clearer picture will emerge of what has been stated about the internal man and the external man so often in explanations, also of what the phrase 'a more internal communication' describes, meant here by 'draw near to me, I beg you'.