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

Footnotes:

29. No one can deny that in God we find love and wisdom together in their very essence. He loves us all out of the love that is within him, and he guides us all out of the wisdom that is within him.

Further, if you look at the created universe with an eye to its design, it is so full of wisdom from love that you might say everything taken all together is wisdom itself. There are things without measure in such a pattern, both sequential and simultaneous, that taken all together they constitute a single entity. This is the only reason they can be held together and sustained forever.

10560. 'See, You say to me, Cause this people to go up' means the solemn promise of a Church among that nation. This is clear from the meaning of 'You say to me', when what had been said had been said by Jehovah, as a solemn promise; and from the meaning of 'cause this people to go up' as that the Church may be established among that nation. These are the things that are meant in the internal sense by those words; but in the proximate sense ¹ the meaning is that they would be led into and take possession of the land of Canaan. For this meaning of being led into and taking possession of the land of Canaan as establishing the Church, see above in 10559. What all this entails has been shown in various places in what has gone before, that is to say, places which show that no Church could be established among that nation, only what was representative of the Church, because their interest lay in external things separated from what was internal; that people such as these cannot receive any influx from the Divine; and that yet the Church resides with a person in what is internal in him, not in what is external separated from it. People such as these are indeed able to represent the Church, but not to be a Church. To represent the Church but not to be a Church is the situation when people cultivate things of an external nature, calling them holy and Divine, yet do not acknowledge or perceive them with faith and love derived from heaven. See what has been stated above in 10526 about the meaning of 'causing the people to go up into the land'.

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