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:

301. Further, in the light of angelic concepts, which are nonspatial, it is perfectly clear that in the created universe there is nothing living except the Divine-Human One--the Lord--alone, that nothing moves except by life from God, and that nothing exists except by means of the sun from God. So it is true that in God we live and move and have our being.

5407. 'And let us live and not die' means spiritual life. This is clear from the meaning of 'living and not dying' as spiritual life, for nothing else than this is meant in the internal sense by 'living and not dying'. In the next life 'life' generally means heaven, but specifically it means eternal happiness, while 'death' generally means hell, but specifically eternal unhappiness there, as is also evident from many places in the Word. The reason why heaven generally and eternal happiness specifically are called 'life' is that wisdom, which essentially is good, and intelligence, which essentially is truth, are present in heaven, and the life of such wisdom and intelligence is received from the Lord, the Source of the whole of life. But because the contrary of this exists in hell - that is to say, evil exists instead of good, and falsity instead of truth, so that spiritual life has been snuffed out there - what exists there, compared with that existing in heaven, is death. For spiritual death consists in evil and falsity, and it exists with man as the desire for what is evil and a consequent thinking what is false. Evil genii and spirits refuse to listen when it is said that they have no life or that they are dead. For they say that they do have life since they have the power of will and the power of thought. But they are told that since life resides in what is good and true it cannot possibly do so in what is evil and false, because the two are contraries.