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:

327. 3. It is our own fault if we are not saved. Even on first hearing it, any rational person accepts the truth that evil cannot come from what is good, and that good cannot come from what is evil, since they are opposites. This means that nothing but good comes from what is good, and nothing but evil comes from what is evil. Once we admit this truth, we also admit that good can be turned into evil, not by the goodness itself but by the evil that receives it. Every form changes what it receives into something of its own nature (see 292 above).

Since the Lord is goodness in its very essence, or goodness itself, then, we can see that evil cannot flow from the Lord or be brought forth by him, but that it can be turned into evil by a recipient subject whose form is a form of evil. In respect to our claim to autonomy, we are this kind of subject. This apparent autonomy of ours is constantly receiving good from the Lord and constantly changing it to suit the nature of its own form, which is a form of evil. It therefore follows that it is our own fault if we are not saved.

Evil does come from hell, of course, but since our insistence on autonomy accepts evil as its own and thereby incorporates it into itself, it makes no real difference whether you say that the evil is from ourselves or that it is from hell. I need to say, though, where this incorporation of evil has come from, even to the point that religion itself is dying. I will do so in the following sequence. (a) Every religion eventually wanes and comes to completion. (b) Every religion wanes and comes to completion by inverting the image of God within us. (c) This happens because of the constant increase of hereditary evil from generation to generation. (d) The Lord still provides that everyone can be saved. (e) He also provides that a new church will take the place of the earlier one that has been razed.

324. But as regards the heathen of the present day, they are not so wise, but most of them are simple in heart. Nevertheless, those of them that have lived in mutual charity receive wisdom in the other life, and of these one or two examples may be cited. When I read the seventeenth and eighteenth chapters of Judges (about Micah, and how the sons of Dan carried away his graven image and teraphim and Levite) a heathen spirit was present who in the life of the body had worshiped a graven image. He listened attentively to the account of what was done to Micah, and his grief on account of his graven image which the Danites took away, and such grief came upon him and moved him that he scarcely knew, by reason of inward distress, what to think. Not only was this grief perceived, but also the innocence that was in all his affections. The Christian spirits that were present watched him and wondered that a worshiper of a graven image should have so great a feeling of sympathy and innocence stirred in him. Afterwards some good spirits talked with him, saying that graven images should not be worshiped, and that being a man he was capable of understanding this; that he ought, apart from a graven image, to think of God the Creator and Ruler of the whole heaven and the whole earth, and that God is the Lord. When this was said I was permitted to perceive the interior nature of his adoration, which was communicated to me; and it was much more holy than is the case of Christians. This makes clear that at the present day the heathen come into heaven with less difficulty than Christians, according to the Lord's words in Luke:

Then shall they come from the east and the west, and from the north and the south, and shall recline in the kingdom of God. And behold, there are last who shall be first, and there are first who shall be last (Luke 13:29, 30).

For in the state in which that spirit was he could be imbued with all things of faith and receive them with interior affection; there was in him the mercy of love, and in his ignorance there was innocence; and when these are present all things of faith are received as it were spontaneously and with joy. He was afterwards received among angels.