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:

68. As already noted [65], heaven is divided into as many communities as there are organs, viscera, and members in us, and no part of these can be anywhere except where it belongs. Since angels are parts like this in the divine heavenly person, then, and only people who have lived on earth become angels, it follows that people who allow themselves to be led to heaven are constantly being prepared by the Lord for their places. This happens by means of the kind of desire for what is good and true that corresponds, and every angel-person is enrolled in this place after leaving our world. This is the very core of divine providence in respect to heaven.

82. Verse 1 And the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

These words are used to mean that the individual has now become spiritual to the point of being the sixth day. 'Heaven' is his internal man, and 'earth' his external. 'The host of them' are love, faith, and cognitions of them, which previously were meant by 'the great lights and the stars'. That the internal man is called 'heaven' and the external 'earth' becomes clear from the quotations from the Word given in the previous chapter, to which the following from Isaiah may be added,

I will make man (vir) more rare than fine gold, and man (homo) than the precious gold of Ophir. Therefore I will strike the heavens with terror, and the earth will be shaken out of its place. Isaiah 13:12-13.

And elsewhere in Isaiah,

You will forget Jehovah your Maker, who stretches out the heavens and lays the foundations of the earth. But I will put My words in your mouth and hide you in the shadow of My hand, that I may stretch out heaven and lay the foundation of the earth. Isaiah 51:13, 16.

These quotations show that both heaven and earth have reference to man (homo). They refer, it is true, to the Most Ancient Church, but the more interior contents of the Word are such that whatever statement is made about the Church is a statement about the individual member of the Church. If he were not the Church, he could not be a part of the Church, just as anyone who is not a temple of the Lord cannot be that which is meant by a temple, namely the Church and heaven. This also is why the Most Ancient Church is called Man (a singular noun).