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:

72. However, since not many people know that this law can be a law of divine providence (primarily because in spite of the fact that divine providence is constantly leading us to think and intend what is good and true, we have a freedom to consider what is evil and false), I need to proceed clearly, step by step, so that this will be grasped. The sequence will be as follows:

1. We have a capacity for disciplined thought and a certain latitude, or rationality and freedom, and these two abilities are in us as gifts from the Lord.

2. Whatever we do from our freedom, whether we have thought it through rationally or not, seems to be ours as long as it is in accord with our reason.

3. Whatever we have done from our freedom in accord with our thinking becomes a permanent part of us.

4. It is by means of these two abilities that the Lord reforms and regenerates us; without them we could not be reformed and regenerated.

5. We can be reformed and regenerated by means of these two abilities to the extent that we are brought to a realization that anything good and true that we think and do comes from the Lord and not from us.

6. The Lord's union with us and our responsive union with the Lord comes about by means of these two abilities.

7. Through the whole course of his divine providence, the Lord protects these two abilities untouched within us, as though they were sacred.

8. This is why it is integral to divine providence that we act from freedom, and in accord with reason.

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'.