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:

521. No One Enters Heaven on the Basis of Mercy Alone

If people have not been taught about heaven, the way to heaven, and the life of heaven for those on earth, they think that acceptance into heaven comes from a pure mercy extended to people of faith, people for whom the Lord intercedes, so that admission depends solely on grace. They therefore think that anyone at all can be saved out of good will; and some people even think that this includes the inhabitants of hell.

However, they do not know anything about human beings, that our quality depends on our lives and our lives on our loves. This applies not only to the deeper levels of our volition and intellect but even to the outer aspects of our bodies, with the physical form being nothing but an outward form in which our deeper natures manifest themselves in practice. This means that our love is our whole person (see above, 363). Nor do they realize that the body does not live on its own but from its spirit, and that our spirit is our actual affection, with our spiritual body being nothing more than our affection in the kind of human form it presents after death (see above, 453-460). As long as these facts are not known, people can be led to believe that salvation is nothing more than the divine pleasure that we call mercy and grace.

125. Because the zones are reflections of the angels' differing degrees of reception of love and wisdom, something must be said about the differences which produce that appearance.

The Lord is in an angel, and an angel in the Lord, as we showed in a previous discussion. ¹ But because the Lord as the sun appears to be at a distance from the angel, it appears as well that the Lord sees him from the sun, and that he sees the Lord in the sun, almost as in the case of an image seen in a mirror.

Consequently if we are to speak in terms of that appearance, then the case is as follows, that the Lord sees and gazes upon every angel as being directly before Him, but that the angels do not thus see and gaze upon the Lord in return. Those who are in a state of love toward the Lord from the Lord see Him straight ahead of them. Therefore they are in the east and west. But those who are more in a state of wisdom see the Lord off to the right, and those who are not so much in a state of wisdom off to the left. Therefore they are respectively in the north and south.

[2] The latter see the Lord at an angle to one side for the reason that love and wisdom emanate from the Lord conjointly, but they are not received conjointly by the angels, as we also said above; ² and wisdom that outpaces love appears indeed to be wisdom, but still it is not, because wisdom outpacing love does not have in it any life from love.

This makes apparent the reason for the diversity of reception which causes the abodes of angels to appear in different zones in the spiritual world.

Footnotes: