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:

523. The Lord never does anything contrary to his design because he himself is the design. The divine truth that emanates from him is what establishes the design, and divine truths are the laws of the design by which the Lord is leading us. Saving people by unmediated mercy is contrary to the divine design, and anything contrary to the divine design is contrary to the divine nature.

The divine design is heaven for us. We have distorted it by living contrary to its laws, which are divine truths. The Lord brings us back into the design out of pure mercy, through the laws of the design; and to the extent that we are brought back, we accept heaven into ourselves. Whoever accepts heaven enters heaven.

This shows again that the Lord's divine mercy is pure mercy but not unmediated. ¹

Footnotes:

6013. 'And their young children' means accompanied by aspects of innocence. This is clear from the meaning of 'young children' as innocence, dealt with in 3183, 5608. Natural truth is said to be accompanied by aspects of innocence, and also those of charity, for the reason that if it lacks innocence and charity spiritual truths cannot cause it to move ahead. For to be genuine, truth must derive its essence and life from charity, and charity must derive its essence and life from innocence. Indeed these inner virtues which give truth its life follow one another in this order: What is inmost is innocence; below this comes charity; and what is lowest is a charitable deed motivated by or done in conformity with truth. The reason why they follow one another in this way is that they follow one another in heaven in that order. The inmost or third heaven is the heaven of innocence; the middle or second heaven is the heaven of charity that has innocence from the inmost heaven within it; and the lowest or first heaven is the heaven of truth that has charity from the second heaven within it, and innocence from the third within that charity.

[2] These virtues ought to exist in the same order in man, for interiorly the human being is so created that he conforms to an image of the three heavens. This also is why a person who has been regenerated is an individual heaven or the smallest form heaven can take. But exteriorly, especially so far as his body is concerned, he is so created that he conforms to an image of the world, which was why the ancients called him the microcosm. The ear has been made to conform to the whole nature of air and sound; the eye to conform to the whole nature of the ether and light; the tongue to every perception of particles dissolved and suspended in fluids; the nostrils to the perception of particles suspended in the atmosphere; touch to the perception of cold and heat, and also of weights; and so on. Just as a person's external senses conform to an entire image of the natural world, so his internal senses, which are those of his understanding and will, have been so created that they conform to an entire image of heaven. They have been created like this so that the human being as an individual, like heaven as a general whole, may be a recipient of Divine Good from the Lord.