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:

545. The Lord Does Not Cast Anyone into Hell: Spirits Cast Themselves In

Some people cherish the notion that God turns his face away from people, spurns them, and casts them into hell, and is angry against them because of their evil. Some people even go so far as to think that God punishes people and does them harm. They support this notion from the literal meaning of the Word where things like this are said, not realizing that the spiritual meaning of the Word, which makes sense of the letter, is wholly different. So the real doctrine of the church, which is from the spiritual meaning of the Word, teaches something else. It teaches that the Lord never turns his face away from anyone or spurns anyone, never casts anyone into hell or is angry. ¹

Anyone whose mind is enlightened perceives this while reading the Word simply from the fact that the Lord is goodness itself, love itself, and mercy itself. Good itself cannot do harm to anyone. Love itself and mercy itself cannot spurn anyone, because this is contrary to mercy and love and is therefore contrary to the divine nature itself. So people who are thinking with an enlightened mind when they read the Word perceive clearly that God never turns away from us, and that because he does not turn away from us, he behaves toward us out of goodness and love and mercy. That is, he wills well toward us, loves us, and has compassion on us.

Enlightened minds also see from this that the literal meaning of the Word where things like this are said has a spiritual meaning concealed within it, a meaning needed to explain expressions that in the letter are adapted to human comprehension, things said in accord with our primary and general conceptions.

Footnotes:

8227. 'And the Egyptians were fleeing to meet it' means that they plunged themselves into the falsities arising from evil. This is clear from the meaning of 'fleeing to meet the sea' as plunging themselves into falsities arising from evil, which are meant by the waters of that sea, 8226. The situation is that a person who is ignorant of causes lying on more internal levels inevitably believes that the bad things which happen to the evil, such as their undergoing punishment, vastation, and damnation, and finally being cast into hell, are attributable to the Divine. That is exactly how it seems to him, since such things occur at the presence of the Divine, 8137, 8138, 8188. Even so, no such thing happening to them is attributable to the Divine, only to themselves. The Divine and His presence have one end alone in view, namely the protection and salvation of the good. When the Divine is present with them, protecting them from those who are evil, the evil feel all the more antagonistic towards them, and all the more antagonistic towards the Divine Himself; for they hate Him most of all. Those who hate good hate most of all the Divine. So they rush to the attack, and in the measure that they do so they subject themselves, in keeping with the law of order, to punishment, vastation, and damnation, and at length cast themselves into hell. From all this it becomes clear that the Divine, that is, the Lord, does only what is good and does nothing bad to anyone; rather, those ruled by evil subject themselves to such miseries. This is what is meant when it says that the Egyptians fled to meet the sea; that is, they plunged themselves into the falsities arising from evil.

[2] On this subject something further must be said. The belief also exists that bad things are attributable to the Divine because He allows them and does not take them away. And one who allows something and does not take it away when he has the power to do so appears to will it and so to be the cause of it. But the Divine allows it because He cannot prevent it or take it away. The Divine wills only what is good; if therefore He were to prevent or remove bad things, that is to say, the miseries of punishment, vastation, persecution, temptation, and the like, He would be willing something bad. For then the people who must suffer them could not have their faults corrected and evil would increase until it held sway over good. The situation is like that with a king who acquits the guilty. He is the cause of the ill done by them subsequently in his kingdom, and he is the cause of the resulting lawlessness of others, not to mention that the evil person becomes more deeply immersed in evil. Therefore although a good and righteous king has the power to cancel punishments, yet he cannot, for if he cancels them he does not do what is good but what is bad. It should be recognized that all forms of punishment as well as of temptation in the next life have good as their end in view.