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

Notas de rodapé:

67. Next, since we are by creation heavens in smallest form and therefore images of the Lord, and since heaven is made up of as many desires as there are angels, each of which is a person as to its form, it follows that the constant effort in divine providence is for each of us to become a heaven in form and therefore an image of the Lord. Further, since this is accomplished by means of the desire for what is good and true, it is for us to become that desire. This, then, is the constant effort in divine providence.

The very heart of providence, though, is that we should be in some particular place in heaven or in some particular place in the divine heavenly person and therefore in the Lord. This is what happens for people whom the Lord can lead to heaven. Since the Lord foresees this, he also constantly provides for it, with the result that all of us who are allowing ourselves to be led to heaven are being prepared for our own places in heaven.

7622. When all this had been completed the spirits around me who had watched the bird intently and the series of changes it had undergone talked to one another about it, and for a considerable length of time. They perceived that this kind of sight could only be a sign of something heavenly. They knew that the flaming object was a sign of heavenly love and affections; that the hand which the flame clung to was a sign of life and the power of life, and the changes of colour signs of variations in wisdom and intelligence that go with that life. They knew that the bird too had a similar meaning, the difference being that the flaming object was a sign of celestial love and aspects of that love, while the bird was a sign of spiritual love and aspects of this love. (Celestial love is love to the Lord, spiritual love is mutual love and charity towards the neighbour.) They knew too that the changes in the colours of the bird, and at the same time in the life it had within it until it became stone-like, were signs of the various successive changes in the intelligence that goes with that spiritual life.

[2] They knew furthermore that spirits who come up from underneath by way of the region of the loins into that of the breast are utterly convinced that the Lord is with them, and as a consequence believe that in all they do, even wicked and criminal acts, they are doing the Lord's will. Yet although the spirits around me knew all these things they could not figure out who exactly were meant in the scene they had witnessed. Eventually they learned from heaven that the inhabitants of Mars were meant; that their celestial love, which still exists in a large number of them, was meant by the flame that clung to the hand; that their wisdom and intelligence was meant by the series of varying colours; and that the bird at first, when its colours were beautiful and it was full of life, meant their spiritual love, but then, when that bird became stone-like, lacking in life, and dull-coloured, it meant inhabitants who had forsaken the good of love for evil, yet still believed that the Lord was with them. But since there is more that has been disclosed and demonstrated to me about those inhabitants who are like this and about their state of life, let that be recorded at the end of the next chapter.