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:

312. This belief among church people is also the cause of their belief that no one will arrive in heaven or hell before the time of the Last Judgment, which they have come to believe will be a time when everything they can see perishes and new things come into being, when souls will return into their bodies and then begin once more to live as people because of this reunion. This faith implies the other, about angels having been created in the beginning, for it is not possible to believe that heaven and hell come from the human race when you believe that no one is going to get there until the end of the world.

[2] So to convince people that this is not the case, I have been allowed to associate with angels and to talk with people in hell for several years now, sometimes constantly from morning until evening, and so to learn about heaven and about hell. The purpose of all this is that church people should remain no longer in their mistaken beliefs about a resurrection on Judgment Day and about the state of their souls in the meanwhile, or about angels and the devil. Because this faith is a mistaken one, it brings darkness with it; and for people who think about such things on the basis of their own intellect, it leads to doubt and eventually to denial. They are actually saying in their hearts, "How can such a vast heaven and so many stars be destroyed and disappear, along with the sun and the moon? How can stars that are larger than the earth fall on the earth? How can bodies that have been eaten by worms and destroyed by decay and scattered to the four winds be reunited to their souls? Where have these souls been in the meanwhile, and what have they been like without any of the senses they had in their bodies?"

[3] There are many other questions like these, which do not accord with belief because they are incomprehensible, and for many people they are destroying any belief in a life after death, in heaven and hell, and along with these the rest of the contents of the faith of the church. This destruction can be observed in people who say, "Who has come back from heaven and told us that it exists, or from hell, to say that it exists? What is this business about people being tortured by fire to eternity? What is this Judgment Day? Haven't we been waiting for it for centuries, all in vain?" along with any number of other things that imply a denial of everything.

[4] Many people who are particularly skilled in worldly affairs think like this; so to prevent them from further disturbing and misleading people of simple faith and simple heart and bringing on a hellish darkness concerning God, heaven, eternal life, and the other matters that follow from them, the deeper reaches of my spirit have been opened by the Lord, enabling me to talk after their death with all the people I have ever known during their physical lives. I have talked with some for days, with some for months, and with some for a year. I have talked with so many others that it would be no exaggeration to talk in terms of a hundred thousand, many in heaven and many in hell. I have talked with some just two days after their deaths and told them that now their funerals and burial rites were being performed so that they could be interred; to which they have responded that it was a good thing they had cast off what had served them as a body for their functions in our world, wanting me to say that they were not dead at all. They were just as alive and just as human as ever, having simply crossed over from one world to another. They were not aware of having lost anything, since they were just as much in a body as before, enjoyed volition and understanding just as before, and had thoughts and affections, sensation, and desires similar to the ones they had in our world.

[5] Many people who have just died, when they have discovered that they are living persons just as they were before, and in a similar state (for our first state after death is like the one we were in on earth, although this changes gradually for us either toward heaven or toward hell), have been moved by a newfound joy at still being alive. They have said they would not have believed it. They were absolutely amazed that they had been in such ignorance and blindness about the state of life after death, all the more so that this is true of people within the church, who could be in more light about such matters than all the rest of the whole world. ¹ Now for the first time they were seeing the reason for this blindness and ignorance, namely, that their outward concerns, their concerns for worldly and bodily matters, preoccupied and filled their minds so completely that they could not be raised into heaven's light and look into ecclesiastical subjects beyond the formalities of doctrine. When bodily and worldly matters are loved as much as they are today, nothing flows in from them but darkness when the mind tries to press further.

Notas de rodapé:

4658. To the inner parts of the ear belong those who have 'the sight' of the inner hearing, who obey whatever its spirit there tells them and make exactly right declarations of what it tells them. I have also been shown what these are like from the following experience. I became aware of a kind of noise coming through from below me, coming up on the left side of me into my left ear. I realized that they were spirits who were trying to work their way out, but I could not make out what kind of spirits they were. Having worked their way out, however, they then spoke to me. They said that they were students of logic and metaphysics and that they had confined their thoughts to these areas of knowledge with no other end in view than that they would be considered learned and so would acquire positions and wealth. They moaned about the wretched life they now led, for they had become steeped in those areas of knowledge for no other purpose, and so had not used this to bring perfection to their power of reason. Their speech was slow and muted.

[2] Meanwhile two were talking to each other overhead, and I asked who they were. I was told that one of them was a very renowned figure in the learned world, and I was led to believe that he was Aristotle. Who the second one was, I was not told. The first of them was at that point taken back to a state he had passed through when he lived in the world; for anyone can easily be taken back to a state of his life when in the world because every state of his life is present within him. But to my surprise he positioned himself at my right ear and there spoke in a hoarse yet intelligible voice. From the meaning conveyed in his utterances I became aware that he was of an entirely different disposition from those schoolmen who had emerged first, in that the things he had written were the product of his own thought and that this was the origin of his philosophical ideas. Consequently the terms which he invented and gave to different facets of his thoughts were verbal expressions by which he described the things of an interior kind. I also became aware of the fact that he had been prompted to engage in such pursuits by a great delight and a desire to know the ideas that are part of thought, and that he followed obediently whatever his spirit had told him. This was why he had positioned himself at my right ear. His followers, called the Schoolmen, ¹ are different. They do not proceed from thought to terms but from terms to ideas comprising thought, and so go down the road from the opposite end. Indeed, many do not even set off down it to these ideas but stay with terms; and if they use these it is to prove whatever they like, and to give falsities an appearance of truth, in keeping with their desire to convince people of these. Consequently their pursuit of philosophy serves to make them stupid rather than wise persons, so that darkness prevails among them instead of light.

[3] I talked to them after that about the science of analysis, and I was led to say that a small child speaking for merely half an hour presents more philosophy, analysis, and logic than he could have done in volumes describing them, for the reason that every detail of human thought and consequently of human speech involves analysis, the laws of which originate in the spiritual world. I went on to say that anyone who wishes in his thinking to begin in an artificial way with terms is not unlike a dancer who wishes to start to learn how to dance from what he knows about motor fibres and muscles. If in trying to dance he fixed his mind simply on his knowledge of these he could scarcely lift a foot. Yet even without that knowledge he moves all his motor fibres spread throughout the whole body, using them to operate his lungs, diaphragm, sides, arms, neck, and every other part of the body, to describe all of which many volumes would not be sufficient. Similar to such a dancer were those who wish in their thinking to begin with terms. He agreed with what I said and declared that if that is the way people learn they are proceeding in the wrong direction. If anyone wished to be so stupid, he added, then let him go that way; even so, let him always keep in mind what is useful and what is interior.

[4] After this he showed me what kind of idea he had had about the Supreme Deity. He had represented Him to himself as one with a human face and a halo around his head. He now knew that the Lord was that Person, that the halo was the Divine as this proceeded from Him, and that He flowed not only into heaven but also into the whole world, disposing and ruling over these. He added that the one who disposes and rules heaven also disposes and rules the whole world because the one is inseparable from the other. He also declared that he had believed in one God alone whose attributes and qualities had been designated by the same number of names as there were gods whom others worshipped.

[5] I saw a woman who was reaching out her hand, desiring to stroke his cheek. When I wondered at this he said that while in the world he had often seen a woman like this one who seemed to be stroking his cheek, and that her hand had been beautiful. Angelic spirits said that women like her had been seen on occasions by people in early times who gave the name Pallas to them, and that whoever had appeared to him had been one of those spirits who, when they had lived as people in ancient times, had taken delight in ideas and so had gone into the field of thought, though not into philosophy. And since such spirits had resided with him and had taken delight in him because he had begun in his thinking with that which was interior they had put forward such a woman to represent this.

[6] Finally he intimated what kind of idea he had had about the human soul or spirit, which he called pneuma, namely something living but invisible, like something ethereal. He also said that he had known his spirit would live on after death because it was his inward essential self which, having the ability to think, could not die. He then went on to say that he had not been able to have any clear thought about the soul, only an obscure one, because his only source of knowledge about it was himself and, to a small extent, what he had received from the ancients. Aristotle himself lives among intelligent spirits in the next life, but many of his followers dwell among people who are stupid.

Notas de rodapé: