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

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25. After his life in the world everyone lives for ever. This is evident from the fact that he is then no longer natural but spiritual; and a spiritual person once separated from the natural stays in the same state for ever, since a person's state cannot change after death. Moreover every person's spiritual side is linked with the Divine, since it can think about and also love the Divine, and be acted upon by all the influences coming from the Divine, much as the church teaches. The spiritual side can as a result be linked to the Divine by willing and thinking, the two faculties of the spiritual man which make up his life. Thus a link can be made with the Divine which can never die, for the Divine is present with him and links him to Itself.

[2] Man has also been created so as mentally to be a model of heaven. The form of heaven derives from the Divine itself, as was shown in HEAVEN AND HELL (The Lord's Divine makes and forms heaven, 7-12, 78-86); man was created so as to be a model of heaven on the smallest scale (57); heaven taken all together resembles a single human being (59-66). Hence an angel has a perfect human form (73-77). An angel is a human being in his spiritual aspect.

[3] I have had a number of conversations with angels on this subject. They were extremely surprised that there are very many among those reputed intelligent in the Christian world, and believed to be intelligent by other people, who have totally rejected any idea that their life is not subject to death, but believe that the soul of a human being is dispersed after death like that of an animal. They fail to perceive the difference in the way human beings and animals live. Human beings have thoughts that can rise above themselves, and they can think about God, heaven, love, faith, spiritual and moral good, truths and such matters, thus rising to the Divine itself, and being linked to Him by all these means. Animals, however, cannot rise above their natural level so as to entertain such thoughts. As a result their spiritual side cannot be separated from their natural after death, ¹ and live on by itself as a human being's can. That too is the reason why an animal's life ² is dispersed together with its natural life.

[4] The angels said that the reason why many so-called intelligent people in the Christian world do not believe their life is immortal is that at heart they deny the existence of the Divine and acknowledge Nature in His place. Those who think from such premises cannot imagine how they can live for ever by being linked with the Divine, and consequently that the condition of human beings is any different from that of animals; for when they banish the idea of the Divine from their thoughts, they also banish that of eternity.

[5] They went on to say that every individual has a highest or most inward degree of life, something highest and inmost on which the Lord's Divinity primarily and most closely acts, and from which He controls the remaining interiors belonging to the spiritual and natural man and arranged in ordered sequence in them. They called this highest or most inward part the Lord's entrance into man and His truest abode with man. It is this highest or most inward part which gives man his humanity and sets him apart from dumb animals, which lack it. This is why men can, unlike animals, have their interiors, which belong to their minds and characters, raised by the Lord to Himself. Thus they can believe in Him, feel love for Him, and receive intelligence and wisdom and speak rationally.

[6] When asked whether those who deny the existence of the Divine and the Divine truths which link a person's life with the Divine Himself none the less live on for ever, they said that these had the ability to think and will, and thus to believe and love what proceeds from the Divine equally with those who acknowledge Him; and that this ability to think and will enables them equally to live for ever. They added that this ability results from that highest or most inward part everyone possesses which was mentioned just above. I have demonstrated at length that even those in hell have this ability, which enables them to reason and speak against Divine truths. This is why every person, irrespective of what sort of person he is, lives for ever.

[7] Because after death everyone lives for ever, no angel or spirit can think about death; in fact, they do not know what it is to die. Whenever therefore death is mentioned in the Word, the angels understand it as damnation, which is death in the spiritual sense, or the continuation of life and resurrection. ³ These remarks are intended as confirmation that all people who have ever been born from the beginning of creation, and have died, are alive, some in heaven and some in hell.

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4527. I have talked to some just a few days after their decease, and being at that time recent arrivals they dwelt in a light which to them was little different from the light of the world. Because that light seemed little different to them they doubted whether it came from any source other than that of the world's light. They were for that reason taken to where heaven begins, to where the light was brighter still, and from there they talked to me. They said that they had never seen light like that, and yet this was long after the sun had set. They now wondered at the fact that spirits had eyes to see with, since during their lifetime they had believed that the life spirits had was pure thought, entirely separated indeed from any subject. The reason they had believed this was that they had been unable to think about any subject of thought because they had not seen it. This being so, they inevitably supposed that, being thought alone, the soul would be dissipated together with the body in which it existed, just like a puff of wind or fire, if the Lord did not in a miraculous way hold it together and keep it in being. Those spirits taken to where heaven begins also saw how easily the learned may fall into error concerning the life after death and that they more than any others do not believe anything apart from what they actually see. They were amazed therefore at their possessing not only thought but also sight, as well as each of the other senses. They were even more amazed that they looked to themselves entirely like people, that they saw, heard, and conversed with one another, and that they could touch and feel their own bodily parts, doing so more perfectly than during their lifetime. Consequently they were astounded that when living in the world man is totally ignorant of all this, and they felt pity for the human race's complete lack of knowledge about such things because of their utter lack of belief, most of all among those who dwell in greater light than others, namely those who are within the Church and possess the Word.

[2] Some of them had not believed anything other than that after death human beings would be like ghosts, an idea which they had become convinced was true because of the apparitions they had heard about. But from this they concluded that a ghost was no more than some gross principle of life which is initially released from the life of the body but then returns again to the corpse, and in so doing is snuffed out. Others had believed however that they would not rise again until the time of the Last Judgement when the world would be destroyed, at which time they would rise again with the body which, though it had crumbled to dust, would be reassembled and in this way they would rise again with their bones and flesh. And because they had in vain been awaiting that Last Judgement or destruction of the world for many centuries they had sunk into the error of thinking that they would not rise again at all. They had not thought about what they had learned from the Word, and had sometimes even quoted that when a person dies his soul is in the hand of God, ¹ and is among the happy or the unhappy depending on the life he had come to know; nor have they thought about what the Lord said concerning the rich man and Lazarus. But these recently arrived spirits were informed that everyone's last judgement takes place when he dies, at which time it seems to him that he is endowed with a body as when in the world, and has the use of every sense as he has done here, though that sense is now purer and more perfect because nothing bodily imposes any limitations on it, and things which belong to the light of the world no longer cloud over those that belong to the light of heaven. Thus he now lives in a body that so to speak has been purified. In that world he could not possibly carry around a body of bones and flesh like that he had in the world, for in this case he would once again be invested with earthly dust.

[3] I have talked on this subject to some on the very day that their bodies were being buried, and through my eyes they have seen their own dead body, bier, and interment. They then said that they were casting that body aside, and that it had served them for uses performed in the world in which they had been but that now they were living in a body which served them for the uses performed in that world in which they were now. They also wished me to tell these things to their mourning relatives, but I was led to reply that if I did they would laugh at it because they did not believe in the existence of anything which they were unable to see with their own eyes, and so they would include what I said among visions which were mere illusions. For people cannot be brought to believe that as men see one another with their eyes so spirits see one another with theirs, and that man is unable to see spirits except with the eyes of his spirit, and that he sees them when the Lord opens his sight, as happened to the prophets, who saw spirits and angels, and also many of the things in heaven. But whether people living today would have believed those things if they had seen them at that time is open to doubt.

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