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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20. 2. The one God is substance itself and form itself. Angels and people are substances and forms from him. To the extent that they are in him and he is in them, to that extent they are images and likenesses of him. Because God is the underlying reality, he is also substance. Unless the underlying reality becomes substance it is a figment of the imagination; but as a substance it becomes an entity. And one who is substance is also form, for substance without form is another figment of the imagination. We can attribute both of these to God, provided he is seen as the sole, the only, and the archetypal substance and form.

The work Divine Love and Wisdom, published in Amsterdam in 1763, demonstrates that God's form is the human form itself, that is, that God is the Human Being, and all God's attributes are infinite. That work also shows that angels and people are substances and forms that have been created and arranged to receive divine qualities flowing into them through heaven. In the Book of Creation they are called images and likenesses of God (Genesis 1:26-27). Elsewhere they are called God's children and people born of God.

As the sequence of topics in this book will show in many ways, the more we live under divine guidance, meaning the more we submit to God's leading, the more and more deeply we become an image of God.

If human minds do not form an idea of God as the archetypal substance and form, and of God's form as the Human Form itself, they render themselves highly susceptible to delusions and speculations about God, about the development of the human race, and about the creation of the world. Their thought of God is restricted to a thought of the expanse of nature underlying the universe, or else a thought about emptiness or nothing at all. The development of the human race they think of as a lucky coincidence - elements just happened to come together in this form. As for the creation of the world, they see its substances and forms as originating in geometry's points and then lines; and because these are nondimensional and one-dimensional they are actually nothing. In such minds, everything that has to do with the church is like the river Styx or the thick darkness in Tartarus.

55. Everything in the created universe is a recipient of the Divine love and wisdom of the human God. People know that each and every constituent of the universe has been created by God. Therefore the universe with each and every thing in it is called in the Word the work of the hands of Jehovah. ¹

There are people who maintain that the world in its entirety was created out of nothing, and the idea they entertain of nothing is one of absolutely nothing, even though out of absolutely nothing comes nothing, nor can anything be produced from it. This is an immutable truth. Therefore the universe - being an image of God and thus full of God - could only have been created in God from God. For God is being itself, and from being must come whatever is. To create from nothing, which has no being, something that is, is completely contradictory.

[2] Still, however, whatever is created in God from God is not a continuous extension of Him, for God is being in itself, and created things do not have in them any being in itself. If created things were to have in them any being in itself, it would be an extension of God, and an extension of God is God.

The angelic idea of this is as follows, that what is created in God from God is like something which in the case of a person had originated from his life, but from which the life has been withdrawn, which is such as to accord with his life, but still is not his life. This angels affirm on the evidence of many testifications which occur in their heaven, where they say that they are in God and God in them, and yet have in their being nothing of God which is God. (We will report further testifications on whose evidence they affirm this in subsequent discussions. Let what we have said here serve simply to inform.)

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