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

Fußnoten:

66. This enables us to understand to some extent a mystery we can call angelic, namely, that every desire for what is both good and true is human as to its form. That is, whatever emanates from the Lord is a desire for what is good because it comes from his divine love and is a desire for what is true because it comes from his divine wisdom. In angels and in us, the desire for what is true that emanates from the Lord seems like a perception of what is true and like thought about it because we are attentive to perception and thought and not particularly attentive to the desire that they come from, even though [the perception and thought] emanate from the Lord as integral to the desire for what is true.

1990. 'Jehovah appeared to Abram' means manifestation. This is clear without explanation, for, as has been stated, Abram represents the Lord. No human being at all in the whole world has seen Jehovah, the Lord's Father; the Lord alone has done that, as He Himself has stated in John,

Nobody has ever seen God; the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known. John 1:18.

In the same gospel,

You have never heard His voice nor seen His shape. John 1:37.

And again in the same gospel,

No one has seen the Father except Him who is with the Father, He has seen the Father. John 6:46.

[2] The Infinite itself which stands above all the heavens and above man's inmost being cannot be manifested except by means of the Divine Human, which exists solely with the Lord. Communication of the Infinite with finite beings is not possible at all from any other source. This also explains why, when Jehovah appeared to members of the Most Ancient Church and subsequently to members of the Ancient Church which existed after the Flood, and also after that to Abraham and the prophets, He was manifested to them as a human being. That it was indeed the Lord, He Himself openly teaches in John,

Abraham your father rejoiced to see My day, and saw it and was glad. Truly, truly, I say to you, Before Abraham was, I am. John 8:56, 58.

This is also taught in the Prophets, for example in Daniel who saw Him as 'a son of man', Daniel 7:13.

[3] From these quotations it becomes clear that the Infinite Being (Esse), which is Jehovah, could not possibly be manifested to man except through the Human Essence, that is, through the Lord, and so has not been manifested to anyone except the Lord alone. So that He could be present with and be joined to mankind, after mankind had removed itself entirely from the Divine and had immersed itself in foul desires and so in merely bodily and earthly things, He adopted the Human Essence itself by being born. He did so in order that the Infinite Divine could be joined to man even though man was so remote. Otherwise mankind would have died the death of those for ever damned. As for all the other arcana concerning the manifestation of Jehovah in the Lord's Human, when His state was a state of humiliation, before He had fully united the Human Essence to the Divine Essence and glorified it, these will in the Lord's Divine mercy be explained later on, to the extent that they are capable of being understood.