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

फुटनोट:

30. It is because the very essence of the Divine is love and wisdom that we have two abilities of life. From the one we get our discernment, and from the other volition. Our discernment is supplied entirely by an inflow of wisdom from God, while our volition is supplied entirely by an inflow of love from God. Our failures to be appropriately wise and appropriately loving do not take these abilities away from us. They only close them off; and as long as they do, while we may call our discernment "discernment" and our volition "volition," essentially they are not. So if these abilities really were taken away from us, everything human about us would be destroyed--our thinking and the speech that results from thought, and our purposing and the actions that result from purpose.

We can see from this that the divine nature within us dwells in these two abilities, in our ability to be wise and our ability to love. That is, it dwells in the fact that we are capable of being wise and loving. I have discovered from an abundance of experience that we have the ability to love even though we are not wise and do not love as we could. You will find this experience described in abundance elsewhere.

7236. 'According to their armies' means in accordance with the genera and species of good within truths. This is clear from the meaning of 'an army' as the truths that constitute faith, dealt with in 3448. But forms of good in the spiritual Church are essentially nothing other than truths, since truths are called forms of good when people lead their lives in accordance with those truths. When therefore the word 'army' is used to refer to those within the spiritual Church who have been regenerated, forms of the good of truth or forms of good within truths are meant. The reason why it says that the children of Israel were to be led out 'according to their armies' is that it is speaking about the time when they will come out of Egypt - in the internal sense when they will come out of conflicts with falsities, thus after they have performed spiritual military service. The proper way to understand the command that they were to be led out 'according to their armies' is that they were to be distinguished in keeping with forms of good within truths, thus were to be divided into groups according to different kinds of good. And this was done in order that they might represent the Lord's kingdom in the heavens. There all have been divided up and allotted a place in the Grand Man in accordance with both the genus and the species of each one's good.

[2] The fact that all in heaven are divided up in accordance with their different kinds of good shows how manifold and how varied good is; it is so varied that good is never the same with one person as it is with another. Indeed if millions of people went on being multiplied forever, one person's good would still not be like another's, just as one person's face is not like another's; and in heaven furthermore good is what shapes angels' faces. The reason for the unending variety is that every form has distinct and varied constituent parts; for if two were exactly alike they could not be two but a single unit. This also explains why in the natural order no one thing ever exists which is like another in every respect.

[3] What makes good so varied is truth; when this is joined to good it gives the good specific character. One reason why truth is so manifold and varied that it can make good so greatly varied is that truths are countless, and interior truths take on a different form from exterior ones. Another reason is that false impressions gained by the outward senses attach themselves, and also false ideas that are products of evil desires. Since therefore truths are so countless one can see that when they are joined to good just as many variations are produced, so many that one form of good can never be the same as another. This is plain to anyone who knows that from merely twenty-three letters joined together in different combinations the words contained in all languages can be produced; indeed even if there were thousands of languages, an unending variety of combinations could be produced. So what will be the product of varieties numbering thousands and millions, as truths do? Confirmation of the existence of those varieties is also contained in the proverb in general use in the world that there are as many opinions as there are heads, that is, ideas are as varied as the number of people there are.