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

Bilješke:

523. The Lord never does anything contrary to his design because he himself is the design. The divine truth that emanates from him is what establishes the design, and divine truths are the laws of the design by which the Lord is leading us. Saving people by unmediated mercy is contrary to the divine design, and anything contrary to the divine design is contrary to the divine nature.

The divine design is heaven for us. We have distorted it by living contrary to its laws, which are divine truths. The Lord brings us back into the design out of pure mercy, through the laws of the design; and to the extent that we are brought back, we accept heaven into ourselves. Whoever accepts heaven enters heaven.

This shows again that the Lord's divine mercy is pure mercy but not unmediated. ¹

Bilješke:

4223. But the true position with correspondence is that although the heavens mentioned above do certainly correspond to the organic forms themselves of the human body - on account of which these communities or those angels have been spoken of as belonging to the province of the brain, or to the province of the heart, or to the province of the lungs, or to the province of the eye, and so on - they correspond primarily to the functions belonging to those viscera or organs. The position really is that, like the organs or viscera themselves, their functions make one with their organic forms. For it is impossible to gather any idea of a function except from forms, that is, from substances, since the substances are the subjects from which they exist. It is impossible to gather any idea of sight, for example, except from the eye, or of breathing except from the lungs. The eye is the organic form from which and through which sight exists, and the lungs the organic form from which and through which breathing does so; and the same applies to all other organic forms. It is the functions therefore to which heavenly communities correspond primarily, and then because they correspond to the functions they correspond to the organic forms too; for the one is indivisible from the other and inseparable, so much so that it makes no difference whether you speak about the function or about the organic form through which and from which that function exists. Consequently there is a correspondence with organs, members, and viscera because there is such with the functions. And therefore when the function is brought into action the organ also is stimulated. The same also applies in every single thing a person does. When he wishes to do this or that, and to do so in this or some other way, and is thinking of it, the organs move in response, and so in accordance with the aim of the function or use; for it is the use they serve that governs the forms.

[2] This shows also that the use they serve existed before the organic forms of the body came into being, and that the use produced and adapted those forms to itself, and not the reverse. But once the forms have been produced or the organs adapted, the uses they serve then flow from them, in which event it seems as though the forms or organs were prior to the uses, when that is not in fact the case. For the use flows in from the Lord, doing so by way of heaven, in keeping with order and with the form in which the Lord has arranged heaven, and so in keeping with correspondences. This is the manner in which man is brought into existence and in which he is kept in existence. This again shows the origin of the correspondence of the human being - every single part of him - with the heavens.