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

脚注:

85. People have not realized before that there is another sun besides the sun of our physical world. This is because our spiritual nature has become so deeply involved in our physical nature that people do not know what the word "spiritual" means. So they do not realize that there is a spiritual world other than and different from this physical one, a world where angels and spirits live.

Because that spiritual world has become so completely hidden from people in this physical world, the Lord has graciously opened the sight of my spirit so that I can see things in that world just the way I see things in this physical world, and then provide descriptions of that spiritual world. This I have done in the book Heaven and Hell, which has a chapter on the sun of the spiritual world. I have in fact seen it, and it seemed about the same size as the sun of this physical world. It had a similar fiery look, but was more reddish. I was given to understand that the whole angelic heaven lies beneath this sun and that angels of the third heaven see it constantly, angels of the second heaven often, and angels of the first or most remote heaven occasionally.

It will be made clear in what follows that all their warmth and all their light--everything people see in that world--comes from that sun.

3354. These individual meanings show what the Lord's words are used to mean, namely the first state of the perversion of the Church, which occurs when people cease to know any longer what good is and what truth is, and instead argue with one another about them, which gives rise to falsities. But because this is only the first state it is said that the end is not yet, and that these are the beginning of sorrows; and that state is referred to as earthquakes in various places, which in the internal sense means an alteration of the state of the Church - a partial or initial alteration. The fact that this was told to the disciples means that it was addressed to all who belonged to the Church, for the twelve disciples represented these, 2089, 2129, 2130. This explains why they are told, See that no one leads you astray, and also, When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, see that you are not alarmed.