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

Footnotes:

169. Throughout the created universe, in its largest and smallest instances alike, we find these three--purpose, means, and result. The reason we find them in the largest and smallest instances of the created universe is that these three are in God the Creator, who is the Lord from eternity. Since he is infinite, though, and since in one who is infinite there are infinite things in a distinguishable oneness (as explained in 17-22 above), these three are a distinguishable oneness in him and in the infinite things that belong to him. This is why the universe, being created from his reality and (if we look at its functions) being an image of him, retains these three in each of its constituent details.

316. There is a similar image of creation in the forms of the functions of the animal kingdom. For example, a body is formed from the seed deposited in the womb or egg, a body that is its final form; and when this matures, it produces new seeds. The sequence is like the sequence of forms of functions in the plant kingdom. The seeds are the initial elements; the womb or egg is like the soil; the state before birth is like the state of the seed in the earth while it is making its roots; the state after birth until reproduction is like the sprouting of a tree until its fruit-bearing state.

We can see from this parallelism that there is a likeness of creation in the animal forms just as there is in plant forms. Specifically, there is a sequence from beginnings to limits and from limits to beginnings.

There is a similar image of creation in the details of our own nature, since the sequence of love through wisdom into useful functions is similar, and so therefore is the sequence of intent through discernment into act, and of charity through faith into works. Intent and discernment, charity and faith, are the first and originating elements, while acts and deeds are the final ones. There is a return from these latter, through the delights of being useful, to the first elements, which as noted are intent and discernment, or charity and faith. We can see clearly that the return is by way of the delights we find in being useful from the pleasure we sense in acts and deeds that come from some love. The delights of acts and deeds are the delights we attribute to being useful.

There is a similar sequence from beginnings to limits and from limits to beginnings in the purely organic forms of our desires and thoughts. There are in our brains the star-shaped forms called gray matter, with fibers stretching from them into the medullary matter and through the neck into the body. There they go to their limits, and from these limits they return to their beginnings. The return of the fibers to their beginnings is by way of the blood vessels.

There is a similar sequence of all our desires and thoughts, which are shifts and changes of the states of their forms and substances. The fibers that stretch out from their forms or substances are analogous to the atmospheres that come from the spiritual sun and are vessels of warmth and light. The physical acts are like the things produced from the earth by means of the atmospheres, with the delights of their useful functions returning to their source.

It is scarcely possible, though, to gain a full mental grasp of the nature of their sequence and of the way it embodies an image of creation, since the thousands upon thousands of energies at work in an action seem to be a single event. Further, the delights of useful functions do not give rise to concepts in our thought, but simply affect us without being clearly perceived.

On these matters, see what has already been presented about the way the functions of everything created tend upward by vertical levels to us, and through us to God the creator, their source (65-68), and how the goal of creation--that everything should return to the Creator and that there should be a union--becomes manifest in outermost forms (167-172).

These matters will be seen in clearer light, though, in the next part [371-431], when I discuss the correspondence of volition and discernment with the heart and lungs.