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:

144. No one is reformed in a state of intellectual blindness, either. These individuals, too, are not aware of truths and do not know about life, because it is our discernment that must instruct us in these matters and our volition that must act them out. When our volition is doing what our discernment tells it to, then we have a life in accord with truths; but when our discernment is blind, our volition is blocked as well. All it can do freely in accord with its own reasoning is the evil that it has justified in its discernment, which is false.

If religion teaches a blind faith, it blinds our discernment just the way ignorance does. It is then teaching a false theology; for just as truths open our discernment, falsities close it. They close it from above but open it downward; and discernment that is open only downward cannot see truths. All it can do is justify whatever it wants to, especially anything false.

Our discernment is also blinded by compulsions to evil. As long as our intentions are caught up in these compulsions, they prompt our discernment to justify them; and to the extent that we justify our compulsions to evil, our volition cannot enjoy good desires, see truths on that basis, and so be reformed.

[2] For example, if people are compulsive adulterers, their intentions, being caught up in the pleasures of that love, prompt their discernment to justify it. They say, "What is adultery? Is there anything wrong about it? Isn't it just like what happens between a husband and a wife? Can't children just as well be born from adultery? Can't a woman accept more than one man without being harmed? What does sex have to do with spirituality, anyway?" This is how a discernment that has become prostituted by its volition thinks. It becomes so stupid because of its debauchery with volition that it cannot see that marriage love is the essence of spiritual heavenly love, the image of the love between the Lord and the church from which it flows; that it is inherently holy, the essence of chastity and purity and innocence; that it makes us forms expressive of love itself, because married partners can love each other from the center of their being and so make themselves loves; that adultery destroys this form together with the image of the Lord; and that it is horrendous for an adulterer to mingle his life with the life of the husband in his wife, since there is human life in semen.

[3] Because this is a profanation, hell is called "adultery" and heaven is called "marriage." A love for adultery is in direct touch with the deepest hell, and a true love for marriage with the highest heaven. The reproductive organs of both sexes correspond to communities of the highest heaven.

I mention all this to show how blind our discernment is when our volition is caught up in compulsions to evil, and to show that no one can be reformed in this state of intellectual blindness.

4190. 'And Jacob took a stone and erected it as a pillar' means a like truth and worship based on this. This is clear from the meaning of 'a stone' as truth, dealt with in 643, 1298, 3720, and from the meaning of 'a pillar' as worship based on it, that is, on truth, dealt with in 3727, from which paragraphs it is evident that these words mean a like truth and worship based on this. The expression 'a like truth' is used, that is, truth as it exists among gentiles, because although gentiles do not know anything about the Word or as a consequence about the Lord, they still have the same external truths as Christians, such as these: One should worship God with due reverence, keep religious festivals, and honour one's parents; one should not steal, commit adultery, or kill; also, one should not covet what belongs to another. Thus gentiles have the same kind of truths as are included in the Ten Commandments and are also the standards of behaviour set within the Church. The wise among them act in conformity not only with the external but also with the internal form which those same commandments take, for they think that the kinds of things which are forbidden are not only contrary to their religion but also contrary to the common good and so to the internal obligation which they owe to other people, and that as a consequence such actions are contrary to charity. And they think in this way even though they have little knowledge of what faith is. In their obscurity they possess a kind of conscience against which they are unwilling to act, indeed against which some are incapable of acting. From this it becomes clear that the Lord governs their interiors which are in obscurity, and in so doing imparts to them an ability to receive interior truths, which they also do receive in the next life - see what has been shown concerning gentiles in 2589-2604.

[2] I have been allowed to talk on several occasions to Christians in the next life about the state and fortune of gentiles outside the Church - that they accept the truths and goods of faith more easily than do Christians who have not lived according to the Lord's commandments, and that Christians think of gentiles in a heartless fashion. That is to say, they think that all outside the Church stand condemned, a way of thinking based on the established rule that outside the Lord there is no salvation. I have told the Christians to whom I have been speaking that this rule is true, but that gentiles who have led charitable lives with one another and who, moved by some kind of conscience, have done what is just and fair, receive faith and acknowledge the Lord more easily in the next life than those who are inside the Church and have not led charitable lives. I have gone on to say that Christians are subject to falsity when they believe that heaven is theirs alone because they have the Book of the Word, written down on paper but not in their hearts, and also when they know the Lord but do not believe that He is Divine as to His Human, indeed when they do not acknowledge Him, as to His second Essence which they term the human nature, as any more than an ordinary human being. Therefore, left to themselves and their own ideas they do not even adore Him. So it is they themselves who are outside the Lord, and for whom there is no salvation.