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:

445. Our Revival from the Dead and Entry into Eternal Life

When someone's body can no longer perform its functions in the natural world in response to the thoughts and affections of its spirit (which it derives from the spiritual world), then we say that the individual has died. This happens when the lungs' breathing and the heart's systolic motion have ceased. The person, though, has not died at all. We are only separated from the physical nature that was useful to us in the world. The essential person is actually still alive. I say that the essential person is still alive because we are not people because of our bodies but because of our spirits. After all, it is the spirit within us that thinks, and thought and affection together make us the people we are.

We can see, then, that when we die we simply move from one world into another. This is why in the inner meaning of the Word, "death" means resurrection and a continuation of life. ¹

Footnotes:

6221. 'Behold, your father is sick' means the next stage towards regeneration. This is clear from the meaning of 'dying' as resurrection to life, and regeneration, dealt with in 3326, 3498, 3505, 4618, 4621, 6036; consequently 'being sick' prior to death means a movement towards regeneration, thus the next stage towards it. The meaning of 'dying' as regeneration and of 'being sick' as the next stage towards it is bound to seem too far-fetched to be believed; but the person who knows anything about the way angels think and speak will acknowledge the truth of it. Angels have no knowledge at all of death or of sickness and consequently form no mental image of them. Instead they form, when a person reads about sickness and death, an idea of the continuation of life, and an idea of resurrection. The reason they do this is that when a person dies he casts off solely what has served him for use in the world and enters into the life his spirit has led. This is the idea that comes to angels' minds when a person reads about 'dying' and 'being sick'. An idea of regeneration likewise comes to mind, since regeneration is resurrection to life. For at first the person was spiritually dead; but once he has been regenerated he is made alive and 'a son of the resurrection. ¹

[2] The person who, while living in the body, is desirous of heaven thinks of death and of sickness previous to it as nothing else than resurrection to life. For when he thinks about heaven he detaches himself from thought of the body, especially when he is sick and approaching death. From this it is evident that a spiritual idea of death of the body is an idea of newness of life. When therefore those in heaven refer to resurrection or regeneration, and this comes down and is channelled into the kinds of things that belong to the world, it cannot fall into any other kinds of images than these. This is how it is with the Word. Every single detail has come down from the Lord, passing through heaven and into the world. On the way down it assumes forms suited to the understanding of those in the three heavens, and at length assumes a form suited to man's understanding, which form is the literal sense.

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