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:

493. Our first state after death is like our state in this world, since we are then similarly involved in outward concerns. We have similar faces, voices, and character; we lead similar moral and civil lives. This is why it still seems to us as though we were in this world unless we notice things that are out of the ordinary and remember that angels told us we were spirits when we were awakened (450). So the one life carries on into the other, and death is only a passage.

7910. 'In all your dwellings you shall eat unleavened bread' means that in their interiors, where good is, truth must be made their own. This is clear from the meaning of 'dwellings' as parts of the mind, thus aspects of intelligence and wisdom, dealt with in 7719, consequently the interiors since intelligence and wisdom reside there, and also good; and from the meaning of 'eating unleavened bread' as making truth one's own, dealt with several times above. As regards the fact that people's interiors are the place where they make things their own, and the fact that the interiors are where good is, it should be recognized that with those who rely on the Lord, that is, who lead a life of faith and charity, good resides in their interiors; and the more deeply it resides in them, the purer and more heavenly that good is. But in their exteriors truth resides; and the more external its seat is, the more bereft of good that truth is. The reason for this is that so far as his interiors are concerned a person is in heaven, the innermost of them being close to the Lord; but so far as his exteriors are concerned he is in the world. Thus it is that the truths of faith enter by an external route, but good by an internal one, 7756, 7757, and thus it also is that people's interiors, where good is, are the place where they make truth their own.