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:

489. If We Had No Free Choice in Spiritual Matters, God Would Be the Cause of Evil, and We Could Not Be Credited [with Goodwill or Faith]

The notion that God is the cause of evil follows from the modern-day belief that was first hatched by those who participated in the Council of Nicaea. At that event a heresy was thrown together and cooked up that still persists today, which is that there are three divine persons from eternity, each of which is a God on his own. Once that egg was hatched, the followers had no choice but to turn to each divine person as an individual god. The participants at Nicaea put together a belief that the merit or justice of the Lord God the Savior is assigned to us. Then, to prevent the idea that we actually acquire the Lord's merit, they took away any idea that we have free choice in spiritual matters, and brought in the notion that we are completely powerless in regard to that faith. Because they centered all the spiritual teaching of the church on that belief alone, they declared the existence of a similar spiritual powerlessness in regard to everything the church teaches about salvation. As a result, horrific heresies came into being, one after another, founded upon that faith and the notion of human powerlessness in spiritual matters, including predestination, that most damaging of concepts, which was covered under the preceding heading [485-488]. All these teachings entail the idea that God is the cause of evil or that God created both good and evil.

My friend, do not put your trust in any council. Put your trust in the Lord's Word, which is high above councils. Look at all the notions hatched by Roman Catholic councils! Look at the egg the Synod of Dort laid from which the horrendous viper of predestination came forth!

[2] Now you might suppose that the free choice granted to human beings in spiritual matters is a mediate cause of evil, and therefore that if free choice of this kind had not been granted to us, we would not be able to sin. But, my friend, stop for a moment here and consider whether any human being could be created so as to be human without having free choice in spiritual matters. If this were taken away from us, we would be statues and no longer human. What is free choice except the power to will and do and think and speak to all appearances as if we did so on our own? Because this ability was granted to us so that we could live as human beings, two trees were placed in the Garden of Eden - the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This means that from the freedom that has been granted to us we can eat fruit from the tree of life and we can eat fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

52. Everything in the universe has been created by the Divine love and wisdom of the human God. The universe in its greatest and least elements and in its first and last elements is so full of Divine love and wisdom that it can be said to be Divine love and wisdom in an image. The reality of this clearly appears from the correspondence that all the constituents of the universe have with all the constituents of a human being. Each and every phenomenon that occurs in the created universe has such a correspondence with each and every constituent of the human being that one may declare the human being to be also a kind of universe. His affections and resulting thoughts have a correspondence with all the constituents of the animal kingdom, his will and consequent understanding with all the constituents of the plant kingdom, and the outmost constituents of his life with all the constituents of the mineral kingdom.

[2] The existence of such a correspondence is not apparent to anyone in the natural world, but it is to everyone who takes note of it in the spiritual world. That world contains all the phenomena that occur in the three kingdoms of the natural world, and they are correspondent manifestations of the affections and thoughts of the inhabitants there - of the affections emanating from the will and of the thoughts emanating from the intellect - and of the outmost constituents of their life. Moreover, these correspondent manifestations and phenomena appear round about them in a visible form like that of the created universe, with the difference that they do so in a lesser image of it.

[3] It is clearly apparent to angels from this that the created universe is a representative image of the human God, and that it is His love and wisdom which are displayed in an image in the universe. Not that the created universe is the human God, but that it exists from Him. For nothing whatever in the created universe is substance and form in itself, or life in itself, or love and wisdom in itself, indeed neither is the human being human in himself, but all is from God, who is human in Himself, wisdom and love in itself, and form and substance in itself. Whatever exists in itself is uncreated and infinite. Whatever exists from that, however - this, because it retains nothing in it that exists in itself, is created and finite, and it reflects an image of Him from whom it exists and takes form.