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

Notas de rodapé:

302. The atmospheres--three in number in each world, spiritual and physical--in their final forms terminate in the kinds of material substance characteristic of our earth. In 173-176 [173-178] of part 3, I explained that there are three atmospheres in each world, the spiritual and the physical, distinguished from each other by vertical levels and diminishing as they move downward by horizontal levels. Since the atmospheres do diminish as they move lower, it follows that they are constantly becoming denser and less active, ultimately so dense and inactive that they are no longer atmospheres but inert substances, and in a physical world they become stable, like the substances on earth that we call "matter."

There are three consequences of this origin of material substances. First, material substances also have three levels. Second, they are kept in interconnection by the enveloping atmospheres. Third, they are suited in their forms to the production of all kinds of useful activity.

445. THE RESUSCITATION OF MAN FROM THE DEAD AND HIS ENTRANCE INTO ETERNAL LIFE

When the body is no longer able to perform its functions in the natural world corresponding to the thoughts and affections of his spirit which he has from the spiritual world, then man is said to die. This takes place when the respiration of the lungs and the beatings of the heart cease. But yet the man does not die; he is merely separated from the corporeal part that was of use to him in the world, for the man himself lives. It is said that the man himself lives, since man is not a man because of his body but because of his spirit, for it is the spirit in man that thinks, and thought with affection makes man. Hence it is clear that the man when he dies merely passes from one world into another. And this is why in the Word in its internal sense "death" signifies resurrection and continuation of life. ¹

Notas de rodapé: