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

Fusnotat:

171. Creation is constantly pressing toward this final goal by means of this trio of purpose, means, and result, because these three elements are in God the Creator, as just stated. Further, Divinity is in all space nonspatially (69-72) and is the same in the largest and smallest things (77-82). We can see from this that the entire creation, in its general tending toward its final goal, is the intermediate end, relatively speaking. God the Creator is constantly drawing up out of the earth forms of service in their sequence, a sequence that culminates in us, who are from the earth as far as our bodies are concerned. By accepting love and wisdom from the Lord, we are then raised up and furnished with all the means for the acceptance of love and wisdom. Moreover, we are so created that we can accept them if we are only willing to.

What has now been said enables us to see, if only in a general way so far, that the goal of creation becomes manifest in final things, the goal being the return of all things to their Creator, and union.

525. Most of those who come into the other life from the Christian world bring with them this belief that they can be saved as a result of immediate mercy, for they pray for that mercy; but when examined they are found to believe that coming into heaven is merely gaining admission, and that those who are let in are in heavenly joy, being wholly ignorant of what heaven is and what heavenly joy is. Consequently, they are told that the Lord denies heaven to no one, and that they can be admitted and can stay there if they desire it. Those who were so desirous were admitted; but as soon as they reached the first threshold they were seized with such anguish of heart from a draught of heavenly heat, which is the love in which angels are, and from an inflow of heavenly light, which is Divine Truth, that they felt in themselves infernal torment instead of heavenly joy, and, struck with dismay, they cast themselves down headlong. Thus they were taught by living experience that it is impossible to grant heaven to anyone as a result of immediate mercy.