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

Фусноте:

11. 4. For various reasons, different nations and peoples have had and still have a diversity of opinions on the nature of that one God. The first reason for this is that knowledge about God and therefore acknowledgment of God is not possible without revelation; and knowledge of the Lord and therefore acknowledgment that all the fullness of divinity dwells physically in him is not possible without the Word, which is a garland of revelations. From the revelation they have been given, people are able to meet God, receive an inflow, and thus be made spiritual instead of earthly.

Early revelation spread throughout the whole world, and the earthly self distorted it in many different ways, giving rise to divergences, disagreements, heresies, and schisms among religions.

The second reason [for the diversity of opinions on God] is that the earthly self cannot comprehend anything about God; it can comprehend only the world, and conform it to itself. This is why it is among the axioms of the Christian church that the earthly self is against the spiritual self, and that they battle each other. People then have come to acknowledge from the Word [or] from some other revelation that there is a God, and yet in both the past and the present they have had a diversity of opinions on the nature and the oneness of God.

[2] Therefore people whose mental sight was dependent on their physical senses and who nevertheless wished to see God made idols for themselves out of gold, silver, stone, and wood. They intended to adore God in those forms as objects of sight. Others with the same desires but with religious principles that forbade idols pictured the sun and moon, the stars, and various things on earth as images of God. Those who believed themselves to be wiser than most but who remained earthly were led by the immensity and omnipresence God displayed in creating the world to acknowledge nature as God, in some cases in its innermost, in others in its outermost aspects. And some who wished to see God as separate from nature thought up some thing that was as all-encompassing as possible and that they called the Entity of All; but because they know nothing more of God than this, this "Entity of All" turns out to be an entity of their minds alone, utterly without any real meaning.

[3] As anyone can see, concepts of God are mirrors of God, and people who know nothing about God do not see God in a mirror facing their eyes, but in a mirror that is facing the wrong way, the back of which is covered with quicksilver or some black, sticky substance that absorbs rather than reflects the light.

Faith in God enters us on a pathway that comes down from above, from the soul into the higher reaches of the intellect. Concepts of God enter us on a pathway that comes up from below, because the intellect takes them in from the revealed Word through our bodily senses. In mid-intellect the different inflows come together. There an earthly faith, which is mere belief, becomes a spiritual faith, which is actual acknowledgment. The human intellect, then, is a kind of trading floor on which exchanges occur.

365. (2) A person's life exists in its first elements in the brain, and in its derivative elements in the body. By first elements we mean its first forms, and by derivative elements we mean the forms produced and formed from the first ones. And by life in its first elements we mean the will and intellect. These two are what exist in their first elements in the brain, and in their derivative elements in the body.

That the first elements or first forms of life exist in the brain is apparent from the following:

1. It is apparent from a person's very sensation that when he concentrates his mind and thinks, he perceives himself to be thinking in the brain. He draws the sight of his eye seemingly inward, firmly fixes his brow, and perceives his contemplation as being within, especially inside the forehead, and somewhat above.

2. It is apparent from a person's formation in the womb, from the fact that the brain or head develops first, and for some time afterward is bigger than the body.

3. It is apparent from the fact that the head is uppermost and the body below, it being according to order that higher things act upon lower ones, and not the reverse.

4. It is apparent from the fact that if the brain is injured, whether in the womb, or by a wound or disease, or owing to excessive strain, the person's thinking is impaired, and sometimes the mind is deranged.

5. It is apparent from the fact that all the external senses of the body, which are those of sight, hearing, smell, and taste, together with the universal sense which is that of touch, and moreover speech, are located in the front part of the head, called the face, and through fibers communicate directly with the brain, from which they derive their sensory and operative life.

6. So it is that affections which have to do with love are visible in a kind of image in the face, and that thoughts which have to do with wisdom are visible in a kind of light in the eyes.

7. We also know from the study of anatomy that all fibers descend from the brain through the neck into the body, and that none ascend from the body through the neck into the brain. And where the fibers exist in their first elements or first forms, there life exists in its first elements or first forms. Who can deny that life originates where the fibers originate?

8. Ask anyone who has common perception where thought exists, or where he thinks, and he will reply, in the head. But speak after that to someone who has placed the seat of the soul either in some gland or in the heart, or elsewhere, and ask him where affection with its consequent thought exists in its first form, whether it does not exist in the brain, and he will reply that it does not, or that he does not know. (To learn the reason for his not knowing, see no. 361 above.)