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

Fotnoter:

31. It is because the divine essence itself is love and wisdom that everything in the universe involves what is good and what is true. Everything that flows from love is called good, and everything that flows from wisdom is called true. But more on this later [83-102].

425. (20) Still there remains the faculty of understanding called rationality, and the faculty of acting called freedom. We have discussed these two faculties that a person has in nos. 264-267 above.

A person has these two faculties in order that from being natural he may become spiritual, which is to be regenerated. For, as we said above, it is a person's love that becomes spiritual and is regenerated, and it cannot become spiritual or be regenerated unless it knows through its intellect what is evil and what is good, and consequently what is true and what is false. When it knows this it can choose the one or the other; and if it chooses good, it can through its intellect be informed of the means by which it can arrive at good. The means by which a person can arrive at good have all been provided. To know and understand these means is the function of rationality, and to will and do them is the function of freedom. It is freedom also to will to know, understand and think about them.

[2] Of these faculties called rationality and freedom, those people know nothing who believe in accordance with the doctrine of their church that spiritual and theological matters transcend the intellect, and that such matters are to be believed, therefore, without being understood. Those people cannot but deny the existence of the faculty called rationality.

Moreover, those who believe in accordance with the doctrine of their church that no one can do good of himself, and that therefore no good springing from any will is to be done for the sake of salvation - those people cannot but deny, from a principle of religion, the existence of either of these faculties that a person has.

Therefore people who have confirmed themselves in these opinions are also after death, in accordance with their belief, divested of these two faculties; and instead of being able to enjoy the freedom of heaven, they live in the freedom of hell, and instead of being able to enjoy by virtue of rationality the wisdom of angels, they are caught up in the insanity of hell.

Surprisingly, moreover, they profess these two faculties to exist in doing evils and in thinking falsities - not knowing that the exercise of freedom to do evils is slavery, ¹ and that the exercise of rationality to think falsities is irrational.

[3] Still, it should rightly be known that these two faculties of freedom and rationality are not a person's own, but are the Lord's in a person; that they cannot be assigned to a person as his own, nor given to a person as his own, but are continually the Lord's in him; and yet that a person never has them taken away. The reason they are not taken away is that a person cannot be saved without them, for without them he cannot be regenerated, as we said above. It is because of this that the church teaches a person that he cannot think truth of himself, nor do good of himself.

Yet because a person has no other perception than that he thinks truth of himself and does good of himself, it is clearly apparent that he ought to believe that he thinks truth as though of himself and does good as though of himself. For if he does not believe this, then either he is not thinking truth and not doing good, and so is without religion, or he is thinking truth and doing good on his own, in which case he attributes to himself that which is Divine.

That a person ought to think truth and do good as though of himself may be seen from beginning to end in The Doctrine of Life for the New Jerusalem.

Fotnoter: