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:

4. God alone--the Lord--is love itself, because he is life itself. Both we on earth and angels are life-receivers. I will be offering many illustrations of this in works on divine providence and life. Here I would say only that the Lord, who is the God of the universe, is uncreated and infinite, while we and angels are created and finite. Since the Lord is uncreated and infinite, he is that essential reality that is called Jehovah and is life itself or life in itself. No one can be created directly from the Uncreated, the Infinite, from Reality itself and Life itself, because what is divine is one and undivided. We must be created out of things created and finite, things so formed that something divine can dwell within. Since we and angels are of this nature, we are life-receivers. So if we let ourselves be misled in thought so badly that we think we are not life-receivers but are actually life, there is no way to keep us from thinking that we are God.

Our sense that we are life and our consequent belief that we are life rests on an illusion: in an instrumental cause, the presence of its principal cause is only felt as something identical to itself. The Lord himself teaches that he is life in itself in John: "As the Father has life in himself, so too he has granted the Son to have life in himself" (5:26); and again in John (11:25; 14:6) he teaches that he is life itself. Since life and love are one and the same, as we can see from the first two sections above, it follows that the Lord, being life itself, is love itself.

10431. 'And let My anger grow hot against them, and let Me consume them' means that they turn themselves so far away from inward and thus Divine things that they are inevitably destroyed. This is clear from the meaning of 'growing hot with anger', when it has reference to Jehovah, as a turning away on man's part, dealt with below; and from the meaning of 'consuming', when this too has reference to Jehovah, as being destroyed by their own evil. Many places in the Word speak of Jehovah's becoming inflamed with anger and growing hot, and also of His consuming and destroying. But the reason why they do so is that when a person turns himself away from the Lord, as happens when he does what is evil, it appears to that person as though He acts in those ways. And since he is not heard then and is also punished the person supposes that the Lord is full of anger towards him, when in fact the Lord is never angry and never consumes; for He is Mercy itself and Goodness itself. This shows the true nature of literal statements in the Word, namely that they are made in accord with the appearance as seen by man. One such appearance occurs in what follows, where Jehovah is said to repent; but in reality He never repents, for everything is foreseen from eternity by Him. From this also it may be recognized how many errors those people fall into who think of nothing beyond the literal sense when they read the Word, thus who read it without the aid of teachings drawn from the Word which show them what the real truth is. For those who read the Word with the aid of such teachings know that Jehovah is Mercy itself and Goodness itself, and that it cannot by any means at all be said of infinite Mercy nor of infinite Goodness that it grows hot with anger and consumes. From those teachings therefore they know and see that when such a statement occurs it is made in accord with the appearance as seen by man.

Anger and evil have their origin in man and not in the Lord, but they are nevertheless attributed to the Lord, see in the places referred to in 9306.

Anger when spoken of in regard to the Lord means a person's turning away from the Lord, 5034, 5798, 8483, 8875.