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

Mga talababa:

213. As regards love and wisdom, love is the end, wisdom the cause or means, and useful endeavor the effect, and useful endeavor embraces, contains, and is the foundation of love and wisdom. Moreover, useful endeavor so embraces and so contains them that all the qualities of the love and all the qualities of the wisdom are actually present in it, useful endeavor being the concurrence of these.

It should be rightly known, however, that it is all homogeneous and accordant qualities of love and wisdom that are present in useful endeavor, in accordance with the observations presented and demonstrated above in the discussion in nos. 189-194.

189. Degrees of height are homogeneous, with one following after another in succession, like end, cause and effect. Since degrees of breadth or continuous degrees are like those in a progression of light to dark, of heat to cold, of hard to soft, of dense to rare, of thick to thin, and so on, and these degrees are known from sense experience and visual observation, whereas degrees of height or discrete degrees are not, therefore we must deal chiefly with the latter in this part of the work; for without a concept of these latter degrees, one cannot see causes.

People know, indeed, that end, cause and effect follow in order as prior, subsequent and last elements. They also know that the end produces the cause, and through the cause, the effect, in order that the end may be realized. And they know many other things relating to these three as well. Yet to know these things and not see them in application to actual phenomena is to know only abstractions - abstractions which remain in the thought only as long as one contemplates the analytical speculations of metaphysical philosophy. So it is that although end, cause and effect proceed by discrete degrees, still little if anything is known in the world about these degrees. For a concept only of abstractions is like some airy apparition which flies away; but if abstractions are applied to such phenomena as have actual existence in the world, they are like something visible to the eyes in the world, which stays in the memory.