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

Примітки:

525. Many people who arrive in the other life from the Christian world bring with them a faith that they are going to be saved out of straight mercy, because they plead for it. When they are examined, though, it turns out that they have believed that getting into heaven was simply a matter of being let in, and that people who had been admitted were in heavenly joy. They have had no notion of what heaven is or what heavenly joy is. So they are told that the Lord does not deny heaven to anyone. They can be let in if they wish and even stay there. Some who wanted to were actually let in; but at the very threshold, at the touch of heaven's warmth (that is, of the love angels are engaged in) and the inflow of heaven's light (which is divine truth), they were seized with such pain in the heart that they felt themselves in the torments of hell rather than in the joys of heaven. Struck by this, they plunged down headlong. In this way they were taught by firsthand experience that no one can enter heaven out of straight mercy.

993. And they repented not of their works, signifies that they were unwilling to live according to the Lord's commandments. This is evident from the signification of "repenting," as being to live a different life; also from the signification of "their works," as being evils from falsities. For those who separate faith from works do evils from falsities, in that they say that as works are from man they are not good but are meritorious, and therefore must not be joined with faith, which is spiritual and justifying. For a man can do nothing that is good from a false principle; and where there is no good there is evil. It is otherwise when a man lives according to the Lord's commandments, which are, that evils must be refrained from and goods must be done. Therefore "they repented not of their works" signifies not to be willing to live according to the Lord's commandments.

(Continuation respecting the Sixth Commandment)

[2] That true conjugial love contains in itself so many ineffable delights that can neither be numbered nor described can be seen from the fact that this love is the fundamental love of all celestial and spiritual loves, since through that love man becomes love; for from it each of the marriage pair loves the other as good loves truth and truth loves good, thus representatively as the Lord loves heaven and the church. Such love can exist only through a marriage in which the man is truth and the wife is good. When a man through marriage has become such love he is also in love to the Lord and in love towards the neighbor, and thus in the love of all good and in the love of all truth. For from man as love there must proceed loves of every kind; therefore conjugial love is the fundamental love of all the loves of heaven. And as it is the fundamental love of all the loves of heaven it is also the fundamental of all the delights and joys of heaven, since every delight and joy is of love. From this it follows that heavenly joys, in their order and in their degrees, have their origins and their causes from conjugial love.

[3] From the felicities of marriages a conclusion may be drawn respecting the infelicities of adulteries, namely, that the love of adultery is the fundamental love of all infernal loves, which are in themselves not loves, but hatreds; consequently from the love of adultery hatreds of every kind gush forth, both against God and against the neighbor, and in general against every good and truth of heaven and the church; therefore to it all infelicities belong, for, as has been said before, from adulteries man becomes a form of hell, and from the love of adulteries he becomes an image of the devil. That from the marriages in which there is true conjugial love all delight and felicities increase even to the delights and felicities of the inmost heaven, and that all that is undelightful and unhappy in the marriages in which the love of adultery reigns increases in direfulness even to the lowest hell, can be seen in the work on Heaven and Hell 386).