Difference Heaven Makes

By focusing upon a rehearing of the Gospel news of heaven today, the author invites readers to exercise a post-modern permission to listen to this testimony without either the usual modernist earplugs or an uncritical post-modern make believe. Without attempting to retrace the history of images and interpretations of heaven, Morse seeks rather to draw upon this background to get to the heart of the issue of modern eschatological and apocalyptic discussion by proposing in the foreground a "thought experiment". If we hear of heaven as that which is now at hand and coming to pass, in contrast to what Paul calls "the form of this world that is passing away," how significant would the consequences be? Morse proceeds to conduct such a retrial of the news of heaven as presence, citizenship, kingdom, creation, and proximity by testing its present day credibility with respect to such topics as the theology of heaven, the reality of heaven, the ethics of heaven, and the hope of heaven.

'The church hears every week the references to heaven that abound in scripture and in Christian prayers and confessions. Members of the church also hear and employ in their own conversation references to heaven that are fundamentally at home in our general culture. How are we to relate to one another these two sets of references with their significant differences? Consider, for example, the matter of movement. Leaving behind infantile, otherworldly visions of golden streets and spacious mansions in the sky, are we still to focus our attention on our own journey, thinking however metaphorically of heaven as the better place "to which we hope to go "when we die? Or in the context of God's own good news, do we confess a radically different line of movement? When we confidently pray, "Thy kingdom come, "do we confess that in God's gracious initiative heaven is "now coming toward us", being the state of affairs that is "at hand" in the sense of its taking shape among us now as the determining constituent of the real world? And does it follow that instead of having as its fundamental opposite a hell that is the dreaded hereafter, heaven is moving toward us as the dynamic opposite of " the form of this world that is even now passing away"(1 Cor 7:31)? Heard as gospel news, is heaven that which is now coming to pass, in contrast to that which is passing away? And is it in this moving contrast that we see and deal with the world as it really is, the world in which Paul could say, "The Lord is at hand" (Phil 4.5)? All of these questions are faithfully and profoundly analyzed by Morse as, speaking of heaven Biblically, he notes that "we are called to be "on" hand for that which is "at" hand but not "in" hand, an unprecedented glory of not being left orphans but of being loved in a community of new creation beyond all that we can ask or imagine.' - J. Louis Martyn, Union Theological Seminary, New York, NY, USA. --Sanford Lakoff

Christopher Morse holds the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair in Theology and Ethics at Union Seminary, New York, and is the author of The Logic of Promise in Moltmann's Theology.