Heaven

...Amen...

...For these writers and their audience, "Once families existed in heaven, home, schools, pets, and suburbs quickly followed...

...Paul's theology and the reticence of official doctrine notwithstanding, people will have answers to their questions, and two millennia of Christian culture high and low, of art, poetry, and literature, of sermons and theology testify to the creative impact of this insistence...

...On their account, Thomas's theocentrism stands in line with that of Jesus and the New Testament as well as the early writings of St...

...Some of his correspondents were wondering what it is like to be raised from the dead and what sort of bodies they could expect to have...

...Sunday after Sunday Christian assemblies profess belief in "the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come...

...Historically this judgment may be (more/or less) adequate, but religiously, is not such an opposition simply a mistake...

...This does not, in the end, deprive their work of religious significance...

...Insightful and entertaining as Cultural history, this chronicle of heaven's images serves as well to animate the perennially humane questions of what we dare hope for and in what our wholeness finally consists.inally consists...

...What goes on in heaven, anyway...

...McDannell and Lang find similar projections in the Middle Ages...

...Historians deal in probabilities, and the authors admit openly the conjectural and speculative character of the positions on heaven their opening chapters ascribe to Jesus, Paul, and their Jewish contemporaries...

...Furthermore, if their topic is religious, their approach as historians of society and culture is resolutely secular...

...Their handsome volume also invites conversation...

...Announced by Emanuel Swedenborg in the eighteenth century and surviving today most notably among the Mormons, this modern heaven centers on the human: wholly continuous with this life and thoroughly material, it finds its bliss in the edifying activities with which the deceased work at their own betterment while enjoying the company of their peers...

...His initial response is the sort that, at a public lecture or in a classroom, guarantees that no further question will pass the audience's lips...

...The sublimity of St...

...More broadly, a 1982 Gallup poll found that 71 percent of the American population thinks there is a heaven where the good receive an eternal reward...

...Nor does Christian hope require pictures...

...Paul took a dim view of the impulse to speculate about the afterlife...

...15:36...

...Paul, the present experience of God's Spirit is sufficient pledge that one will share in what God did for Jesus by raising him from the dead...

...At their hands it exercised a dual social role: immortalizing Victorian disdain for idleness, it also served to secure the Victorian home from the disturbing influence of socialists, feminists, or labor reformers...

...On further matters, however, vagueness reigns...

...Augustine, medieval mystics, Protestant reformers, and contemporary theology...

...Monasteries, for example, fostered an agrarian lifestyle, while monastic circles culled from the Book of Genesis an image of heaven as a renewed garden of paradise where naked saints found sober refreshment in nature's welcoming ambience...

...perfect contemplation brought all other activity to a halt, and any pleasure in the company of one's fellow saints was secondary and, in the last analysis, superfluous...

...William P. Loewe Queen Victoria left instructions that she was to be buried wearing her wedding veil...

...Truncated images of human wholeness become banal or repugnant, and in either case they serve, sooner or later, to stifle the hope that renders living meaningful...

...Theologians like Thomas Aquinas entertained more austere notions...

...What is the eternal reward...

...Originating among a literary elite, the modern heaven was developed and carried beyond the clerical establishment by women fiction writers of the nineteenth century...

...Its counterpoint, an anthropocentric version of heaven, emerges in a second century writer like Irenaeus, the later Augustine, various medieval texts, the Renaissance, and of course the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...

...Their telling of that story shows why Christian images of heaven, precisely in their shifting and evolving variety, constitute a historian's delight...

...Heaven: A History offers first of all the pleasure of the well-wrought tale McDannell and Lang have forged from a wealth of sources, a tale spanning the centuries from ancient Judaism to the present and enhanced by more than sixty illustrations...

...In this she was a docile follower of her chaplain, Charles Kingsley, whose correspondence, diaries, and sketches leave no doubt that conjugal embraces figured large in his anticipations of eternal bliss...

...The resulting images of heaven proliferate through the centuries and vary wildly among themselves...

...Indeed, St...

...Victoria and her chaplain, it turns out, represent one aspect of a distinctly modern version of heaven to which Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang devote almost half their book...

...Resurrection is God's deed, beyond space and time, on the far side of death...

...McDannell and Lang identify an opposition between theocentric and anthropocentric values as the key to their history of images of the afterlife...

...To questions like these neither the liturgical creed, which dates back to the fourth century, nor official church teaching responds with much detail...

...What do saints do with themselves...

...Hence it is literally unimaginable, just not the sort of thing you can picture...

...Whatever their trustworthiness as guides to the beyond, in one respect these images cannot fail: they provide first-hand data on the values and desires which structure the worlds of those whose hopes they express...

...You fool," he roars (I Cor...

...The newly founded orders of friars, however, Dominicans and Franciscans, throve on urban living, and the heaven they preached and painted celebrated the cultured life of a new Jerusalem in which rich attire symbolized heavenly rank...

...He knew, after all, that pure love conquers death, from which it seemed obvious to him that heaven must allow room for the chaste intercourse of married lovers...

...For this reason, as authors McDannell and Lang rightly assert, the story of heaven is at the same time the story of Western culture...

...With these views Thomas represents the polar opposite of the modern version of heaven, one side of a tension which McDannell and Lang find running through the full span of their history...

...For St...

...For Thomas heaven's joy derived from the knowledge of God and only that...