One of the key things that we have tended to misunderstand in the church is the relationship between heaven and earth. In particular, we have always located heaven as a place far away, only accessible through divine intervention, or as a place we arrive at after we die, or worse, the place that our soul goes to – our final destination.
As Moltmann makes clear in my post below (Why we no longer have hope for this world) this has been a reduction and a distortion of the Christian message. Orthodox theology has always regarded salvation as the uniting of heaven and earth – of heaven coming to earth and of a perfected earthly existence (hence the New Jerusalem imagery in Revelation).
Much of the confusion regarding our salvation has been due to our loss of the Jewish idea of heaven and our replacing it with a more Greek (some would say Platonic) view of heaven. In our view, Heaven is a immaterial dimension inaccessible to the material person, where God dwells in perfection and where souls will go to be with God in a disembodied bliss. The Jewish idea of heaven is very different. For the Jewish mind, heaven is all around us. The heavenly realm is a place where God rules, and which is a reality which the earthly (I use this word to differentiate our realm from the heavenly) realm is connected to and influenced by. It is a parallel existence where God’s will is done – it is part of the spiritual realm. Moltmann has some insightful and challenging things to say about Heaven and Earth:
“The dual world described in the words ‘heaven and earth’ is the goodly form of God’s creation; it is not a conflicting and divided world… ‘Heaven’ is the word used to describe the sphere of God’s creative potentialities and energies … ‘The earth’ is the term we use for the sphere of created reality and the possibilities inherent in that reality. … But the distinction also leads to an understanding of thr continual communication between God’s creative potentialities towards the world, and the worldly potentials themselves; for the worldly potentials are made possible by the divine ones.
The continual making-possibilities-possible keeps the world in existence and its life systems alive; for it keeps the future open for all open systems, and opens that future anew. To put it in theological terms, creation lives from the continual inflow of the energies of the Spirit of God. To put it symbolically: because heaven is open, and as long as it is open, the world has a future.” (God in Creation, 182.)
What Moltmann makes clear here is that Heaven and Earth are not separate, but Heaven is the place where the newness and potentials of God’s intention for creation exist, and from there, they can inform and shape the realm of the earth. This is called God’s Kingdom breaking in. One day, when his will is done on earth as it is in heaven, then his kingdom will have fully come. This is what Jacob saw when he dreamed of the ladder between heaven and earth – a free interchange between this world and the world where God’s will rules perfectly. It may not be too great a stretch to say that Jacob’s ladder was a type of Christ. For in Christ, heaven and earth are united, and through him they will be finally and completely united. But this surely must be the topic of another post – perhaps on Deification.
