The Difference Heaven Makes

'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