Word: christe
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...rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Peter Wehner, policy director for Jack Kemp's think tank, Empower America, decried the worldliness of Christians who feel they can serve both God and Mammon--resulting in too many people left in poverty. The Rev. Robert Sirico qualified Christ's admonition as being against only the "unjustly" rich, and accused Wehner of trying to win attention by "bashing rich Christians." As aspersions were cast and tax credits argued, heaven fell to the wayside...
...John expect his readers to accept his heavenly portrayal--and his subsequent spectacular descriptions of the Beast, Armageddon, the Last Judgment and Christ's final triumph--as the literal truth? Most scholars today regard his heaven, at least, as symbolic and mystical, its images painstakingly retrieved from the Old Testament and reorganized to frame an allegorical argument rather than an actual detailed reality of the next world. The same applies to hundreds of other heavenly visions generated by various holy men and women in the next two centuries that were eventually excluded from Scripture but some of which nonetheless exerted...
...centuries-long battle over the nature of human identity was waged in terms of whether the inhabitants of paradise would consist of body as well as soul. (The orthodox answer, confounding all heresies, remained yes.) If the virtuous soul departed the body at death and had to wait until Christ's Second Coming to reunite with it at the Resurrection, what did it do in the meantime? (A medieval Pope eventually ruled that it lived in heaven in an interim state of blessedness but eagerly anticipated a bodily reunion. That doesn't even address the issue of purgatory.) Exactly where...
...love, expanded St. Augustine's idea of the Beatific Vision, the saints' rapturous and direct communion with God. The Renaissance Catholic heaven more resembled an ongoing human-to-human celebration presided over by the Virgin Mary. But Protestant reformers of the 1500s reinstated a vision severely centered on Christ and his Last Judgment. This became the dominant understanding in America from its Puritan period through its first century, despite some founding fathers' attraction to the ideas of the Enlightenment...
...working them out once they got there. The happiest prospect in this heaven was a slightly more idealized (and eternal) version of that already sugar-coated icon, the Victorian family. The model finessed the doubts about God that were seeping into the cultural mainstream by relegating God and even Christ into a nearly invisible role in the background. But it did so at a price. Without a compelling spiritual center, the vision of the future was hostage to the endurance of the society it mirrored...