Further:

I am a South Sydney Rabbitoh supporter. I attend a few games a year, yes even when they are at the bottom of the NRL ladder. When present, I share a common goal and belief in my team with the bloke next to me. While I may have a small red and green rabbit emblem on my black jacket, my neighbour is fully dressed in beanie, scarf, footy jumper and flag, dripping red and green. We share the same joy in the scoring of a Rabbitoh try. When the opposition scores and it is a good piece of football, I applaud it, whilst my brother in colours boos and curses the ref. One team, one goal, same story, different eyes to see, different ways to respond.

Is heaven real? In as much as the Souths story will incorporate another premiership in 2008, hopefully yes.

Is heaven real? In as much my story can incorporate the attainment of a fuller loving humanity that would not have been gained but for my encounter in the Scriptures with the Risen Lord, certainly yes. But I do not know what happens beyond the grave. If not, then the God of Promises works only in the here and now of human evolution. Who am I to question? But I do like surprises.

BTW: Keiran/Tao. The Enlightenment came centuries after the printing press. Its more immediate effect was on the expanded literacy of the hoi poloi in reading the Bible with it being printed in the vernacular. And yes Tao the application of ClassicGreek thought to the Christian "sacred science" of theology through St Thomas Aquinas ( nominated as the first Whig by Hayek) did indeed lay the foundations of freedom from which the Enlightenment shone its once promising light. That's exactly the point Peter Sellick and others have endeavoured to hammer home. Christian thought and practice are our roots, and in cutting itself from them secular humanism has delivered a dried and withered outcome.

Now its time to hit the golf course which is usually a hell experience.

tao, I think you are way off the mark if you are seriously thinking about complaining to Sell's employer about his work in this area. The reference to his employment is in a footnote following the article, it's not used in the article anywhere to justify his position. It's my understanding that those kinds of footnotes are used fairly regularly on OLO. I can see a case for background info and a case against but I don't see that Sell's has tried to present his views as being the Universities view.

He is an individual with an interest in theology who happens to work at a University. No need for censure or compaint for that, argue the point with Sell's here and be glad that he is exposing aspects of christain theology that we will never hear from our resident fundies. Next time some unsavory type threatens you with eternal hellfire for not following their particular brand of belief you are better armed to fight them on their own turf.

R0bert

Sells, your surprise at the lack of sermons on heaven is unnecessary. As soon as the concept of heaven gets beyond the feeling that it is a nice place where what is left of self exists in eternal harmony with God and fellow wraiths, you and others on this thread are left speechless. All your sermonisers cannot describe, in ordinary English, any aspect of the reality of heaven. If they try, then the simple and vast contradictions in regarding it as having any reality, in the understandable meaning of the word, become obvious.

Look at the words of hymns and prayers, they are full of praise and thanks which stimulate the emotions but nothing else. I have invited Boxgum (one of the more articulate bloggers) to put his/her understanding of heaven
into words (his/her sermon if you like) and what do we get: “ the essential beauty and awe of the God relationship”. Is that enough to argue for the reality of heaven?

The ancients had a definite view of heaven. It was up there above the sky. They drew pretty illustrations of it with people disposed in it. The telescope destroyed that image so the possibility of seeing it in a place went. It is now in that vast nowhere so all that remains is a memory of stories from humanity's childhood.

John Warren,

”The ancients had a definite view of heaven. It was up there above the sky.”

First of all we need to define what is meant by “ancient”. I assume here the period between c. 4,000 BCE and 476 CE (The Fall of the Western Roman Empire).
As mentioned in an earlier post there exited a Garden Culture transition stage in the late Neolithic period. Also, as previously mentioned, the primitives before the foundation of the first civilization (Sumer) believed in immortality and that “evil” and omens intervened to truncate its “good” course. Heaven did no exist as we see it your description. The Sky tends to be related to creation myths.

The ancients (Quigley: 1961): “During the period 600-400 BC in the Greek speaking world, Ionian scientists applied the rules of hypothesis by assuming the heavens were made of the same substance and obeyed the laws and that man was a part of nature”. “The enemies of science” disagreed with the Ionians asserting that Earth and Heaven were of a different substance. Earth had four elements (earth, wind, air, fire) and was made of a different fifth substance, “quintessence”. Moreover, it was said, objects on Earth moved in straight lines and in heaven in “perfect” circles, which the planetary certainly does not… just representative of the same.

--contunued--

Tao.
All the great universities of the world have schools or faculties of theology, even some of our Australian universities do. Those who do not, like UWA are unfortunate because their students, especially those studying the humanities, remain ignorant of the great traditions of thought that have formed Western civilization. The theological sciences should be an integral part of everyone’s education. By the way, I submitted my Online Opinion articles, alongside my scientific publications to the university’s review of academic publications.

I was reminded about how interesting the subject of heaven was by this morning’s reading from the Ephesians:

(Eph 6:12 NRSV) For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

So heaven is not only the abode of God, but it is also where the forces of evil dwell. The forces and authorities referred to are many in our day. We could include nationalism, rampant capitalism, the foolishness of the radical biologists like Dennet and Dawkins, Marxism, religion, political correctness, managerialism. All of these obscure the face of humanity as being made in the image of God.

My detractors on this page may protest at the ancient language of theology and they refuse to look through that to the thing it indicates. The cosmic powers of this present darkness are all around us. We do not have to believe in spooks to see that they are real. The language of heaven is an ancient way of talking about them and a potent way.

--continued--

Where did the Habiru God live? Yahveh was originally a minor deity of the Canaanite pantheon whom the Habiru worshiped. He lived on a mountain. El was the Creator of the World. El was said to have led a Council of the Gods, but, we, –to the best my knowledge are knowledge not told where the Council met; Earth, heaven, some realm of the gods? If memory server, Yahveh lived in a volcano. The Hebrews from the time of Moses started to worship Him exclusively.

Please notice the term “Him”. Around this time there was a shift from “fertility” to “vitality” in relation to spirituality.

In heaven, the elevation of Mary and the intercession of the saints became a compromise to the Roman pantheon.


Tao,

Thank you for your post.

My point about 4,000 BCE is that the ancient (not primitive) religionism with a priesthood seems to have started around the time of the beginning of the Sumerian civilization. Creationists in back tracking genealogies approximate this date. Good date, wrong event. There were garden cultures lasting 8,000 to 12,000 years before this time, preceded by earlier Neolithic peoples. Otherwise put, the Old Testament takes us back to roughly the time of the first city states, priesthoods and the invention of hand writing not the Creation (an evolutionary process). Humanity depending on the stage of development and in response to ecologies transforms its religious expressions.

“With regard to your earlier comments about Marx not taking into account a “purchasing class” - Marxism takes as its basis for class analysis, peoples’ relationship to the means of production.” I would not dispute these matters. Only the capitalism of Dickens is different to today’s. Moreover, capital is deplored to protect/build markets, e.g., the Marshall Plan and the response to 1997 Asia Cash. -- I am not near being a Marxist.

Boxgum,

Regarding the ritual of the nine absolutions, I confess my source is was David Jensen, as journalist in, “Shoes of a Fisherman” ! Point remains. Just the same, I have seen icon worship firsthand in Russia.

Thanks for your reply.