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Heaven, Then and Now

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

John McDade SJ
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I remember, as a small boy, telling my parents that before 1 was bom, I had been in heaven and had chosen them to be my parents. My father laughed heartily at this. In retrospect, it is clear that Platonism was not strong in my family, but it was inevitable that when later I came to do a doctorate I did it on pre-existence language in Christology because Christ had been there too and we had discussed my parentage, at some length, I remember. I have no idea where my childish fantasy came from: it may be a common idea among religious children to think that they were somewhere before they are here and that they are going somewhere after they have been here.

Information

Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 83 , Issue 971 , January 2002, pp. 42 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

Footnotes

1 Russell, J.B., A History of Heaven, (Princeton University Press, 1997), 187.

2 Bynum, Caroline Walker, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity 200–1336 (Columbia University Press, 1995), 238. I am indebted throughout this paper to Bynum's superb study.

3 Origen, Fragment on Psalm 1. 5, in Methodius, De resurrectione, bk 1, chaps 22–3; quoted in Bynum, 66.

4 I refer here to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Retreat notes of 1881: ‘Why did the Son of God go forth from the Father not only in the eternal and intrinsic procession of the Trinity but also by an extrinsic and less than eternal, let us say aeonian one? To give God glory and that by sacrifice, sacrifice offered in the barren wilderness outside of God, as the children of Israel were led into the wilderness to offer sacrifice. This sacrifice and this outward procession is a consequence and shadow of the procession of the Trinity, from which mystery sacrifice takes its rise,’ Phillips, C. (ed.), The Oxford Authors: Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford University Press, 1986), 288–9.

5 Bynum, 329, 334.

6 335.

7 336.