Measuring the Pearly Gates
Dennis O'Brien December 12, 2006 - 7:40am
Paradise Mislaid
How We Lost Heaven—and How We Can Regain It
Jeffrey Burton Russell
Oxford University Press, $28, 224 pp.
There was a time when heaven was in heaven. But then something happened to heaven. As long as the physical universe had some sense of “up” one could locate heaven above. “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev 21:2). With the rise of modern science, the tidy world picture of a centered earth and a sphere of stars on the circumference dissolved. Space just went on and on infinitely so that there was no center, no up and no down...
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