Soul Invictus

I'm not sure the history behind people believing that heaven is "up" and somewhere outside of the planet Earth. Does anyone know where this common belief originated from?

In Luke 17:20-21, Jesus is to have said:

20 And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation:

21 Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

This passage seems to clearly state that the kingdom of god, (which I assume is heaven), is not a place as defined as having a physical location. It seems pretty unambiguous in stating that the kingdom of god is a mindset - pick a phrase...it's in your heart, in you, etc.

However in John 14:1-3, he is to have said:

1 Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.

2 In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.

Now this phrase doesn't state that this prepared place is the kingdom of god, however, unless the kingdom of god and this prepared place are two different things, this phrase would contradict the former statements made.

Does anyone care to offer any insights on these passages? Anything on quite possibly where this prepared place is, or why people believe where they think it is?

robto

First of all, remember that the distinction between "heaven" and "sky" that we have in English didn't exist in Hebrew or Greek. Do I need to explain why the sky is up? El (like Baal and other Canaanite deities) was a sky god.

Now, the "kingdom of God" (aka "kingdom of heaven") was an ambiguous concept in early Christianity. For some, the KOG was an internal state - heaven on earth, as it were. For others, it was the kingdom that God was going to set up when his Messiah came and Israel was restored to its prominent place among the nations. You see both viewpoints in the NT. (Check out the Gospel of Thomas, too, which comes down heavily on the "within you" side.)

What you see in the NT is religious dogma in the process of becoming. Don't expect consistency. There was not yet any authority that could decide these matters for the church, so people brought their own concepts from Judaism or Greek religion, and eventually it was all melted down into the Christian system.

Clivedurdle

The advantages of a good pentecostal upbringing!

Yup, Immanuel - God with us, kingdom of heaven is within you, whited sepulchres, hippocrites, left hand right hand, mary and martha ....

Interestingly the pentes could not leave the heretical baggage of all the older denominations who made heaven and hell (and God and Jesus) real and got trapped by the fundamentals.

Still the humanist psychologists managed it!

We create heaven and hell ourselves, no one else. It is an existential choice which way we go - always look on the bright side - or we're doomed!

CreamFilledGiraffe

Genesis?

xxx

Just guessing here, up was the only direction left, down is the ground and all compass directions can be accessed by humans, either on foot or on boat.

GenesisNemesis

Heaven is the sky.

:rolling: The Christians!!! THE CHRISTIANS!!! :rolling:

One question:

Isaiah 22:18 He will surely violently turn and toss thee like a ball into a large country: there shalt thou die, and there the chariots of thy glory shall be the shame of thy lord's house.

Isaiah 40:22 It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:

Now, if the ancients knew the very concept of a "ball" as shown in Isaiah 22:18, why did they say "the circle of the Earth" in Isaiah 40:22? The verses aren't really even that far away!!

Luke 4:5 And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.

Flat Earth, much?

I think you see my point. If the ancients knew that the Earth was round, and the Bible was the source of that Knowledge, then why wasn't there a scientific revolution in the Middle East?

spin

Your thought about this doesn't seem to relate to the verse in its context, the ball is what is made of the person.

I think you don't get the idea of the 40:22 idea of the circle of the earth, but your reference to Lk should help you understand that the circle was flat. The idea is to go up to the top of a high enough mountain and you can see all the world. However, experience says from the top of a high mountain you can look in every direction, 360 degrees, as though the world to be seen were a flat circle.

Returning to Isa 40:22, the heavens are "stretched out", ie appear to the writer as a flat material (a slightly different image from the Genesis firmament, a flat beaten metal like surface, though conveying the flat notion just the same), "as a curtain", again a basically two dimensionally formed heavens, which are "spread out like a tent to dwell (in)", again the tent being a two dimensional image and the preposition "in" is not in Hebrew. The tent was just a surface stretched over poles to protect from the sun, so "under" would be a better preposition to give the reality of the idea. The heavens are a flat area stretched out like a tent above a flat earth.

The Hebrews didn't know it was round. A few Greeks did, but they weren't convincing to a wider population.


spin

Eldarion Lathria

China, of course. The Celestial Empire ruled by the Son of Heaven.

Eldarion Lathria

Chris Weimer

The Roman idiom was "orbis terrarum". The earth is not a circle, but an orb.

EarlOfLade

Well, some claim that the earth is hollow and that the sun is inside this hollow and is only shining on one side, hence why it is dark at night.

Religious people can make up whatever they want and think it is real. Talk about denial of reality.