刚刚读完N.T. WRIGHT所著SIMPLY CHRISTIAN （why christianity makes sense), 很有收获。基督徒只读圣经可能不够，要读一些有名的著作，帮助自己理解。这里我摘了一部分打出来，和大家分享。
1 Where is God, where is Heaven?
To borrow an image from another part of the Christian story, those who come with arguments to prove(or perhaps to disprove)the existence of God are always in danger of the kind of surprise received by the women who went to Jesus’s tomb on Easter morning. They had gone to do what was appropriate for a dead friend, leader, and would-be Messiah. But he was up (so to speak) before them. Their actions were indeed appropriate, granted where they were starting from, but his resurrection put everything into a new light. We shall explore that light in due course, since it illuminates not only the question about Jesus but (again like the sun)everything else as well. The point at present is that, since God(if he exists) is not an object within our world, or even an idea within our intellectual world, we can probe towards the center of the maze as much as we like but we shall never reach that center by our own efforts.
But suppose that God, if there is a God, were to come bursting out of the center of the maze on his own initiative? That, after all, is what the great monotheistic traditions have said. To get our minds around that possibility we shall have to take a step sideways and consider more carefully what we are talking about. If God isn’t up in the sky, where is he?
“God is in heaven”, says one of the more hard-nosed biblical writers, “and you are upon earth; so let your words be few” (Ecclesiastes 5:2).That comes as a warning to those of us who write and speak for a living, but it highlights what the biblical traditions always insist upon: that if we are to think of God “living” anywhere, that place is known as “heaven”
Two misunderstandings need clearing up at once. First, despite what some later theologians seem to have imagined, the ancient biblical writers did not suppose that, had they been able to travel in space, they would have come sooner or later to the place where God lived. Granted, the world “heaven” in Hebrew and Greek can mean, effectively, “the sky”; but the biblical writers move more effortlessly than most modern readers between that meaning (a location within the world of space, time and matter) and the regular meaning of “God’s dwelling place” –that is , a different sort of “location” altogether. (This is not to be confused with the question of “literal” and “metaphorical” meanings, which is discussed in Chapter 14.) Heaven in this latter, very common biblical sense is God’s space – time universe. The question is then whether God’s space and our space intersect; and if so how, when and where.
The second misunderstanding comes about because the word “heaven” is regularly used, misleadingly but very frequently, to mean “the place where God’s people will be with him, in blissful happiness, after they die.” It has thus come to be thought of as a destination, a final resting place for the souls of the blessed; and, as such, it has regularly been paired with its assumed opposite, ”hell.” But “heaven” has this meaning, not because, in the earliest Christian traditions, it was the final destination of the redeemed, but because the word offers a way of talking about where God always is, so that the promise held out in the phrase “going to heaven” is more or less exactly “going to be with God in the place where he’s been all along” Thus “heaven” is not just a future reality, but a present one. And we then meet the same question as before, from a different angle: How does this “place”, this “location” (I use quote marks because I am not referring to a place or location within our world of space, time and matter) interact with our world? In deed does it do so at all?
In the bible, our world is called “the earth” Just as “heaven” can refer to the sky, but very commonly refers to God’s dimension of reality as opposed to ours, so the word “earth” can refer to the actual soil beneath our feet, but also regularly refers to our space, our dimension of reality, as opposed to God’s. “The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth he has given to human beings (Psalm 115:16)”. Thus, though the Bible can speak of places “under the earth” in addition to heaven and earth themselves, the normal pairing is the one we find in the first line of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
Getting this straight provides the setting in which we can address the underlying question directly. How do heaven and earth, God’s space and our space, relate to one another?
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Option 3 is what we find within classic Judaism and Christianity. Heaven and earth are not coterminous (相连的), nor are they separated by a great gulf. Instead, they overlap and interlock in a number of different ways. This can seem initially confusing, after the clean either/or of pantheism泛神论 and Deism自然神论; but this is the kind of confusion we should welcome. It embraces the complexity which we ought to expect if human life is in fact as intricate错综复杂的and many-sided as we have seen in the earlier chapters. It is easy to think you have mastered Shakespeare’s plays if all you have on the shelf is the comedies. When someone brings you all the other plays as well – the tragedies and the history plays, plus a volume or two of the great man’s poetry for good measure – you will complain that things are now getting confused and highly complex. But you are actually closer to the understanding Shakespeare, not further away.
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The old testament insists that God belongs in heaven and we on earth. Yet it shows over and over again that the two spheres do indeed overlap, so that God makes his presence known, seen, and heard with the sphere of earth.
This strange presence is the subplot of many of the early stories. Abranham keeps meeting God. Jacob sees a ladder between heaven and earth, with angels going to and fro. Moses discovers that he’s standing on holy ground – a place, in other words, where (for the moment at least) heaven and earth interact – as he watches the burning bush. Then when Moses leads the Israelites out of
The main focus of ancient Israelite belief in the overlap of heaven and earth was the
From that moment on, The
to be continued
