Difference Heaven Makes: Rehearing the Gospel As News

Abstract

The premise addressed in the reflections of these pages is that refer-ences to heaven in the Bible have more present day significance than is routinely associated with the word today. Navigating the range of this current significance to its contextual source presents a fascinating task. No subject more than this news of “heaven” so resists attempts by definers of the modern mind to foreclose consideration of what living in the real world involves. How this hearing of “a species beyond,” in the words of the poet Emily Dickinson, both “beckons and baffles” reopens one of the most important theological legacies of the past century and respectfully asks of it, “So what?”