Russell, professor emeritus at the University of California-Santa Barbara, first explored this fundamental Christian belief in A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence. Here he traces the evolution of the idea of heaven from the early church through the Middle Ages. In this formative stage of the faith, heaven simply meant “where God is,” and this summation remains the core meaning of the word. As Russell puts it, “To say that the Christian view of heaven is theocentric–centered on God–is an understatement…. Heaven is inseparable from God.” Thus, heaven cannot be reduced to what we usually assume it to be. It is not merely a celestial realm or a future era. Our common locators for heaven–such as up (above the earth) or ahead (in the afterlife)–also fall short. They mistakenly imply that heaven is determined by space and time. Worse still, they suggest that the qualitative difference made by God’s presence among us can be assessed in quantitative terms.
These misunderstandings made belief in heaven vulnerable to modern skepticism. Russell’s subtitle, How We Lost Heaven–and How We Can Regain It, reveals that the gradual erosion of belief is his greatest concern. He meticulously surveys skepticism from the early modern nominalism of William of Ockham to the postmodern deconstruction of Jacques Derrida. Between these philosophical bookends Russell considers everything from Marxist social theory and Freudian psychology to natural theology and the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch. In all of these diverse movements, he detects a single corrosive element that comes to define the modern project–the removal of God from the center of the cosmos. Once God is displaced, the world can be reconstituted in purely quantitative terms. Only physical objects and forces that can be objectively measured are deemed real. Since heaven does not meet this criterion, its reality is perpetually called into question, and its significance is relegated to the periphery of modern consciousness. Like a raisin under a car seat, paradise has been mislaid.
Yhank you so much!
I look forward to reading this latest book by my friend and medievalist colleague Jeff Russell. For those of you not familiar with his books, I recommend the four volumes of his history of Satan, and his previous book on heaven referenced in the review. Jeff is a first-rate scholar.
Never read any of his work. How does he compare to CS Lewis?
CharlesB: Jeff Russell is an intellectual historian. For example in the volume entitled Luciter: The Devel in the Middle Ages, he traces in depth the development of diabology in theology, art, literature and folklore, interweaving it with the problem of evil and theodicy. If there is a comparison, it might be in Lewis’ drawing deeply on literary traditions in the Christian West.