Heaven is distinctive to Christianity, because Heaven is based upon love, and love requires other person's and beings; love is mutual, dynamic, open-ended, potentially endless...
Whereas, Paradise is self-gratification, that is a world devoted to My gratification.
Paradise excludes Heaven, if Heaven contains persons, because persons are free agents and never can be dedicated to 'My' self-gratification - they have real independence of being.
Heaven is a post-mortal place and state of persons and beings who have aligned with the creator and creation, by affiliation with Jesus Christ and with those who have made this affiliation ( "Christians").
Paradise has one real person only, everything else being under that person's ultimate control.
Heaven is a family of friends and relations, Paradise a tyranny of one Master and many slaves.
That's an interesting distinction.
ReplyDeleteI would have thought that the difference would be more that one requires a...well, a higher perspective, spiritually. Paradise can reflect love, but of an essentially Earthly form. The love which constitutes Heaven is essentially divine, and while it does not necessarily exclude mortal feelings it cannot be fully enjoyed through them.
But it is true that the original idea of Paradise puts man as the Creator, not the created.
The Christian idea of God as our Father means that in the Christian Heaven saints can be both created and themselves creative, since while the relationship of child to parent is not commutative it is essentially kindred. Thus the idea of Heaven contains the idea of Paradise. I think that the idea of Paradise must originally have been intended in the context of Heaven as well. That is, the position of 'creator' of one's own Paradise was understood to have been conferred by a higher being.
My own relationship to Paradise is as a conservator, not a creator. So perhaps I cannot understand the essential difference in flavor involved between Heaven and Paradise as they appear to others.