Reading Laeth's latest aphorisms, he reminded me of a 2019 post from Wm Jas Tychonievich about whether or not the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith was, in principle, correct to posit an actual planet (assumed to be orbiting a star that Mormons term Kolob) as the place of God's (usual) residence; thus the physical, material location of Heaven.
I made a comment at WmJas at the time; and find I have further notions now that I have thought further about heaven in relation to entropy, creation, and love:
I mean that I now understand resurrected (i.e. incarnate, physical, material) eternal life to be possible in a situation where all the Beings have committed eternally to be wholly motivated by love.
It is this living from love that "abolishes entropy" (to express it as a double-negative!) - or, differently expressed; enables all of resurrected creation to be eternal, eternally developing, eternally living.
Heaven happened when this became possible (during Jesus's ministry, I assume); and began to be populated when humans (and other Beings) made the choice and eternal commitment to love, and began to be resurrected.
Thinking about the possibility of something like the planet of Kolob, and whether it would be discoverable as a place in this universe - somewhere that might theoretically be travelable-to; I realized that it seems relevant that resurrected Human Beings are (apparently) to be able to visit and function on this earth and in mortal affairs - e.g. some of the Beings people call Angels are resurrected humans.
This would mean that eternal Human Beings can exist on earth, and in an environment where nearly everything else (or, indeed everything else) is mortal and subject to entropy, decay, death.
And it seems that Angels are not usually recognized as such; and indeed (at least in the modern West) Angels are regarded as impossible nonsense.
My notion is that even if mortal Human Beings were capable of travelling to a Heaven such as the planet of Kolob is supposed to be, and even if these people were allowed to "enter into" this Heaven (e.g. to investigate and study Kolob) -- then it is quite possible that these mortal Human Beings would not recognize or realise that they were in the place of Heaven.
It is, in deed, easy to imagine that modern Western Men would even deny vehemently that Heaven was Heaven if told the fact, even if these people actually were living "in" Heaven! (i.e. were present as mortal-incarnates in the situation of Heaven, but were not resurrected-incarnates)
This self-blinding to Heaven is, after all, no different from our mainstream and official on-principle/by-assumption/ and absolute denial of even the possibility of paranormal, supernatural, spiritual, and/or divine phenomena.
As Tolkien showed in literary form: evil cannot comprehend good; likewise those who reject and are unfit-for Heaven, cannot even perceive Heaven.
Note: I should be clear that Kolob does Not play an active role in my own theological metaphysics - indeed I have not even considered the matter for some years. But I don't see why Heaven, or God the Father's dwelling place - should be one particular planet, or The reason I write here is that those who reflexively reject the idea as absurd, insane, or stupid - could probably benefit from thinking more deeply about their reasons for doing so.
2 comments:
That is a good point that if people were in paradise, they may not recognize it. I had not made the connection before, but I realize it is a theme in more than one of C.S. Lewis's book (The Great Divorce, The Magician's Nephew, Out of the Silent Planet, and The Last Battle).
I do not consider the idea of Heaven being a planet inherently ridiculous but on the other hand, people in the past thought that Heaven was in the sky or that there was an earthly paradise in some far off land. These are natural and common-sensical beliefs, given what people knew at the time, so there is no reason to disparage them, but at the same time, it didn't turn out to be the case.
I think it also relates to questions like what is matter and what is spirit? At different times, people have had different answers. Some have viewed spirit as a kind of etherealized matter or a higher, more real, kind of matter. Some have described spirit abstractly in terms of stuff with properties of matter subtracted. Hunter-gatherers have had the concept of spirit beings, but I am not sure how they contrasted them with ordinary creatures.
So no one knows exactly what matter and spirit is, but there is a difference between abstraction as abstracting properties from what we are familiar with versus abstraction as an attempted description of something whose specific properties are largely unknown.
There is just too much that is unknown to say exactly how Heaven relates to Earth. But it is okay because, just as people still can understand the concept of spirit without precisely describing its properties, people can understand the basic idea of Heaven without needing to know many of the specifics.
@NLR - Good points. I had not mentally cross-referenced these CSL aspects with the present post - despite that the dwarfs in Last Battle had a big impact on my conversion: in an "I was that dwarf" sort of way.
As for the nature of matter and spirit - I think the point which only Mormon theologians (that rarest of breeds!) seem to have grasped among Christians, is that the whole narrative of Jesus Christ points to the superiority of incarnation, and implies a linear development from spirit to matter.
It's not that these need to be regarded as qualitatively distinct, indeed they are not; but that spirit comes before the body - and with resurrection, the body becomes permanent.
Incarnation therefore (it seems to me) ought to be seen as the ultimate.
This is why Mormon doctrine has it that God the Father (and Heavenly Mother) is also embodied.
I am not sure about that - because it seems to me that God the primary creator may be a spirit and has remained a spirit; which was why the incarnation of Jesus was necessary.
And if so this probably has further implications - which perhaps are reflected in the nature and quality of our mortal life relationship with God the creator, as contrasted with our relationship with the resurrected and ascended Jesus (although, of course, we might also mistake one for the other).
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