Heaven
Paula Gooder
SPCK £9.99
(978-0-281-06234-8)
Church Times Bookshop £9

WITH endearing clarity, Paula Gooder blows away thick cobwebs from this shrouded subject, revealing the valuable jewels that lurk within.

Her starting-point is not “going to heaven (or hell)”, but heaven as the awesome dwelling of God. This rests on a full and valuable exegesis of the great biblical narratives about the vision of the throne of God, progressing through 2 Kings, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and eventually issuing in the description of the heavenly throne-room in Revela­tion.

The other denizens of heaven and their purposes are also de­scribed and distinguished — the members, functionaries, coun­sellors, and messengers of the heavenly court. A clear distinction is made between the biblical sug­gestions and the subsequent elaborations of apocalyptic litera­ture.

In a field where multiple inter­pretations abound, Dr Gooder distinguishes carefully between evidence and the various inter­pretations of it, alerting the reader to other views while gently opting for her own. She repeatedly maintains that she believes in angels, although one of the few frustrations of the book is that she does not go far enough in explaining what this means. In what sense are they bodily? Do they have personalities of their own in any intelligible sense?

Only after this discussion do we come to consider the state of our dear ones who have died. Here again, there is a full discussion of the biblical data on the develop-ment of ideas on life after death, its extent, its ambiguities, its imagery. This is crowned by an exegesis of the important passage of Daniel

12 against its background, and still more of 1 Corinthians 15. The change in Christian resurrection from “perishable” to “imperishable” is fascinatingly cashed to mean that instead of the bodily decay we know so well, the resurrection body will progress to ever more vibrant life. The notion of hell is also dis­cussed. Here perhaps the most im­portant finding is the minimal part hell plays in the biblical revela­tion.

A valuable final outcome of the discussion is that heaven is seen to be not simply “up there”, but interpenetrating the world. The idea of heaven “is the ultimate rebellion against the idea that this world is all that there is. Believing in heaven allows us to catch a glimpse not just of the world as it is, but of the world as it might be.” The book of Revelation depicts in heaven the same struggle between the forces of good and of evil as we ourselves experience.

This little book is a joy to read. Even the footnotes are courteous and informative. The presentation is sparkling and lucid. The reader is left in no doubt that the author is mistress of her whole subject, and yet can be relied on, in telling us as much as we can understand, to give a trustworthy assessment.

Fr Henry Wansbrough OSB is a monk of Ampleforth, emeritus Master of St Benet’s Hall, Oxford, and a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission.