Introduction

Summary

Questions of immanence and transcendence continue to occupy theologians, the concept of apocalyptic with its transcendent eschatology has been to the fore in Biblical studies and there has been a resurgence of quests for experience of transcendence in contemporary culture. It is not surprising that in this intellectual climate the tension between this-worldliness and other-worldliness should have remained a crucial problem for the Christian life-style. Interest in such broad contemporary issues provided the original context and the initial impulse for a study which might at first sight appear to be a rather obscure angle of approach to Pauline theology.

Before embarking on a consideration of the function of heaven in Paul's thought it is worth briefly placing this consideration in some relation to aspects of the thinking of recent decades about the heavenly dimension or transcendence. If there is an average reaction to the concept of heaven, perhaps it is similar to the anguished but naive doubts of the squadron chaplain in Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

Did it indeed seem probable … that the answers to the riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all his infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven? Where the devil was heaven? Was it up? Down? There was no up or down in a finite but expanding universe in which even the vast, burning, dazzling, majestic sun was in a state of progressive decay that would eventually destroy the earth too.