The word paradise is one which is so familiar to most of us that its utterance evokes an immediate mental image of a beautiful garden where the righteous dwell for eternity. This image, while finding its roots in the biblical tradition, is influenced as much by Dante, Milton and many Christian paintings as it is by biblical traditions. In fact, it is hard to see the word paradise without bringing to mind those famous medieval and renaissance paintings of the Garden of Eden, Heaven and Hell. The problem of this Christian heritage is that it encourages a rather monochrome image of the nature of Paradise which runs contrary to the variety of images contained in texts from the biblical era.

The purpose of this study is to examine the references to Paradise in texts from the biblical era and to explore the images evoked by them. The paper will begin and end with a consideration of the texts about Paradise in the New Testament. From there we shall move on to explore the background to these texts first in the Hebrew bible and the Septuagint and then in non-canonical texts from the second temple period. We shall note where ideas shift and develop and note how this affects the image of Paradise. We will end by returning to the texts from the New Testament and noting how this background affects our understanding of the relevant passages.

The thought of paradise has exercised a particular hold upon the ethical imagination. Bringing us before those things that lie just outside of our reach, its language speaks to us of what has been there all along, before ever we appeared to take up our places in the world, and of what will still be there ever after we have gone from here. Paradise speaks to us of this enduring somewhere else than here, and so we are drawn to its lasting otherness, held in fascination by its suggestion that things might have been otherwise, and might still come to be so—if only. Ethics has been shaped within this ‘if only’, the cue for its opening lines taken from the lead of paradise that it is our truest beginning, and its action directed by a promise that all will end well. So the thought of paradise enables the self-understanding of ethics as an interim measure, fit for the time between times, living from out of a perfect beginning and facing towards the horizon at which the sun will rise again. Paradise thus discloses the world for ethics, illuminating the world as a place of change, and at the same time a place of failure and of loss, and so it gives an ever-available ground for ethics, sending it forth to do what work it can in the time given, and shaping the activity of ethics as the careful observance and restoration of what comes to be known there.

Soon after the Second Vatican Council it became customary in our churches for celebrant and people to face one another during the Eucharist, whereas previously it had been more usual for everybody to face in the same direction. Considerable sums of money were spent in facilitating this arrangement, which was widely thought to be among the chief requirements of the ‘new liturgy’. For many, ‘mass facing the people’ has become, together with the use of the vernacular, the sine qua non of contemporary liturgy. Many priests will refuse to celebrate otherwise, many laity would not attend a mass celebrated otherwise. The reasons are surely ecclesiological: the reorientation of priest and people at the liturgy is seen as symbolic of the move from a pyramidal to a collegial model of church that the Second Vatican Council effected.

Before the Council, for celebrant and people to face each other was a clear sign of affiliation to the liturgical movement. The pattern was rare in this country, especially among Catholics. An early example was the chapel of Queen’s College in Birmingham, built in 1938 but only opened for worship after the Second World War. At Queens the celebrant of the eucharist has always stood in the apse, facing the body of the church, and in doing so has faced west I have been told that Queen’s College chapel was the first built in England for the ‘westward position’, under the influence of the liturgical movement.

The change was represented as a return to primitive practice, but this justification was based on a misunderstanding.

I remember, as a small boy, telling my parents that before 1 was bom, I had been in heaven and had chosen them to be my parents. My father laughed heartily at this. In retrospect, it is clear that Platonism was not strong in my family, but it was inevitable that when later I came to do a doctorate I did it on pre-existence language in Christology because Christ had been there too and we had discussed my parentage, at some length, I remember. I have no idea where my childish fantasy came from: it may be a common idea among religious children to think that they were somewhere before they are here and that they are going somewhere after they have been here.