Will the World-to-Come be in Heaven or here on earth?

[PNEUMA]

Will the World-to-Come be in Heaven or here on earth?

The crucified Christ is the end of the old world and beginning of the new world on earth.

 

[Wesrock]

vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p123a12.htm
The earth is renewed along with all of creation.

This.

 

[Aaron_I]

Even pre-fall, Man was body and soul.

In the creed, we all profess our belief in the “resurrection of the body”.

Whatever form Heaven takes, humans will absolutely continue to be body and soul. It’s what makes us human.

 

[Robert_Sock]

Even pre-fall, Man was body and soul.

In the creed, we all profess our belief in the “resurrection of the body”.

Whatever form Heaven takes, humans will absolutely continue to be body and soul. It’s what makes us human.

We will have spiritual bodies, whatever that entails. Note that Christ was able to walk through a locked door.

“Just as a blind man is unable to form any idea about colors, or a deaf person to fathom what it means to hear sounds… so the body cannot comprehend the delights of the soul… For we live in a material world, and the only kind of pleasure we can understand is that experienced through our body. But the joys of the spirit are everlasting and ceaseless. There is no resemblance of any kind between the enjoyments of the soul and those of the body.”
–Maimonides

“Man is not a soul bound in a transient body. If that were the case, resurrection would have little significance other than representing the soul’s return to its bodily prison…The Rambam says there will be no eating, drinking or sleeping in the World to Come (Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance 8:2). This statement was the focal point of a dispute between Maimonides and Nachmonides, and has been deeply misunderstood. In the World to Come, the body will not be resurrected and then die. Maimonides says that after resurrection, the body will cease to be a body as we know it (ibid.). This cessation implies that the body will instead become so holy that it will become spiritual, transcending the physical limitations imposed upon it in this earthly world. Nevertheless, it will retain its sense of self-existence, its sense of being.”
-http://www.aish.com/sp/ph/48929597.html

 

[Katherine438]

Does it matter?

It does not matter to me … as long as I will be able to be in the presence of our Lord, that is all I pray for.

However, I must say that I do respect any other person’s interest in the actual place … it is probably something that most of us have thought of occasionally.

 

[Mintaka]

Jesus walking through a locked door was not about non-materiality. Indeed, He made a great point of saying that He was not a ghost, and of both eating food and cooking it for the Apostles when out on the beach.

(Grilling some fish on a charcoal grill for breakfast. Yup, Jesus was God and had a resurrection body, but He was also a man hanging out with men. Cracks me up.)

The point is that Jesus was Lord of Creation, and could order the door’s molecules just as perfectly as He ordered the storm winds and the sea when He walked on water and calmed the storm. We will share in this lordship over Creation even more perfectly than Adam did in Eden, and therefore we will able to do stuff like walk through doors, too. (As some saints have done while still alive.)

If you want some good stuff about the relationship between the soul and the resurrected body of a normal Christian, Prudentius’ ancient “Hymn for the Burial of the Dead” is very instructive.

 

[Mintaka]

Here are some good bits translated from Prudentius:

Quickly comes the age when
friend heat will revisit the bones,
and its original home will carry again
the fresh and living blood,

When unmoving cadavers that once
lay rotting in burial mounds
are “caught up into the air,”
flying along with their souls.

This is why so much care is spent
on sepulchres. This is why
final honor is given loose joints
and a funeral procession adorns it;

[why] custom is to spread linen cloths
of very bright gleaming whiteness,
and to preserve the body sprinkled with myrrh,
with the Sabaean drug.

What are they for, the hollowed out rocks?
What do the beautiful monuments mean,
if not that something is entrusted to them
that is not dead, but given over to sleep?

…

So the killed bodies
Come back in better times,
Nor after death, does the rewarming
Structure know weakening.

…

Pestilence, the plaguebearer
who now ravages our panting frames,
will sweat out his own torments
in a thousand shackles.

Then afar, from the air on high,
Flesh the Victrix, now and forever,
shall see him groaning without end
under the same pains he caused her.

…

Once this was home to a soul
made by the Creator’s mouth.
Burning, there dwelt in these limbs
Wisdom from Prince Christ.

Earth, cover the body deposited in you.
Unforgetting, He’ll ask for His gifts back –
He, the Maker and Author –
And the hidden faces of His Own.

…

No, not if age dissolve
the bones to rotted ashes,
and the dried out cinders left
are but the least fistful in measure,

Nor, if wandering gusts
and breezes through empty void
take the sinews with their dust,
will a human be allowed to be destroyed.

• The Vulgate translation of Paul

 

[Benadam]

What about the new heavens and the new earth ? That’s in the catechism?

 

[Ridgerunner]

Jesus walking through a locked door was not about non-materiality. Indeed, He made a great point of saying that He was not a ghost, and of both eating food and cooking it for the Apostles when out on the beach.

The point is that Jesus was Lord of Creation, and could order the door’s molecules just as perfectly as He ordered the storm winds and the sea when He walked on water and calmed the storm. We will share in this lordship over Creation even more perfectly than Adam did in Eden, and therefore we will able to do stuff like walk through doors, too. (As some saints have done while still alive.)

.

I am inclined to accept this, or something like it. We are told by physicists that the overwhelming “majority” of our bodies is just space. There is space between molecules, space between atoms, space within atoms. Not much of us is actually solid matter.

I have often wondered whether (as one poster speculated) there really is a difference between heaven and earth in the time to come. If God willed His overwhelming and perceptible presence to be in this room where I sit, it would be heaven and nobody would question it.

I wonder whether heaven is even a “place”. We know so little about the universe, really. I remember some southern writer; perhaps it was Fitzgerald, who declared that in the South the air is “thick with spirits”. If, say, we could perceive the souls of the departed just as they are, would they even be both here somewhere else as well? Might they be right here, and investigating the far galaxies, all at the same time? One recalls that God is “everywhere” because His mind keeps every atom spinning, every quark in movement, every law of matter and energy in operation. His presence is, in ways we cannot comprehend, pervasive or the whole universe would instantly cease to exist. So how, exactly, is He here with me, on the moon, inside every star and black hole, all at the same time?

If God is everywhere, and if we are joined to Him at death and after the “new” earth comes to be, is there really any separation between us and Him, no matter what far reaches of the universe we might “intend” ourselves to be, physically?

As to Jesus walking through the door, is it possible that there are “modes” of physical being about which we know nothing, but by virtue of which He or (later) we might so align ourselves with the rest of the universe that we could walk through doors, dive to the center of the sun or a black hole and “see” every physical law, every equation even, in operation? Might we gain an “immunity” from the immense heat, the crush, the vacuum of space, the radiation, the centrifugal and centripetal forces by reason of our then being “aligned” with it in the way that God is?

I’m inclined to think so.