Where is Heaven Now?

I have not read the book by "Cardinal" Brandmüller ... · Where is Heaven Now?

Randal Rauser has written a book called ...

What on Earth Do We Know about Heaven?: 20 Questions And Answers About Life After Death
Paperback – October 1, 2013 | by Randal Rauser
https://www.amazon.com/What-Earth-Know-about-Heaven/dp/0801015642

It so happens that the first question is entitled: Where is Heaven Now?

The intro to the chapter is the urban legend about a Russian drill hole boring too deep. To, in fact, Hell.

While many early Christians believed that hell was beneath the earth, it is something of a shock to realize that some contemporary Christians

The next page is not on the preview, but I can fill in "... believe this too" / "... believe this too in this day and age" and similar.

The man would be well advised to read this only after sitting down.

Hell is c. 6300 + km down in Earth (i e, around the centre). And, if we prefer joining St. Patrick over unrepenting Druids in the afterlife, Heaven would be, past the fix stars, which are one light day up, and probably same celestial coordinates as Jerusalem has on Earth, not on the celestial sphere, which each day is moving around the Earth, but on the Empyrean part above and beyond those stars.

I hold with William Lane Craig that it is possible for God to reveal Himself in such a way to someone that no doubt is rational, even if that someone is not able to counter the doubts in rational debate. This is both relevant for knowing that God exists, and for knowing what God orders.

I also hold, that such knowledge is not the only way to know these things, there are more humdrum ways. Let's say Romans 1 indicts Aristotle. Now, Aristotle wasn't accused of having intimate experience of God in his own life and siding with idolatry, he was accused of knowing the existence of God by Geocentrism (unmoved mover of the outermost moved sphere) and still siding with idolatry, fully well knowing that Hercules for instance was NOT the unmoved mover.

What I try to communicate in my writings is not an experience of God (if such), it is this second type of knowledge which definitely can be formulated into arguments.

Part of the bonus of Geocentrism is, restoring Aristotle's unmoved mover (of the outermost sphere). Part is also knowing where Heaven is, namely above moving spheres. The initial reason for the query while I still hesitated, the day before St. Bartholomew in 2001, was the Distant Starlight Problem.

It can be noted that in each case, sham knowledge is possible. That doesn't invalidate real knowledge because supposedly "parallel". Dena Schlosser's view of what God wanted in her daughter's life was not true knowledge. She ended up killing her daughter in the process (Randal Rauser mistells the story as if she had thought God directly ordered her to kill her daughter, not what happened according to wikipedia). Joshua's view was. God had just thrown down the walls of Jericho miraculously. God was later on going to halt the "outermost sphere" (I would replace that with the aether) while the angels of Sun and Moon were halting the movement in their spheres. God obeyed as to East-West movement, the thing that constitutes Day and Night.* Two angels obeyed as to the slower movement Sun and Moon perform West to East along the Zodiac.**

That's not how God would validate the delusions of an insane person on an irrational killing spree. That's also not how God would validate an erroneously formulated, I will not say prayer, but intended miraculous command. In Joshua 10:12, we are informed that Joshua prayed, but not told the words. We are then told the words of his miraculous command after the prayer. We know they are not the prayer itself, because Sun and Moon are not names of God. And having spent so much time with Moses, Joshua was well aware of that.

But the point is, I can feel pretty smug about old fashioned, traditional, cosmology, in a way that Randal Rauser cannot. In a way which he actually finds shocking. So, if he reads this, I hope he's sitting down, not lifting the Java (this is a 3 minute read), and not coming in from heavy exercise.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St. Patrick's Day
17.III.2024

Apud civitatem Dunum, in Hibernia, natalis sancti Patricii, Episcopi et Confessoris, qui primus in ea insula Christum evangelizavit, et maximis miraculis et virtutibus claruit.

* Joshua 10:14
** Habacuc 3:11