Heaven-Lesson #1

Heaven: The Heart's Deepest Longing

A Study Guide

By Lynn Cross

For Advent Book Club

April 2010

Introduction: Our Guide on the Quest for Heaven: Our Society or Our Heart? (p. 11)

1) Three major questions we all ask. Can our society or we (the self) hold the answers?

What can I know? Epistemology

What should I do? Ethics

What may I hope? Metaphysics

2) Our society has slipped into the abyss of relativism/there is no truth, or whatever you believe personally is your own truth.

3) The Greeks discovered two divine attributes; truth and goodness. The Jews were discovered by the God who has those two attributes; big difference.

4) Society stills looks for the “summum bonum” (greatest good), but relativism has turned it into a utopian quest and whoever has the power is the one who “paints” the utopia for the rest of us.

5) Idols: (defined) anything that is not God but treated as a God, any creature set up as our final end, hope, meaning, and joy.

6) All idols, since they are not God sooner or later break your heart.

7) When God is not acknowledged, we then do not know how to define human beings. We become ghosts in machines. Are we spirit, or matter, or a combination, or what?

8) When God is dead, death is God.

We see this in the way that life is cheapened in our society.

We see this as we try so hard to avoid death, or in the opposite to embrace death.

9) When God dies all becomes permissible. (Dostoyevsky)

10) Nature becomes something to manipulate at will, to suit our own purposes. We become a mechanistic people, reduced to mere dust, the dust of death.

11) The conquest of nature becomes the first idol that arises from the death of God.

This means power over nature and power over society.

Q.: In whom shall the political power be located? *notice power or rights then do not come from God, but come from the arbitrary chosen power. How much of human life shall be politicized, publicized, or communalized?

12) Kingdom of this world (self or society) has cracks in its foundation. Once this is seen three reactions are possible:

a. The turning to the Kingdom of God

b. Turning to another idol of self

c. Turning to nothing, despair.

13) Idols don’t work. Human nature cannot save, and neither can any false utopia of society.

14) They (idols) can teach us though: that we can’t pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and I can’t make something bigger and better than myself. I need a savior.

15) Our societies come tumbling down because they are made of inferior material-we.

16) Pascal, “Happiness is neither outside nor inside us: it is in God, both outside and inside us.”

17) Lewis Quote:

“Almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And….lest your longing for the transtemporal *(something that does not last) should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, an the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever.” C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, p. 5.

18) Ancients meant something different when they talked of happiness. It was an objective term rather than a subjective term. Ex. a successful tyrant, suffering can be “happy.” Suffering is an occasion for wisdom, and wisdom is an essential ingredient in happiness.

19) Find in your heart the longing, the desire for something eternal.

Lewis partial quote: “ We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.” Lewis, The Weight of Glory, p. 4.

*Lynn’s definition.

Next:

I. The Beginning of the Quest: The Heart’s Hunger for Heaven (p. 43)