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The Christian concept of heaven flourished for almost two millennia, but it has lost much of its power in the last hundred years. Indeed today even theologians tend to avoid the topic. But heaven has always been a central tenet of the Christian faith, writes Jeffrey Burton Russell. If there is no heaven, no resurrection of the dead, the entire Christian story makes no sense.
In this stimulating book, Russell sets out to rehabilitate heaven by forcefully attacking a series of ideas that have made belief in heaven, not to mention belief in God, increasingly difficult for modern people. Russell provides elegant and persuasive refutations of arguments ranging from the idea that science has disproved the existence of the supernatural, to the notion that biblical criticism has emptied the scripture of meaning. Along the way, as Russell looks at the ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, Mark Twain and Alfred Lord Tennyson, Marx and Freud, and a host of others, he sheds light not only on the history of Christian thought, but on the process of secularization in the West. One by one, Russell refutes these anti-religious ideologies, pinpointing the deficiencies of their reasoning.
Throughout the book, Russell invites the reader, whatever his or her beliefs, to take the concept of heaven seriously both as a worldview in itself and as one with enormous influence on the world. It is a book that will be welcomed by thinking Christians, who often feel beleaguered by the forces of modernity and sometimes find it hard to defend their own beliefs.
- Sales Rank: #3371222 in Books
- Published on: 2006-05-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.30" h x 1.00" w x 9.30" l, 1.05 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Russell, who has already written histories of hell and its minions (The Prince of Darkness; Mephistopheles; Satan), takes up where he left off in his 1997 book A History of Heaven. In his previous work, he offered a splendid survey of the idea of heaven up through the Middle Ages. Here, he traces the history of heaven from the 16th century through the late 20th, providing a marvelous overview of the many philosophical, literary, social, and even religious forces that have challenged the concept of heaven. Russell focuses on the Christian notion of heaven and its attendant beliefs in resurrection of the body, immortality of the soul, and angels, as well as the view of heaven as a specific place where believers will reside after death. Although in the Middle Ages, belief in such a paradise seemed secure, by the 18th century, philosophers such as Voltaire, Locke and Hume questioned the idea of a cosmos ruled by a benevolent deity as well as the existence of miracles, heaven and God. Romantic writers such as Wordsworth, Blake, Emerson and Goethe recovered heaven in the 19th century, but, as Russell points out, the Romantics' heaven was an internal one. Russell's elegant survey of heaven offers a first-rate history of a much debated subject. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* How did the celestial hope of St. Paul and St. Augustine dwindle into a foolish delusion dismissed by Sartre and Derrida? In a work that provocatively complements his History of Heaven (1997), Russell chronicles the erosion of traditional Christian understandings of heaven incompatible with surging secular modern philosophies, including the science that explains the stars as fallout from a big bang and humans as the accidental offspring of evolution. Likewise corrosive of heavenly orthodoxy, Freudian psychologists have defined religious hope as a collective fantasy even as Marxist theorists have attacked faith as an obstacle to political progress. But Russell does more than provide a lucid recital of skeptics' assaults on heaven. He fights back. A lapsed atheist, this accomplished cultural historian turns the tables on the skeptics, subjecting their antireligious arguments to a skeptical scrutiny, showing, for example, how the scientific foes of religion must smuggle into their progressive philosophies beliefs that their own theories cannot sustain. Russell's debunking of the debunkers takes on particular seriousness when he defends the scripture, religious poetry, and hymns that secularists dismiss as wishful metaphor. Steering clear of the hyperliteralism that gives secularists tempting targets, Russell argues that, far from hiding dark realities behind pretty illusions, the great depth-metaphors of Christianity--from the luminous New Jerusalem of Revelation to the heavenly chariot of African American spirituals--gesture toward realities too cosmic to fit within ordinary language. Believers and unbelievers alike will find much here to challenge their thinking. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"A marvelous overview of the many philosophical, literary, social, and even religious forces that have challenged the concept of heaven.... Russell's elegant and richly textured survey of heaven offers a first-rate history of a much-debated subject."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Effectively questions the arguments of many thinkers who have rejected religion in general and heaven in particular.... His handling of the ideas of such philosophers as David Hume, John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche is thought-provoking and well reasoned."--Library Journal
"Believers and unbelievers alike will find much here to challenge their thinking.... Russell argues that, far from hiding dark realities behind pretty illusions, the great metaphors of Christianity--from the luminous New Jerusalem of Revelation to the heavenly chariot of African American spirituals--gesture toward realities too cosmic to fit within ordinary language."--Booklist (starred review)
"Paradise Mislaid accomplishes a spectacular feat: it uses the subject of Heaven to examine the history of just about everything we deny or believe. Patient, generous, eloquent, it delivers to the ordinary reader a brilliant analysis of the long battle for Christian ideas. Russell shrinks from nothing as he pierces the illusions surrounding skepticism and cynicism and how these biases have come to dominate our daily lives. Vitally important for those of us who struggle to articulate the richness of the faith they hold dear."--Anne Rice, author of Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt
"A glorious work of scholarship and faith, expressed with poetic grace."--Rodney Stark, author of The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success
"A lively, fascinating engagement with the past history and future promise of the Christian idea of heaven. Russell's shrewd analysis is certain to stimulate a healthy debate over recovering confidence in this idea within the Christian church and western culture at large."--Alister McGrath, author of The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World
"Jeffrey Burton Russell is an eminent scholar of Western religious ideas, whose previous magisterial works on the history of hell, heaven, heresy, dissent, and the devil display a singular passion for both historical and spiritual truth. In Paradise Mislaid, he shows vividly how the 'flat earth' mentality of our own time has estranged Western culture from its spiritual and intellectual roots. A fascinating and important apologia."--Carol Zaleski, co-author of Prayer: A History
"Presents and effectively questions the arguments of many thinkers who have rejected religion in general and heaven in particular. His handling of the ideas of such philosophers as David Hume, John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche is thought-provoking and well reasoned."--Library Journal
Most helpful customer reviews
36 of 39 people found the following review helpful.
Paradise regained
By wolvie05
This is a magnificent work of scholarship and faith by a self-confessed 'lapsed atheist'. In concise, vigorous prose Russell summarizes the evolution of views on heaven and God from the time of the Middle Ages to the present day. Along the way he assesses the various skeptical arguments that undermined faith in heaven and a loving God and judges them at best inconclusive and at worst incoherent. His research in philosophy, history, sociology, science, literature and theology is massive and thoroughly comprehensive, demonstrating that a case for heaven need not be built on a fundamentalist appeal to Scripture or to sentiment alone. Russell gives devastating if sketchy critiques of 'physicalism' (more like scientism in general) on one hand, and Progress (as a metaphysical belief in the gradual perfection of the human race) on the other, leaving the historical Christian tradition, informed by reason, scripture and science, as the most plausible alternative. He relies heavily on the defense of the Christian faith as developed by Alvin Plantinga in "Warranted Christian Belief" as well as Hilary Putnam's critique of physicalism in "Representation and Reality", both of whom are a good step above the usual apologetic sources. Russell does not shy away from real bones of contention and admits where advances in science and philosophy have made certain questions less straightforward as they had been, but his case for heaven emerges unscathed from his immersion in the best anti-theistic polemics this age has to offer. Christians need to read this book. Liberal theology has been too dismissive of one of the great hopes and comforts that our religion has to offer. It's time to reclaim Paradise, and Russell's book is a huge step in the right direction.
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