“Contrary to a Time magazine cover portraying a fluffy cloud bearing a man peering out into an all blue yonder with the byline, ‘Does heaven exist?,’ most of the references to ‘heaven’ in the Gospel testimony are not about blue skies or life only after death. Remarkably few of the approximately six hundred and seventy-five instances of the term found in the Bible may be said to be reducible to such categories of interpretation. In such testimony, heaven neither begins nor ends with death. The automatic tendency to suppose when we hear the word ‘heaven’ that the subject is either the sky or the hereafter only shows ow much our own thinking has become conformed to the world of the Time magazine cover. The question is what ‘sense of the word’ do we have in mind when we hear of heaven?”
from page 4 of “The Difference Heaven Makes, Rehearing the Gospel as News” by Christopher Morse
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