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7 - Eating in Heaven? Consummating Communion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Norman Wirzba
Norman Wirzba
Affiliation:
Duke University, North Carolina
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Summary

Everything that is loved in a fragmentary and incomplete way on earth has always had its ultimate ground in heaven. No earthly moment can be fully exhausted.… [I]n heaven we shall live the full and eternal content of what on earth was present only as a transcendent, unsatisfiable longing.… In heaven, therefore, our earthly existence – and we have only one existence – will be present in an unimaginable and unimaginably true manner.

Heaven is the state of being in which all are united in love with one another and with God. It is an agapē, a love feast. Whenever less than the whole world is loved, with all the creatures in it, whenever anyone or anything is excluded from love, the result is isolation and retreat from heaven. Heaven is the community of those whom God loves and who love God.

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever.… For the hand of the Lord will rest on this mountain. (Isaiah 25:6–8, 10)

… in the spirit he carried me away to a great high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.… […]

Type
Chapter
Information
Food and Faith
A Theology of Eating
 , pp. 211 - 234
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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