A Quote by Sara Maitland

Natural history is not taught in seminary. This is curious, as most people in pastoral ministry are about 567 times more likely to be asked about cosmology or sub-nuclear physics or human biology or evolution than they are to be asked about irregular Greek verbs or the danger of the patripassionist heresy. If we monotheists are going to go around claiming that our "God made the heaven and the earth," it is not unreasonable to expect us to know something about what that heaven and earth actually are.
It often appears that those who talk the most about going to heaven when you die talk the least about bringing heaven to earth right now, as Jesus taught us to pray: 'Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' At the same time, it often appears that those who talk the most about relieving suffering now talk the least about heaven when we die.
Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about.
Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
Perhaps generations of students of human evolution, including myself, have been flailing about in the dark; that our data base is too sparse, too slippery, for it to be able to mold our theories. Rather the theories are more statements about us and ideology than about the past. Paleontology reveals more about how humans view themselves than it does about how humans came about, but that is heresy.
Our culture is so fixated on dying and going to heaven when the whole Scripture is about heaven coming to earth.
When people use the word hell, what do they mean? They mean a place, an event, a situation absent of how God desires things to be. Famine, debt, oppression, loneliness, despair, death, slaughter--they are all hell on earth. Jesus' desire for his followers is that they live in such a way that they bring heaven to earth. What's disturbing is when people talk more about hell after this life than they do about Hell here and now. As a Christian, I want to do what I can to resist hell coming to earth.
It's not about going to church every week because you know there's a lot of people who go to church all of the time who aren't going to heaven. It's not even about that, it's not about kissing God's ass, it's about being aware.
Initially, when I first became a Christian and got into ministry, my thought was that God existed to make my life better and to take me to Heaven. Now I realize that it is not about me at all. It is all about God and that He did this to display His plan to restore the Earth to the Garden of Eden state.
Jesus preached more and taught more about helping the poor and the sick and the hungry than he did about heaven and hell. Shouldn't that tell us something?
I am convinced that there is no great distance between heaven and earth, that the distance lies in our finite minds. When the Beloved visits us in the night, He turns our chambers into the vestibules of His palace halls. Earth rises to heaven when heaven comes down to earth.
Eugene Wigner wrote a famous essay on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences. He meant physics, of course. There is only one thing which is more unreasonable than the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and this is the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology.
It certainly seems like a good idea to talk about Heaven, meditate about Heaven and read about Heaven, because, after all, that's where we're going to spend eternity.
[W]atching ducks land on a lake in Arkansas in the winter is about the closest to Heaven as you can find on this earth... and as someone who believes, according to my faith, I will go to Heaven when I die, I am pretty sure that there is duck hunting in Heaven!
Our aims in political activism are not, and should not be, to create a perfect utopia. What we seek is more simply to improve the quality of human life while at the same time respecting the natural environment which sustains it: 'Not a heaven on earth but a better earth on earth.' This is not at all a timid agenda, far from it. The work ahead of us is enormous!
One reason I like to talk about Heaven, think about Heaven and read about Heaven is because, after all, that's where we're going to spend Eternity, so it's a pretty important place and we ought to be pretty interested, don't you think? It's our Eternal Home, the place Jesus has gone to prepare for us forever, so we certainly ought to be interested in it and want to know what it's like and what we're going to be like when we get there!
Thoughts of heaven quicken our faith. Our only sure and solid foundation is the hope of heaven. The only solution to earth's mysteries, the only righter of earth's wrongs, and the only cure for worldliness, is heaven. We need an infusion of heaven into our faith and hope that will create a homesickness for that blessed place. God's home is heaven. Eternal life and all good were born there and flourish there. All life, happiness, beauty, and glory are native to the home of God. All this belongs to and awaits the heirs of God in heaven. What a glorious inheritance!
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