very interesting – thanks!

Oh I was referring to the readings on ethics. Martin Luther never wrote that quote. He supposedly spoke something similar along those line when someone asked him a certain question. Actually we got no proofs whether Luther really spoke those words…..but you can easily find all kinds of bizarre interpretation of the quote (with its own bias agenda of course

Hi, Y.F.C.,
Thanks for your comment – I’ve (still) not got the time to hunt down the context, but it sounds legit cheers!
-d-
p.s. to all – I’ve corrected my slip-up two comments above (pantheism –> polytheism).

The quote has nothing to do with eschatology nor being environmentally friendly. The original quote is more closer to “If I knew Jesus would return tomorrow, I would STILL plant a tree today.”

The main concern here is the topic of Ethics. He was rejecting consequentialism (e.g. utilitarianism in modern days). Depending on your interpretation, he was endorsing either deontology or “virtue ethics”. Check out the whole readings.

Actually, I do think we use pictures/metaphors that way. All language is really metaphor anyway at one level or another.
And yes – the Genesis creation story isn’t so much contrasting “up there vs down here” as much as it’s contrasting pantheism (EDIT: polytheism!) with monotheism.

But then why do we no longer use pictures/metaphors that way?

I do understand that the creation stories were polemic towards surrounding cultures, but I don’t recall the “up there vs down here” thing being one of them. I defy you to find literature on that issue.

Me thinks he had knocked back a few too many German ales. Good for him!

of course, the word ‘heaven’ carried at least two meanings: 1) the ‘sky’, and 2) ‘God’s place’; and the early Hebrews would never have imagined that (literally) ‘God lived in the sky’. They would have understood the relationship between heaven and earth to be just a tad more interesting than that, even if the pictures/metaphors they use can seem that way (especially) to modern ears. In fact is it precisely the ‘i spy with my eye the god in the sky’ view which the author/community behind the Genesis 1 creation poem is/are negating – among other things, he/she/they refuse to call the ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ by their names, and thus affirm the beliefs around them that they were gods (sun-god / moon-god); instead they are simply called the ‘greater light’ and the ‘lesser light’.

Interesting that the more ‘emergent’-esque church is now trying to argue that heaven was never meant to be ‘up there’.

Cheers Simon – I’d lean toward the second of your possibilities.