New Heaven: Death, Human Destiny, and the Kingdom of God

by Harvey Cox

Overview

Harvey Cox is one of America’s great public theologians of the past fifty years. In many bestselling books he has written on matters of religion and faith for a popular audience, including on secularism and belief, world religions, Jewish-Christian dialogue, liberation theology, Pentecostalism, Jesus, and biblical interpretation. In his new book he explores the question that underlies all religion: what is the point of life that ends in death? What are the different ways we think about the afterlife? What are we actually talking about when we talk about heaven?

Interestingly, this is not a subject of great preoccupation in the Gospels. Jesus was concerned primarily with the Kingdom of God—about conforming the present world to the values and principles of God’s love and justice. How this has gravitated toward concern with “life after death” is one of the topics covered here. Cox draws on personal stories, including his youthful work as an assistant his uncle, an undertaker, approaches to death in other cultures and religions; and his own reflections on mortality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781626985322
Publisher:	Orbis Books
Publication date:	10/01/2023
Pages:	312
Sales rank:	673,833
Product dimensions:	5.13(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.65(d)
Age Range:	17 - 18 Years

About the Author

Harvey Cox (b. 1929), is an ordained minister in the American Baptist Church. He served for many years as Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School until his retirement in 2009. Beginning with his bestselling The Secular City (1965), he has written over a dozen books, most recently, How to Read the Bible (Harper, 2015) and The Market as God (Harvard, 2016). In 2016 we published A Harvey Cox Reader

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
Why We Need a New Heaven
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. (Revelation 21:1)

I had recently turned ninety when I started writing this book. Consequently, when friends asked me what I was currently working on, and I told them, they smiled knowingly. They were sure they knew why I had seized on this topic. Entering my sunset years, they thought, it was only natural that my thoughts would turn to what might or might not come next. The curtain was about to go up on my last act, so a book about the “hereafter” was just what everyone would expect. It would be my swan song, my last hurrah.

But my friends were mistaken. I did not undertake this project because of a sharpened sense of my mortality. I had other reasons. However, my friends were not entirely wrong. The reader will see that as I wrote, my awareness of my finitudes did become increasingly significant to me, making the book more personal than I first intended.

When I was fourteen, I thought about death and the afterlife a lot. I think most kids do at that age. But I did not worry about heaven or hell. I could not imagine that God, whom I pictured as a kindly old man, could possibly dispatch me, or anyone else, to eternal torment. As for heaven, I was not sure whether there was such a place, but I had my doubts. At that age, neither possibility bothered me much. What did unsettle me, however, was the prospect of nonexistence. Imagining a universe spinning on for millennia, its stars and planets heedlessly orbiting, but without me, made my stomach tighten. When I learned that our solar system and eventually the universe itself would also eventually expire, it did not seem alarming. It was the nonexistence of my own self that seemed so unthinkable. As I left my early teen years, this jumble of horror and the emptiness gradually faded, and for decades I rarely thought about any hereafter. Then why this book?

Table of Contents

Contents Introduction: Why We Need a New Heaven ix

1. Gates of Heaven 1

2. Rituals of Initiation 15

3. Death and Burial 29

4. Jesus and Heaven 47

5. Heaven and the Kingdom of God 71

6. Jews, Heaven, and the Kingdom of God 92

7. The Undiscovered Country 116

8. A Modern Visitor to Heaven 132

9. Heaven in the Desert 153

10. The Death of Purgatory 164

11. Angels in Heaven and Elsewhere 182

12. American Heavens 199

13. Black and Brown Heavens 221

14. Jerusalem as Heaven 247

15. The Transfiguration of Heaven 265 Index 278

Editorial Reviews

A book, with the legendary Harvey Cox wisdom on full display, eloquently written to change the way people think and believe, live and die.”—James Carroll, author, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie

From the Publisher