Dr. Jonathan Juilfs

follower of Jesus following the incarnation is empowered as a member of the body of Christ to be his agent wherever in the cosmos it might be needed.

Now, I always say to my students, I don't know if I'm a strict believer in alien forms of life, but I do believe that God could use every follower of his anywhere in the cosmos, whatever the situation might be.

And with that then comes this sense that, and this is why I like Junius' answer, we're not going back to the garden.

There's a newer, even better destiny that was set up by the nature of the events that took place in salvation history.

And so in some senses...

I rely heavily on 1 Corinthians 15 here, which I think is after the Gospels, the greatest book of the New Testament.

When it talks about, Paul says, it's a mystery.

There's something going on here I can't explain.

But he says, the soma, the bodies, not sarks, not flesh, but that something is going to happen to us in a way that we have never known.

Now, my cheesier friends might say, yes, I'll have a heavenly body.

I'll be primed and pumped and, you know, full of muscles and able to do anything that I want to.

But I think Paul is imagining something even far greater than that, far greater powers.

And so Dante gets a little taste as he enters into even the early orbits of Paradiso of these new abilities that he has never had before, that no human presumably has ever had before.

And I think what that should do is actually help us to think imaginatively about what heaven might look like.

Potent moment.

Yeah.

One of the images that comes to mind here, and I haven't had a chance to say this to Wesley, but I wrote my dissertation on...

two female contemplatives on Julian of Norwich and Marguerite Perrette.

Marguerite Perrette, who was actually burned at the stake in 1310 for a book called The Mirror of Simple Souls.

And Marguerite's full historical context and even the textual context are complicated, and I won't go into those here.