Meeting in heaven
Subtitle: modernising the Christian afterlife, 1600-2000
By: Bernhard Lang
Publisher: Peter Lang
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Frankfurt am Main
Language: eng
Number of pages: 166
ISBN-13: 9783631620007
Subjects: History of doctrines; Heaven; Future life
Description: In heaven, we will meet our friends: this was one of the most conspicuous expectations Christians had, and continue to have, of life after death. While the theme as such is almost as old as Christianity, it came to flourish only in early-modern times, peaking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This book explores how the rediscovery and developemnt of the 'meeting again' theme by authors such as John Bunyan and Emanuel Swedenborg and by the artist William Blake created a specifically modern heaven. Giving priority to an eternity of continuing earthly passions and family ties, the modern notion of heaven contrasts with earlier, God-centred notions of an eternal saintly solitude spent contemplating God in 'beatific vision'."--Cover, p. 4.
Notes: Collection of essays partly published elsewhere previously between 1987 and 2008.
Table of contents: title: From stasis to movement, from loneliness to love : heaven, a history in retrospect; title: The modernisation of life after death, 1644-1791 : a survey; title: The English heaven : an exploration of the Pilgrim's progress (1678/84); title: The Spanish heaven : opposition to modernity; title: A Swedish heaven : Swedenborg on Heaven and hell (1758) ; Appendix: Swedenborg chronology; title: A Swedish heaven in European thought : early readers of Swedenborg ; Appendix: Thomas Hartley on Swedenborg's doctrine of Correspondences (1778); title: American heavens : an exploration of cemetaries, 1740-1850.