Heavenly minded, or no earthly good? Pastor Andre takes the old jibe, so heavenly-minded that they're no earthly good, and turns it round. He has never met a Christian like that, and the Bible seems to direct our thinking in exactly the opposite direction: if you want to be some good in this world, you've got to be heavenly minded. The church's real problem, he suggests, is that we're not heavenly minded enough, because when heaven stops being real, heavenly mindedness starts to look like escapism.

In this episode Andre asks what heavenly mindedness is, and what it means to live inside a cosmos that is both visible and invisible. With Charles Taylor's A Secular Age he describes how the West has moved from an enchanted world to a disenchanted one, from the porous self to the buffered self, and how even believing Christians breathe its air and end up with a functionally disenchanted faith. With Meredith Kline's archetype and ectype, and Michael Heiser's unseen realm, he sets out one cosmos with two registers, heaven and earth not sealed off from one another but interacting, so that heavenly mindedness is about understanding what the real world is. Then he follows the New Testament upwards: Abraham in the promised land but still camping, looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God; heaven as our homeland, a created realm, the pattern for the tabernacle and the most real place there is; and our citizenship in heaven, which Paul does not set alongside earthly citizenship as an equal but radically relativises. Along the way: a church in London of about 100 people with 27 different nationalities; the Narnian horse of The Horse and His Boy, who keeps talking about his home country even though he can barely remember it; how the heavenly citizenship becomes a plaque on the wall while we live by our other passport; Colossians 3, where the Christian life is heavenly all the way down and heavenly mindedness is not one box amongst many; Hebrews 12, where you have come to Mount Zion, the church's worship is joined to the heavenly court, and why losing that turns church into just a social club; the inheritance kept in heaven in 1 Peter 1, with the great institutions of Israel relocated upwards and fulfilled in Christ; and Romans 8, where creation groans and the Spirit produces a yearning and groaning for heaven in us. Heavenly mindedness, Andre concludes, is what makes us of earthly good.

REFERENCED ALONG THE WAY

- Charles Taylor, A Secular Age: the porous self and the buffered self, and

the move from an enchanted world to a disenchanted one

- Meredith Kline on archetype and ectype: mountains and the glory cloud

pointing beyond themselves

- Michael Heiser on the unseen realm and the divine council

- The Horse and His Boy, from C.S. Lewis's Narnia series

- Scripture: Genesis 1 to 3, Hebrews 11:8 to 10, Hebrews 11:14, Revelation

21, Ephesians 2, Colossians 3:1 to 4, Hebrews 12, 1 Peter 1, Galatians 4,

Romans 8, 2 Corinthians 5, 2 Peter 3, 1 John 3

This episode takes stock of the series so far: the divine council, the fall

of the supernatural realm and the work Christ is doing to raise the dead

are all aimed, Andre says, at helping us to become more heavenly minded, so

that we can fix our eyes on Jesus, who is the author and perfecter of our

faith.

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