Chapter 5

Part Two:

This second part of chapter five deals with two things I would like to talk about here:  

The first is a mystic understanding of the gospel.   McKnight comments that the “ecstatic experience of union with God is not unusual for Christian mystics.  I believe that eternity will be an uninterrupted flow of such ecstatic union with God.  We will be, in our very natures, blended into the presence of God with maintaining our identity…we will enter into perichoresis.”[1]  Perichoresis says that the trinity “exists as an interpenetrating and mutual indwelling…In other words, God’s eternal reality is the love between Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”[2]

If this is how God is, this also is how Heaven should be.   McKnight uses an analogy that I like very much: Heaven may be a little bit like family camp.  We all know the feeling.  Families in constant community for a week or weekend.  Families cook together, sleep in close quarters and play games together.  The kids running around playing with the sticks (hopefully not the stones), hiding behind trees, finding an “alternate reality” as they escape into games of Narnia or Middle Earth.   C.S. Lewis, in his book The Great Divorce, describes hell as a place where diminished humans are constantly in search of distance between themselves and others.  This would say that Hell is anti-perichoresis.    

Understanding this McKnight goes on to explain that “there will be no law courts, because humans will transcend justice with love; there will be no locks because humans will own what they need and rejoice in what others own…and on and on in the perichoretic circle of eternal life.” [3]

It is a beautiful to think of heaven as a place of “eternal life.”

[1] Scot McKnight, Embracing Grace: A Gospel for all of Us (Brewster: Paraclete Press), 58
[2] Scot McKnight, Embracing Grace, 34
[3] Ibid., 59