DNJ Column February 10, 2019 There’s no denying that Jeffery Burton Russell is a bit of an odd duck in his publishing history. Author of 14 books and Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he’s also known for his 5-volume history of the devil, beginning in 1977. The series runs Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (1977), Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (1981), Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (1984), Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (1986), and Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History (1988). The bulk of his other research is on medieval church history. What most interests me about him, however, are his two books on heaven. He began in 1997 with “History of Heaven: The Singing Silence,” and in 2006 finished up with “Paradise Mislaid: How We Lost Heaven—and How We Can Regain It.” “History of Heaven” was full of stuff like, “Heaven…is an endless dynamic of joy in which one is ever more oneself as one was meant to be, in which one increasingly realizes one’s potential in understanding as well as love and is filled more and more with wisdom.” Now that’s a mouthful, but in it orients us toward Russell’s reading of the history of the images and metaphors of heaven found in scriptures and poetry and theology from a human point of view. He sees an uncontradictory unity of vision connecting the human good and the revealed essence of fulfilled divine love. There’s more: “Heaven is the singing silence, the still ness of God that he sings to the world.” One of the best gifts of Russell is the way he opens our vision to a metaphorical expression of the theological reality of what must be, given resurrection of Christ. He combines 2500 years of western (and not always western) philosophical reflection on reality with the book of Revelation’s picture of the New Heaven and New Earth and comes up with “the singing silence,” and all that implies. This is found in introduction, but he proceeds from the biblical views of heaven up through the early fathers and medieval thinkers to the apex of poetic reflection found in Dante’s “Paradiso.” Dante himself understands how any human expression can only fail when approaching a description of the infinite and eternal, but, in hopefully immortal lines says (in translation) “the Love that moves the sun and other stars was turning my desire and my will together as elements of one moving wheel.” Dante himself sees through a theological prism, to a world where love moves will. And, in describing this topos of the gospel, he encapsulates a great deal of scripture in a few words “turning my desire and my will together.” This is an allusion to the problem raised by Paul in the letter to the Romans in chapter 7: “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.” Dante reflects the solution Paul points toward at the beginning of chapter 8, when he says: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” For Dante, desire and will united is only accomplished by the Love that moves the sun and the stars of the universe. Russell’s follow-up work, “Paradise Mislaid: How We Lost Heaven—and How We Can Regain It,” is the book our Sunday night class will be reading and discussing beginning in April, when we complete the book of Romans we’re studying now. Steve Odom is pastor of Central Christian Church on E. Main St. and may be reached at steven.odom@gmail.com