If heaven is a place on earth, Kauai gets my consideration.I am enjoying my way through "God Behaving Badly" as he wrestles with our modern cultures inability to deal with the stories of the Old Covenant.
The books The God Delusion, and God is not Good, have highlighted attacks on the character of God which offend modern sensitivities and lead these authors to actively campaign against the Christian faith.
I have some sympathy for them, as one who has overcome a view of God triggered by my own sensitivity to reading Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, by Johnathan Edwards, and by being tutored for decades in the strictest of Calvinistic doctrine.
My own quest to answer the core questions, Who is God and What is the Gospel have led me to disagree with the status qua in some very important areas. For that very reason I applaud the conversation that our current culture has allowed in these areas. Wrestling with long held dogmas can indeed, make us less dogmatic and more open to considering another point of view.
The biggest change in my thinking lies in taking a much larger view of the Gospel as being God's ages long plan to defeat the works of the devil, not by His own might alone, but through the very creation of humanity from the dust of the earth and the breath of His spirit.
I see judgment and mercy kissing at the cross, and reconciliation of all things on earth and in heaven as a distinct hope, with the ecclesia of God playing the key role in the plan. I see a unified body of Christ judging angels, and I see a judged and transformed humanity enjoying things in ages to come that the mind of man cannot conceive, and right now, with all the brokenness in me, and the world, I have a deep abiding joy that God is good.... very, very good. "That all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well, and the fire and the rose are one."
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