NBierma.com > Heaven

Bringing Heaven Down To Earth
Connecting This Life to the Next
by Nathan L.K. Bierma

Chapter 8
Alien Ambassadors: Living as Citizens of Heaven

• Synopsis
• Discussion Questions
• Quotation Citations
• Further Reading

Synopsis
To live in the hope of heaven means to live with an awareness that our citizenship is in the heavenly city, not the city of the present age. We must reject complacency in our faith and conformity to a mass culture and understand our identity as ambassadors: giving our civic obligations to Caesar but our allegiance, worship, and character to Christ. We must not conform to the follies and loyalties of our culture, but must model more coherent identities that are shaped by the vision of a heavenly city. To understand our heavenly citizenship is to live in the hope of heaven.

Discussion Questions
• What are other "unimportant ways" of blending in to our culture? How can we define the difference between the "unimportant" and "important" ways?

• How would you define what Henri Nouwen means by "downward mobility"?

• What does it mean to say that "being Christ-like is fundamentally anticipatory"?

Quotation Citations

• Letter to Diognetus quoted in Baxter, Michael J, “God is Not an American,” in Laytham, D. Brent, ed. God Is Not: Religious, Nice, One of Us, an American, a Capitalist. Brazos Press, 2004. pp. 61-64.