Who Art in Heaven

One of my neighbors hosted a party. I can’t remember the reason for the gathering, but I do remember one of the women I met. We talked for a bit about things in general, then about our families, and finally about our concerns for our children. She had something weighing on her mind and needed a sounding board. Apparently, I was it.

The gist of the problem was that her 14-year-old daughter had recently declared that she wanted to be an atheist. After being raised in a church-going family, attending Sunday school regularly for the entire span of her still-short life, and listening to sermon after sermon, she had concluded that it was all bunk. My new confident told me, “I don’t mind that she’s thinking about religions questions and sorting things out for herself. I applaud her honesty. What bothers me is why she came to this conclusion.”

She paused, so I supposed I was supposed to ask, “Well, why did she?”

The woman answered, “She tells me that she doesn’t believe that there’s an old man with a white beard who sits on a cloud continually circling the planet watching over us. She just doesn’t believe there is a heaven in the clouds.”

The image came from a poster in their church’s preschool classroom. An artist, no doubt with good intentions, created it to help four-year-olds visualize something their minds weren’t ready to embrace more fully. To this questioning teen, however, it stood as the totality of the Christian message, its simplicity abetted by years of illustrations in children’s Bibles, pictures on pajamas, and sweet stories told during children’s sermon time.

My new acquaintance continued, “I don’t believe that either, but I can’t convince her that the church never meant it literally.”

Perhaps someday that teen will make the leap toward understanding a more adult version of the concept that was presented with such simplicity to preschoolers. Yet many others have struggled with a similar question: Where exactly is heaven?

The scriptural account is a bit vague. Some verses suggest it is “above” (for example, Colossians 3:1–2) and others that it is “within you” or “in the midst of you” (Luke 20:21).

Ancient peoples often depicted it as in or beyond the sky. I once had a discussion with a college-aged student who argued that if heaven really existed, the astronauts would have located it. The student’s logic concluded that if those who had been in orbit hadn’t passed the pearly gates, or if someone from NASA hadn’t found it with the Hubble Space Telescope, then heaven obviously didn’t exist.

The question isn’t even limited to the young. Not long ago, during a Bible study group discussion, a woman in the group, a mature woman probably in her 70s, asked the question: Where is heaven, anyway? I was a visitor and unsure of that denomination’s teaching, so I kept quiet, but I noticed that no one answered the question. The leader diverted the discussion to other things, and left the location of heaven hanging.

One of the books that has given me the most profound insight into the likely location of heaven was Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, originally published with the pseudonymous name A. Square. The author behind “A. Square” was Edwin Abbott Abbott. The novella, originally published in 1884, has become a classic, and it is usually marketed as science and mathematical fiction. In my opinion the work is profoundly religious. Abbott himself was a schoolmaster and a theologian, so I believe the heavenly implications in his work were intended. Let me recap the story. (Spoiler alert: I’m going to summarize the whole story, but I still recommend it for a full reading and much pondering.)

The narrator of the tale is A. Square. Mr. Square lives in a two-dimensional world where all the inhabitants are geometric figures. They exist on a plane that has width and depth but no height. None at all. Most of the story involves detailed description of how this society functions, how its inhabitants are socially stratified based on their angles, and how architecture works in just two dimensions. There is also some two-dimensional humor. (Although in contemporary times, some folk complain that it reflects the misogynistic attitudes of the late nineteenth century; for example, women, who are in a lower class than men, are “all point.”)

Mr. Square is a fairly prosperous member of the community. His sons and grandsons are higher in social ranking than he is, and he is content with his life. But that’s when the trouble starts.

Mr. Square is visited by a sphere. He doesn’t know where the sphere came from (“above” has no meaning to him). The sphere tries by diverse methods to get Mr. Square to raise his eyes into the new plane. It doesn’t work. Ultimately, the sphere resorts to a more hands-on approach and pulls Mr. Square up into the third dimension, extending him into height, essentially creating a cube. Mr. Square has an epiphany. His “insides” are extended “up.” He is now able to view an entire new dimension about which he was previously ignorant, and from this vantage point, he can clearly see things about his world that he had previously only inferred.

Mr. Square also has had a dream about Lineland, where the inhabitants exist in a single dimension. They don’t even understand the two dimensions that seem intuitive to Mr. Square. By considering the things that one-dimensional beings don’t understand about two dimensions, Mr. Square is better able to grasp by analogy the realities of the third dimension.

He takes an additional mental step and thinks about the possibility of a fourth, fifth, or even more dimensions. All these extra dimensions represent heresy to the sphere, who is quite content with just the three.

Learning about new dimensions of existence isn’t problem-free. Many prophets have been labeled — and even executed — as heretics. Likewise, after returning to Flatland, Mr. Square ends up in prison for preaching the heresy of the third dimension.

I believe Mr. Abbott wanted his readers to ponder the possibility that the three physical dimensions we experience in our daily lives, those of length, width, and height, may not fully represent all of reality. But perhaps our reality can be extended in a new way by taking our “within” and extending it “above.” Above and within. This seems to me to be exactly how the Bible describes the location of heaven. Heaven can’t be located anywhere with just the three spatial dimensions because the spiritual realm comprises so much more.

The heaven in which our Father resides presents multiple mysteries to three-dimensional beings such as humans. The Bible presents clues that heaven may represent much more than we can imagine. The opening phrase of Genesis says, “In the beginning God created the heavens (yes, the plural heavens) and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Some old translations of the Lord’s Prayer even use the plural. In the fourteenth century, John Wycliffe, the first person to translate the Latin Vulgate Bible into English, wrote “Our Father that art in heavens,” and at the end of the nineteenth century Robert Young, who provided posterity with Young’s Literal Translation, concurred: “Our Father who [art] in the heavens!”

Pictures and talk about heavenly locations provide analogies that can help us embrace concepts. But if we keep looking, literally, within the limits of three-dimensional, physical reality, heaven will remain elusive.

But who is the Father residing there?

Some versions of the Lord’s Prayer, address Our Father and then continue directly to “in heaven.” They omit the phrase “who art” or its equivalents entirely.

The original Greek text doesn’t directly include “Who art.” I can’t read Greek, but I do have some resources that reproduce the Greek text. I’ve also got an interlinear translation, a concordance, and some other tools. As best as I can make it out, the original language — with the words in their Greek, non-English order — says something like “Father of us the (or who) in the heaven.” The phrase apparently contains no verb related to being.

The “Father of us” part seems pretty straight forward. With the words in typical English order it becomes “Our Father.” “The/who in the heaven,” however, introduces an odd problem. To the Greek speakers of the first century, I’m sure it made perfect sense, but the words don’t readily align themselves to my own use of my native language here in the twenty-first century. Might it mean something like “the one who is” in the heaven? Or perhaps harkening back to the name God used of himself when Moses asked (Exodus 3:14), could it possibly be interpreted to be along the lines of “Our Father, the I Am” in the heaven?

Early translators who worked to render the Greek text into Latin came up with the famous opening phrase that appears in the Vulgate version of the Bible, “Pater noster qui in caelis.” Literally, word for word, “Father ours who in heaven.”

In his translation, Wycliffe didn’t actually use the word “who.” He said, “Our Father that art…” A few centuries later, William Tyndale oversaw the first attempt to translate the New Testament from the original Greek instead of the Latin version. When he translated the verse during the 1500s, he wrote “which”: “Our Father which art in heaven.” The Geneva Bible, also produced during the sixteenth century, agreed, “which.” The original King James Version of the Bible in 1611 retained the word “which,” as did the 1662 version of the prayer found in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (BCP).

Many later translations of the Bible in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — including the American Standard Version, Young’s Literal Translation, and the 1899 American Edition of the Douay-Rheims version — along with the updated 1928 BCP all adopted “who.”

I once talked with a man who believed that this difference in terminology indicated that Biblical translators originally thought of God as an object. The man claimed that the notion of a personal God — a God who was a who rather than a God that was a thing or a principle — entered contemporary thought and began to spread sometime during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The idea supported his theological suppositions, but linguistically, it overlooked the normal evolution of grammatical patterns and word preferences in formal English.

During the formative years when modern English was being standardized, thats and whiches commonly referred, without any ambiguity, to persons. In casual conversation even today, the word that is often heard instead of who: The girl that played the piano. The boy that sang in the choir. An English teacher or careful writer might cringe, but people do make statements like these all the time.

As to which, the Oxford English Dictionary documents that the word was used to refer to persons for centuries. Writers of no less stature than Chaucer and Shakespeare used it to refer to people.

The real issue, irrespective of grammatical evolution, is God’s relationship with humanity as a personal Father. Our Father is a who, and he has revealed himself as a God with personhood.

Art is another old-fashioned word that doesn’t immediately work well in contemporary English. The word is a verb, a form of to be, that infamous, irregular verb responsible for such oddities as I am, you are, and he is.

In current, standard English there isn’t an equivalent for “he art.” The closest is in a nonstandard dialect with a phrase such as “He be.” “He be” has a meaning slightly different from “He is.” He is, refers to the moment. He is at home. That’s where he is right now. But, if he be at home. That’s an enduring or habitual presence. If he be at home, that’s where you should expect to find him.

“Our Father, who is in heaven,” is a fine statement in modern English. But “Our Father, who art in heaven” brings to the modern ear a sentiment that may not have been originally intended but that can yet have meaning. That presents an emphasis on the permanent: Our Father, he be there. Enduringly. Always. For all the yesterdays and for all the tomorrows. Our Father who art in heaven. Art, as in the “I am.” Not our father who was in heaven or who will be in heaven. Not even our father who just happens to be in heaven at this moment, but Our Father who exists, everlastingly in heaven.

When I offer my prayer to Our Father, I find comfort in the personal connection of “who” and the enduring quality of “art,” but I can also appreciate the immediacy of “is.” When those words are omitted, these aspects of God’s character are not lost. Their meaning is still present even if I pray more simply: Our father in heaven.