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Inquisitive Isaac wrote:

Hi, guys —

I certainly believe in the Assumption of Our Blessed Mother (body and soul) into Heaven. Therefore would it make sense to say then that Heaven is an actual, physical place.

  • Could it possibly be that Heaven is some where in our physical universe; not in some spiritual realm that we cannot see?

I'm not trying to make light of this by any means. Souls are spirit and have no need for any physical world with time and space limits.

  • Other than Christ's Resurrected, Glorified Body and Our Blessed Mother's, are there any other souls that have been taken to Heaven, both body and soul?

Thank you,

Isaac
  { Is Heaven a place; and beside Jesus and Mary, are there other souls with their bodies in Heaven? }

John replied:

Hi, Isaac —

Thanks for your questions.

As to Heaven being a place.

Well, it has to be some sort of place. It might not be time and space as we understand it but existence itself requires space. Now that doesn't mean the space has the same law of physics as our space but that's really a mystery we can't begin to understand.

As to whether other souls that have been taken to Heaven both body and soul.

Depending on how literally you want to take Genesis, Genesis 5 seems to imply that Enoch was taken up into Heaven, body and soul. Later in the book of Second Kings, we see that Elijah was taken body and soul into Heaven. There are some Jewish traditions as well.

In addition, one could possibly understand the epistle of Jude to say that Moses' dead body was taken into Heaven. I would imagine, if that's the case, his body was reunited to his soul.

John

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