Our Father who art in heaven
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven. (sicut in caelo et in terra.)
This is the first half of the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples according to Matthew 6: 9-13. My question concerns a seeming ambiguity in the second two lines. Are we praying that a) the kingdom come on earth, or are we praying b) not that the kingdom come on earth, but that it come in heaven, and that the will of the Father be done on earth as it is in heaven?
Perhaps it would be better to put the problem in terms of an amtriguity (to coin a word). In the second two lines, are we praying that
a) the Father’s kingdom be realized on earth?
or that
b) the Father’s kingdom be realized in heaven?
or that
c) the Father’s kingdom be realized both on earth and in heaven, perhaps by way of some mysterious spiritualization of the material realm concomitantly with a materialization of the spiritual realm?
I claim that there is this amtriguity (three-fold ambiguity) in the second two lines. How deal with it? My natural Platonic (some would say ‘gnostic’) tendency is to view (b) as the correct interpretation. But I am open to (c) and thus to the idea that Christianity in its innermost core is involved in a mysterious synthesis, a sort of quasi-Hegelian Aufhebung of the matter-spirit opposition in a way that lies beyond the power of our discursive-dianoetic minds to grasp, except by way of images and shaky analogies.
But we need to back up a step.
I take ‘earth’ to refer to the entire material realm, and not to the planet Earth, although of course our home planet, “the third stone from the Sun” (Jimi Hendix) is a tiny bit of the material realm, i.e., the physical cosmos. This is an important distinction, which is why you should always use the majuscule ‘E’ when referring to our home planet. When the Artemis astronauts broke free of the Earth’s gravitational field, and took a look at the dark side of the Moon, they remained on earth (in terra). They remained within the material realm. They did not enter heaven, assuming that ‘heaven’ refers to a pure spiritual, and thus immaterial, realm. You cannot rocket into heaven, and no matter where in the universe the rocket takes you, you will be on earth. Not even Elon Musk can rocket you into heaven.
Collateral observation: When Christ ascended into heaven, he did not take off like a rocket into outer space. He did not ascend like a rocket ascends. He ‘dematerialized.’ But not in the ‘beam-me-up-Scotty’ sort of way via matter transmitter, but in a mysterious, wholly spiritual way. In the Ascension, Christ did not de-materialize in order to re-materialize in a different spatiotemporal location. “The right hand of the Father” cannot refer to a spatial location. In the Ascension, Christ vanished from the material realm and entered a purely spiritual, hence wholly immaterial, realm. Or at least, that is the (Platonic-gnostic) way I am inclined to think of the Ascension.
I hope the Ascensive digression helps explain the distinction between earth (the earthly realm) and heaven (the wholly spiritual, and thus immaterial, realm).
But there is wrinkle that must be noted. I distinguished between earth (the material realm) and the planet Earth. But of course Earth is a part of the material realm. (Everything Earthly is earthly, but not conversely.) So if the Father’s kingdom comes (is realized on earth), it will presumably be realized on the planet Earth, although not necessarily to the exclusion of its being realized elsewhere in the material realm.
Now given the distinction between the earthly as the realm of space-time-matter and the heavenly as the realm of the immaterial, non-spatial, and eternal, there is a clear difference between the realization of God’s kingdom on earth in the future and its realization in heaven in eternity.
(The vexing question of the relation of time and eternity obtrudes here, but it must relegated to the ‘back burner’ for now. For example, does eternity come after Time? What on earth, or in heaven, could that mean?)
And so, in conclusion, I pose the question: which of (a)-(c) did Christ intend when he taught his disciples to pray the Pater Noster?