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It remains to reflect that "earth" and "heaven,' " so understood, are closer in meaning to what the Nicene Creed speaks of respectively as "the visible" and "the invisible" (or "the seen" and "the unseen") than they are to "the earth" and "the heavens" referred to in Gen 1:1. There seems little doubt that what Gen 1:1 means by "the heavens" is the dome of the sky above us, with its sun and moon, stars and planets, somewhat as though they were all located on the inside of a inverted cup viewed by someone looking up at it from the plane on which the cup rests. But if this were to be taken as the meaning of "heaven" in the petition whose presuppositions we are concerned to understand, it would presuppose, in effect, that, while God's kingdom has always already come, because God's will has always already been done, in the sky and among the so-called heavenly bodies, this is not so on earth -- which is hardly what the petition presupposes. On the other hand, to take "heaven" in the petition to mean "the invisible" or "the unseen," makes perfectly good sense. For the possible as possible, no matter how determinate, is precisely not visible or seen, or otherwise the object of our ordinary sense perception, while the actual as such is typically accessible, directly or indirectly, to sense perception of one sort or another, whether or not it literally can be seen.

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