HEAVEN, CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF103HADITH. Sayings ascribed to the
prophet Muhammad. The collection is
considered the second most holy text in
Islam, the Qur’an being the first.
HAECCEITY. A property that can only
be possessed by one object. Some hold
that individual persons have a haecceity.
So, Barack Hussein Obama has the prop-
erty of being Barack Hussein Obama, and
no other person can have that property.
This bears on the philosophy of creation.
If there is a haeceity being Barack Hussein
Obama, God could have deliberately set
out to create him rather than someone
else who shares all his physical and men-
tal properties.
HARE, RICHARD MERVYN (1919–
2002). A defender of impartialism in the
ideal observer tradition. He also defended
a non-cognitive view of religious belief.
His works include The Language of Mor-
als (1952), Freedom and Reason (1963),
and Moral Thinking (1981).
HARTSHORNE, CHARLES (1897–2000).
A bold American philosopher, influenced
by Alfred North Whitehead. Hartshorne
defended pan-psychism and a form of
theism in which the world is in God
but God and the world are not identical
(sometimes called process theism or
panentheism). Hartshorne mounted a
vigorous defense of the ontological argu-
ment for the existence of God, as found
in the work of Anselm. He did not
subscribe to traditional Christian theism
on several fronts: he denied that God is
omnipotent, for example, and he was
skeptical about an individual afterlife. His
works include The Collected Papers of
Charles Sanders Peirce 6 vols. (ed. with
Paul Weiss, 1931–1935), The Philosophy
and Psychology of Sensation (1934),
Beyond Humanism (1937), Man’s Vision
of God and the Logic of Theism (1941),
The Divine Relativity (1947), Reality as
Social Process (1953), Philosophers Speak
of God (with William L. Reese 1953), The
Logic of Perfection (1962), Anselm’s Dis-
covery (1965), A Natural Theo logy for our
Time (1967), and Creative Synthesis and
Philosophic Method (1970).HEAVEN, CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION
OF. The hope of heaven is both the
climax of the Christian story and an inte-
gral component of the Christian vision
of reality. The heart of that vision is
the claim that the ultimate reality is the
trinity, a God who exists in three persons
in an eternal relationship of love. This
God is not only the source of all truth,
goodness, and beauty, God is also infi-
nitely creative and boundless in God’s
own happiness and joy.
The Christian story is that human
beings were created in the image of the
triune God for an eternal relationship
with God. Although humans have fallen
and gone their own way, it is God’s design
to restore and perfect that relationship.