Rehabilitating Heaven

Every so often I write about heaven, and I can hardly keep myself from waxing rhapsodic. I find the ideas and imagery of the afterlife truly inspiring. Yet I also find it difficult to keep from waning snarkily (please forgive the semantic chimera). Heaven is one of my great comforts and joys, yet for many other believers, it seems to lead only to confusion or apathy. "Won't heaven be boring?" I can hardly believe my ears.

Many people -- even many Christians -- seem to envision of heaven of puffy clouds and plinking harps and halos a la mode. Yet how many of us would willingly resign ourselves to such a life?  Why do we imagine an afterlife devoid of joy, a paradise devoid of pleasure, a heaven devoid of humanity?

As I've said before, such a heaven is a heresy. There is no room in my theology for a God who would create man, call him very good, and forcibly remove from his eternal future all that defined him as human.

For one, heaven is not somewhere "up there." Christianity promises "a New Heaven and a New Earth" (Rev. 21:1).  The Apostles' Creed insists on "the resurrection of the body." The Christian faith and the Christian future are equally and essentially Incarnational.

Our stereotype of heaven is taken from the imagery of Revelation, which speaks of an eternal choir singing for the praise and glory of God. This is quite true: life after death will be in a perpetual state of worship. Yet God's glory is not confined to the nave! Even the most devout among us would have a hard time accepting an eternal existence in the choir loft.

Just as surely as we can whistle, so we can worship while we work.

The Communion of the Saints

Rehabilitating heaven is one of my passions, and there's a lot of ground to cover. I've been waiting to do a series of notes on Life After Death for quite some time. I'll post occasionally on the topic, while continuing my exploration of Catholic dogma.  I hope you enjoy the series.

If you aren't bothered by the potential spoilers, I'd recommend Dr. Peter Kreeft's essay on Fourteen Questions About Heaven. There are some points where I disagree, but I think it's a splendid resource.

Contemplations in Theology: #14

One of my favorite verses is 1 Corinthians 6:3 - "Do you not know that we will judge angels?" It is a deliciously vague verse, dropping the merest hint of our future as restored humanity.

Angels reside continually in the unadulterated Presence of God. It shows. I can't remember a single instance in Scripture where a guy meets an angel and doesn't fall to his knees in incapacitating fear. We're talking about Seriously Tall People with flaming swords, heads of lions, massive wings, circles within circles... you know, the works.

And yet 1 Corinthians 6:3 tells us that the Christian shall not only be able to withstand such a sight, but shall indeed be judges presiding over such creature.

God has something up His sleeves. Angel means 'messenger' or (more broadly) 'agent,' so the angels were made to carry out and communicate His will. I will not attempt a more detailed examination of what angels are, for I will readily admit I could care less. The point is that God made humanity in HIS OWN IMAGE. We are more than agents, more than messengers, more than any heavenly creature. For God implanted in our souls the germ of Himself. Our souls yearn for Him for this reason. We desire the good, the true and the beautiful because those noble qualities reflect Him. We are defined as human precisely in the degree to which we reflect God.

And then we fell.

Salvation is like a Texas Two-Step. First we're saved... then we're really saved. Justification is necessary to get us through the door, past the threshold, to the hearth of Heaven and the arms of God. But what will we do once we're there?

Most Christians, if they're honest with themselves, will admit that an eternity of harps and choral singing sounds -- frankly -- as boring as Hell. Granted, we're supposed to be happy about the prospect because God will be there, and admittedly, that would make up for quite a bit. But why would we ever look forward to losing everything that we enjoy in this life, those things that define us as human?

Such a heaven is a heresy. If our humanity is defined by the image of God, then God could not have intended to remove that image from us when we are saved. If anything, our humanity shall be amplified, purified, pushed to its outer bounds. C.S. Lewis once wrote that humans are like children who prefer mud pies over chocolate, a sandbox over a day at the beach. Our desires aren't excessive; they're too small. We think too small. The harps and the choral singing isn't going to be our full-time occupation in the heavenly barracks. The music is supposed to symbolize the ecstasy we shall experience in the Presence of God, an ecstasy we sometimes find in music. The words of praise speak to the joy of our hearts that will be constantly expressing gratitude towards God.

There is no temple in the New Jerusalem. The city is the temple. Our entire lives will glorify God, and God will glorify our entire lives.

There's the word: glorify. Justification is nice for those first baby-steps, but glorification is the meat of our eternal future. Christ was the firstborn, the Son of Man just as surely as the Son of God. And the saints are the children of God, who died with Christ in His death and are raised up with Him through His resurrection. We owe everything to God, and will owe Him all the more when He lavishes His love upon us.

Please, enough with the heaven of school uniforms, of starchy collars and organ music (unless you actually like organ music, in which case let your imagination run wild). Heaven is going to be beyond your wildest dreams, almost as far beyond description as God is, mostly because it's going to be God's party, put on for all eternity for our enjoyment.

Since before time began, God prepared a feast for you. Now He's waiting for you to arrive, His guest of honor. Traffic's a beast, but the party is worth it.

Contemplations in Theology: #3

Christians are often stereotyped these days. Christianity itself is stereotyped. Yet of all the caricatures, I believe there is one that is the most corrupting, the most harmful and perverse, and it is one shared by Christian and non-Christian alike. It is our stereotype of heaven.

How long must we suffer the delusion that heaven is a land of kindly-faced angels and soft puffy clouds? Leaving the question of angels aside for later, I must ask, from where did we find this image of an ethereal Paradise? Certainly not from the Book of Revelation, for St. John did not see us living as airy immortals in an immaterial land. Rather, he saw "a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth passed away..." (Rev. 21:1).

We have retained something of the Manichean heresy, from the days of early Christianity. It was defeated in orthodox theology by St. Augustine, yet it endured. The Manichees taught that spirit was good and matter was evil, that the soul was trapped in a prison of corrupting flesh. Therefore, their idea of salvation was in the release of man from its human bondage, in the redemption of spirit from the slavery of substance, in the ascension to a purely ethereal life.

This is our doctrine of heaven taken to the extreme, and I maintain that it is fatal to Christian faith. We need look no further than Genesis to find that it took both "dust from the ground" and "the breath of life" from our Creator before the Scriptures declared "and man became a living being." Both elements--matter and spirit--were present from the Creation, and both elements were good. Salvation does not require that man abandon his body; only that he abandon his previous life of sin.

Man is both spiritual and material. There will be a new Heaven and a new Earth.

Paradise is not something totally beyond our experience; it is the fulfillment of our original nature, in the blessing of God's presence and perfection. This assertion is vital to my theology. Christianity does not ask us to renounce our humanity, but to fulfill it. Heaven is not a cosmic bribe, created as a special gift to those in whom God delights. It is the necessary outcome of the Promise, for God had given man dominon over the Creation; after the Fall, God meant to redeem man and restore him to his place over a restored Nature. Just as God promised Abraham that through him (and the Jewish people) all the nations would be blessed, so God had promised Adam that through him (and the human race) all of Creation would be blessed.

Our misconception of heaven is fundamentally a misconception of the human person.

Here is another startling argument, for those (such as myself) accustomed to the Protestant assertion of human sinfulness. Man is originally good. Man was created in innocence, in the image of God, and man has retained that intrinsic goodness and virtue. The Fall was a corruption of the original, but it did not and could not destroy it. Salvation does not replace, but restores. It brings the individual human back to his original place, in worship of God, in fellowship with man, and in stewardship of Nature.

Do we realize what it means when we say that Christ was fully God and fully Man?

I find the early cinematic depictions of Jesus Christ almost comical, in that they treat him as utterly different than any man. He is aloof, almost dispassionate; as loving and gentle as Mr. Rogers, certainly, but not human. The Scriptures present Him in a totally different light. He is weakened by hunger before being tempted by the Devil, he gets exasperated with ignorance of his disciples, he shows a sense of humor in puns (as when he renamed the dimwitted Simon "the rock"--Peter), and he rages against the religious hypocrites of his day. The famous "shortest verse" (John 11:35: "Jesus wept") could be more accurately translated "Jesus broke down and cried like a girl." Scripture records that in Gethsemane, his tears were like drops of blood: this is a real physiological symptom of extreme stress, in which the capillaries behind the eyes burst and seep into the tear ducts. His cry to God in Gethsemane to "take this cup away from me" was a real one, from a man who knew the torture that awaited him. Jesus Christ was not only God; he was more fully human than any human we could know.

This is our inheritance. We are children of His image, of His beauty, of His might. We are the sons of a King; we are the sons of God.

A final word, not about heaven but about the angels. I really wonder how we ever came to this traditional concept of the heavenly creatures, as patient and gentle creatures, much like kindly old nannies but with wings and flaming swords. This is utterly inconsistent with Scripture. In nearly every instance of an angelic visitation recorded in the Bible, the unlucky witness is either struck dumb in terror or must be dissuaded from awestruck worship. Ask yourselves, how many times were the angels obliged to say "do not be afraid" to the patriarchs and prophets? Did they ever tire from it, or did they appreciate the easy audience, like a bad stand-up comic appreciates an indulging crowd?

In Exodus 33, Moses was only allowed to see God with His back turned away (a direct glance would have killed him), yet even after another forty days and nights his face was still lit up like a Christmas tree, and all who saw him feared to approach. Angels live eternally in the direct presence of God. They are the messengers of God; they reflect His awesome power, His timeless glory. These are not meek and mild creatures, nor would we find their gazes comforting. Only when we have come to our inheritance as sons of God will we find ourselves able to return their gaze. Only when we too reflect fully the glory of the King can we endure the reflection of that majesty from others.