Archive: In Search of Heaven

By James S. Robb

Funerals affect people in different ways. Some people are tearful; others are depressed. A few brave spirits try to be joyful.

I’m usually awestruck.

We Christians are expert rhetoricians. We talk endlessly about such weighty things as assurance of salvation; sometimes our talk seems abstract, even unreal. But not at funerals. Seeing my friend lying dead in a steel box takes all the carelessness out of me. I find myself whispering, “They’re about to put him into the ground,” like I’d never heard of that happening before.

And I think, while staring at the body, that the ultimate promise of our faith isn’t so abstract after all. The subject of heaven becomes immediate.

Right then, when my interest in heaven is piqued, comes the letdown; the pastor preaches the standard sermon. Heaven is mentioned only sparingly. When the funeral is over almost everyone wants to change the subject. That’s just the way it is.

One afternoon while sitting in my office I flipped over to Phil Yancey’s column in Christianity Today titled “Heaven Can’t Wait.” He had the same concern I did! Yancey questioned why we modems, even we evangelicals, say so little on the subject of heaven. He then presented a challenge, stating, “It seems to me Christian communicators have a clear responsibility to project a new understanding of heaven into modem consciousness. If we fail we forfeit one of our faith’s greatest features.”

A new understanding of heaven? Quite an order. But if the gauntlet was being thrown down, I couldn’t resist picking it up. Having a solid excuse to explore the afterlife would be the chance of a lifetime. I decided to launch a search for heaven.

I got myself invited to interview a Sunday school class of five-year-olds on the subject of heaven. The answers they gave revealed some colorful ideas of what the preschool set thinks of the eternal city.

“Not even the space shuttle can get there,” observed one boy.

“Probably you’ll just fly around. Probably it will be boring,” a girl theorized.

The children seemed to have a pretty good grasp on what you had to do to get to heaven, although they erupted into a debate on whether it was God or Jesus who died for our sins.

On my way out, Charles Howell, a friend of mine who teaches the class with his wife, Jean, startled me with this observation: “A lot of people never grow out of those five-year-old concepts of heaven.” I think he is right.

It seems most of us have trouble advancing from our early-childhood view of heaven as an everlasting rest home—antiseptic, gleaming and dull. When I envision heaven, it’s hard to see anything but a white walled, Mediterranean city. Most people I know see it more as a quiet, country resort—certainly a nice place to visit, but would you really want to live there?

Few Christians today are taking time to think much about heaven. Many don’t seem particularly interested in the subject and allow outdated imagery left over from childhood to substitute for serious thought. This is unfortunate.

Believers of other eras generally showed more interest in the place they expected to spend eternity. But we residents of the 20th century tend to focus exclusively on short-term, material matters.

Why is heaven given so little attention, even by evangelical Christians? To find the answer to this puzzle I recently talked with a number of creative Christian thinkers as well as sounding out some other sources. My goal was to update my fuzzy ideas on heaven—not so much what it looks like, but what kind of place it is.

Early in my study I discovered that some people don’t dwell on heaven simply because they don’t believe in it. Fishing for lay opinion about heaven, I placed a little ad in a local shoppers’ weekly. In response, Geoffrey Young dashed off a post card with this message: “I think no ‘heaven’ could be more blissful than this earth, and no ‘hell’ could be more tortuous than this earth. Why bother your mind thinking about some ‘heaven’ that may exist somewhere else? Heaven and hell are within you.”

Lutheran theologian Richard John Neuhaus believes such sentiments are spreading. He told me, “One of the great public, even political, events of the modern world is the widespread loss of belief in immortality and eternal life.” He observed that nonbelievers are forced to place all their stakes on the “transient moment” we call earthly life. “They overload the circuits of what earthly life can sustain in terms of hopes and expectations,” he commented. “Therefore they are frequently embittered and fearful people.”

That analysis is certainly true for much of Europe and Asia, where atheism is spreading, yet surely America is a different case.

George Gallup tells us that 71 percent of Americans believe in heaven. What’s more impressive, 66 percent think their chances of going there are “good” or “excellent” (Religion in America, 1984). These amazingly high figures far exceed the number of serious Christians in America.

Paradoxically, there is a dearth of good contemporary literature on heaven—a couple of books and a smattering of periodical articles nearly exhaust the supply. If Americans largely believe themselves to be heaven-bound, why the slack interest?

Presbyterian church historian Richard Lovelace gave me one possible reason for the apathy concerning heaven—increased life span. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Lovelace noted, “you had to have virtually 15 children in order to have three or four survive. You were constantly up against the raw fact of death.” Heaven could hardly be overlooked in those days; most of your family probably lived there.

But we shouldn’t ignore heaven simply because we live in the 20th century. Death might be less noticeable these days, but it is just as certain. Since life ends, it stands to reason we should give some thought to the afterlife. As D. L. Moody once observed, “If I were going to dwell in any place in this country, if I were going to make it my home, I would want to inquire about the place, about its climate, about the neighbors I would have, about everything, in fact, that I could learn concerning it” (Heaven, F. H. Revell, 1880).

According to some of the thinkers I consulted, such heavenly curiosity may be inborn, even if it’s neglected. Peter J. Kreeft, philosophy professor at Boston College, writes, “There is great beauty and value and goodness and meaning in life under the sun—why do we want more? Why do we keep asking: Is that all there is? We are like children opening a thousand beautiful Christmas presents and asking after each one: ‘Is that all there is?’” (Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing. Harper and Row, 1980). Kreeft says the discontent is nothing but our suppressed longing for heaven.

C. S. Lewis put his finger on it when he wrote, “There are times when I think we do not desire heaven, but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.”

One pleasant discovery I made was that meditation about heaven can be more than mere speculation. With numerous passages on the subject, Scripture lays a solid foundation for further thinking. Jesus cleared away a lot of the fog surrounding heaven. He confirmed that each person would not only live again after the grave, but each person would be judged. To the righteous, Jesus said the King (Himself) would say, “‘You have my Father’s blessing; come, enter and possess the kingdom that has been ready for you since the world was made’” (Matt 25:34, NEB). The wicked, of course, would be thrown into hell. Jesus further described heaven to His disciples shortly before His death: “In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2). Jesus informed the repentant thief dying beside Him on the cross that he would be in paradise—heaven, presumably—that very day.

With this biblical evidence as a base, I asked several thinkers to elaborate about heaven. Some of them took a mystical approach. Richard John Neuhaus told me that to learn about heaven you must concentrate on God. “The question,” he said, “is what does one think of God, and why is it that one loves God? The answer, I think, is the love built within us that responds to His creating and redeeming love. Heaven is that union, that mystical communion, in its fulfilled form.”

On the other hand, Neuhaus does not put down what some call the “Islamic” view of heaven which stresses pleasure. “Heaven is everything splendid, glorious, intriguing, celebrative, that in our human condition we can possibly imagine,” he said. “Having said that, we have to say that it is more. It is that pleasure or that delight or that joy greater than which cannot be thought.” All of that will be heaven, says Neuhaus, because heaven is union with God.

Robert Schuller took a similar, but more graphic, approach. “When I see heaven, I don’t see a material place,” he stated. “I’ve said [the] Andromeda [galaxy] might be it, because it’s 2.5 million light years from here. So if we develop a rocket that could travel at the speed of 186,000 miles per second, it would take us 2.5 million years just to get to the outside edge of it. So it might be a place, but I don’t see it as a place.

“I see it as a state of being,” he continued. “I would equate the quality of life there to the psychological and emotional state of what Adam had before the Fall. If I understand the Bible in Genesis and classical theology, when God created the earth and put Adam and Eve there, He intended it to be heaven on earth. So what was the consciousness of Adam before the Fall? I think it was one of glory—harmless glory, reflecting the glory of God like the moon reflects the sun.”

As good as all that sounds, it doesn’t answer one common misgiving about heaven. That is, will heaven be boring? It’s possible on earth to become quite bored during a one-week vacation. And forever, after all, is a very long time. As great as being with God is, does anything happen in heaven?

Peter Kreeft describes the problem well. “The popular head picture of heaven is one of changeless perfection, sometimes in imagery of harps, halos and clouds, sometimes in imageless concepts of abstract spirituality. That may be heaven for angels, but it’s more like hell for humans.”

Quite right. Methodist missionary E. Stanley Jones often told audiences he wasn’t planning to sit around in heaven. He claimed that when he died he would give himself 24 hours to rest and 24 more to visit friends, then it was off to work. He planned to approach Christ and say, “Haven’t you a world that is fallen, that needs an evangelist?” (A Song of Ascents, Abingdon, 1968).

Fortunately for our eternal happiness, nearly every thinker I talked with strongly challenged the idea of a boring heaven.

“Unless we are radically changed,” Richard Lovelace commented, “we’re going to be creative beings who have a drive to exercise dominion. I think of the eternal state as our ability to take all these drives built into us by God and exercise them without the distortion of sin.” What this could mean is that heaven might be full of glorified farmers taking centuries to develop better crop varieties or redeemed musicians creating new and greater forms of music. The possibilities are endless.

Lovelace believes the dull heaven concept was imported into Christian thought by Augustine, who picked up on Plato’s view of an ethereal, non-material afterlife. This idea has no basis in Scripture, Lovelace said.

Indeed, the apostle Paul taught that, though the bodies of the redeemed in heaven would be unlike bodies on earth, the new models would be a great improvement rather than ghostlike. “The first man [Adam] was made ‘of the dust of the earth’: the second man [Jesus] is from heaven,” Paul wrote. “As we have worn the likeness of the man made of dust, so we shall wear the likeness of the heavenly man” (1 Cor. 15:47, 49).

When I interviewed Sheldon Vanauken, author of A Severe Mercy, he suggested that earthly senses such as smell and taste will be carried over into eternity. For example, he believes we will eat (or something like it) in heaven.

Thinking about what we will do in heaven may draw a blank, writes Kreeft, because we may not be considering all the possibilities. He points out that on earth there are two basic postures—working  and resting. When we’re not doing one, we’re doing the other. Both are necessary, but they get tiring when overdone. However, Kreeft notes a third option—play. Not ordinary play, but joyful, creative play. This sort of intense play pushes aside thoughts of weariness or boredom. According to Kreeft that’s how heaven will be. We won’t be conscious of the passage of centuries, for we will be caught up in heavenly joy. As C. S. Lewis once observed, “Joy is the serious business of heaven” (Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963).

Does a clear view of heaven have any relevance here on earth? On two or three counts, the answer seems to be yes.

Although we normally think of heaven only in terms of our future home, Jesus spent much time talking about a kingdom of heaven in which all His disciples were citizens. Picking up on this idea, Sheldon Vanauken states, “It begins now. It’s been said that both heaven and hell are retroactive. That is, when we die and see our lives clearly for the first time, we will see, if we are in heaven, that everything has been heaven leading up to there even though we’ve gone through much pain and sorrow.”

Schuller attributes much of his optimistic outlook on life to his belief in heaven. “On a subconscious level I know I can’t lose. We talk about winning or losing, succeeding or failing; but we’re only talking about certain rounds in the battle, right? The fifteenth and final round is the eternal destiny of my soul. I know I’ve got that one licked.”

Furthermore, Neuhaus believes faith in heaven is necessary to give proper perspective to our worldly work. “I think that other-worldliness is an absolute requisite for genuine engagement in the tasks of this world. That is, if one really believes that this brief span we call life on earth is all that there is, then that person is set up either for self-delusion or for despair.

“But if one has a sense that this brief span is not everything, that the enterprise we are involved in is part of a much more encompassing and mysterious project of God Himself, then one can work at his or her earthly task with a high degree of confidence. Of course we’re not going to build the kingdom of God on earth.

“But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that during this time of pilgrimage and testing, one is found faithful.”

James Robb is executive editor of Good News and editor-in-chief of Bristol Books.