WHAT IS HEAVEN?
Detail of the Last Judgement, Fra Angelico. Public domain.
Q. What do we mean by heaven and hell?
A. By heaven, we mean eternal life in our enjoyment of God; by hell, we mean eternal death in our rejection of God.
(The Book of Common Prayer 1979, Catechism, p. 862)
What comes to mind when you hear the word “heaven”? Very probably, I suspect, a vague image of people standing around on clouds wearing white robes and halos, and playing harps. Possibly the people have wings.
This trope appears all over popular culture. Some of the details can be traced back to biblical references, but overall it’s a weird and misleading image that has very little to do with how Christianity actually understands the hope of “eternal life in our enjoyment of God”. No wonder that a lot of people think, “if all I’m going to do after I die is wear funny clothes, be bored, and learn to play an unfamiliar instrument, I’ll pass!” Or at least, “I’ll only go so I can see my loved ones who have died.”
Another reason that this conventional image of heaven may not be particularly appealing is that the loudest Christian voices – in the English-speaking West, anyway – are those who claim you can only get there by being a heterosexual American who votes Republican. It’s this kind of mindset that Billy Joel is rejecting when he sings, “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints;/the sinners are much more fun …”
With all due respect to Joel, though, he’s wrong. The saints in heaven aren’t crying; the whole point of heaven is the enjoyment of God’s presence, and that is the ultimate experience of joy and bliss – far more than just fun. The question, then, is, what does Christianity really say about heaven, and about why we should look forward to going there?
Much of the popular imagination of heaven has been shaped, for better or worse, by Dante’s Divine Comedy, and especially by Gustave Doré’s illustrations of Dante. Some of the “people sitting around on clouds” misconception is Dante’s fault, but there is one thing that Dante got absolutely dead right about heaven, and that is that everyone who wants to go there, will get there. God does not “send” anyone to hell.
Hell, as the catechism question I quoted at the beginning indicates, is the state of the individual’s self-chosen rejection of God. The choices that we make throughout our lives form us, and if we make too many choices focused on our own selfish greed and wilful dysfunction, we may lose the ability to recognize or choose the true good - that is, God - when we see it. When Episcopalians talk about people going to hell, we mean this as a shorthand for God recognizing that a person’s actions in life have formed their character in such a way that they prefer the self-centered delusion of control - i.e. hell - to the God-centered joys of heaven. God then respects that individual’s choices by allowing them to join their preferred company.
As C. S. Lewis writes in The Great Divorce, “No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.” (1) And, I would add, the desire does not even have to be serious and constant; even the faintest flicker of desire for something other than the self, God can kindle into a flame.
The rest of this article should therefore be read with the assumption that no one who wants to go to heaven will be unable to get there. So why, then, should one want it in the first place?
Christians believe God became human in Jesus Christ, died, and rose again, and thereby conquered death. Humans, who without God’s help could hope for nothing better after death than a kind of static void, known in the Hebrew Scriptures as Sheol, were liberated by Jesus’ resurrection to join him in a new and eternal form of life.
The most fundamental difference between our mortal life and our heavenly one is that there, we will know God perfectly and see God face to face. So the crucial piece of the puzzle is, why should that be something to look forward to?
Indeed, if you think of God as somewhere between boring and scary, the idea of heaven will feel somewhere between boring and scary. We can’t be excited about heaven if we’re not excited about God.
One of the things that I, at least, look forward to about heaven is the expectation that I will finally be able to ask a lot of questions about life and history and why the world is the way it is, and get complete and accurate answers. We are promised that in seeing God face to face, we will be able to know, if not exactly as God knows, at least much more clearly and fully. As St. Paul writes in I Corinthians 13:12, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
If life is a book, right now we’re in the middle of it, and none of the plot makes sense and we’re struggling to figure out what is going on and what we should do; in heaven, we’ll be able to read the last page and gasp with surprise at the twist that explains everything, and then go back and start over at the beginning and re-read the whole thing and pick up on all the details we missed. Think of the best book you ever read, and how the beauty of the language or the brilliance of the plot swept you away; and then think of getting the chance to sit down for a one-on-one talk with the author of that book, and really get to know the mind behind all that beauty and brilliance. God is the source of everything joyful and beautiful and lasting and good in the world; how amazing must it be to be directly in God’s presence?
Seeing and knowing God also comes with the converse: that we will be able to be fully and perfectly ourselves, purged of and freed from everything that held us back in our mortal lives. People whose lives were limited and deformed by trauma, by lack of opportunity, by injustice and oppression, or just by the ordinary limitations of finite humanity, will find themselves able to rejoice in being entirely who they are, and being loved for every part of that being. There are no closets, ghettoes, or minimum wage jobs in heaven.
St. Paul gives us a metaphor for what this renewed and re-created life will be like. Our bodies, he says, are like seeds, and “you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or some other grain. … What is sown is perishable, but what is raised is imperishable. … It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.” (I Corinthians 15:37, 42-43)
Imagine an acorn, or the seed of an apple, or a rose. If all you knew was the seed, could you even imagine the majesty of the hundred-year-old oak, or the flavour of a fresh-picked apple, or the beauty and fragrance of a rose? That’s how extraordinary our heavenly life will be compared to this one.
But what will we do there?
On one level, this is a question that doesn’t actually require an answer: we will be in the presence of God, in eternity, and the joy of that experience will be enough.
But since those who are reading this article are still in fact existing in three-dimensional space and in linear time, it might help to try to come up with some comparisons.
Think of those moments of your life when you were utterly transported; or utterly content; or utterly awestruck; or utterly absorbed. Think of the times when you were using every available skill and talent that you have at an absolutely crucial moment. Think of the times when the vastness of the universe, or its complexity, left you awestruck. Think of the times that you were absorbed in “flow”, in the feeling of creativity that makes you lose track of time. Think of the times of perfect bliss and satisfaction.
My moments might include being present at the birth of a new baby; standing on top of a mountain after having climbed there with my own two feet; tasting a fresh green bean from a vine I had planted myself; riding a horse down a dirt road on a perfect autumn day; hitting a high note in a choral concert with a full orchestra; or, since I’m a priest, celebrating the Holy Eucharist. Your moments will be different, because God has created each of us unique – and thank God for that! That’s what Billy Joel didn’t realize – that the saints are fun because of their utter uniqueness, while the sinners are boring because they are all, in their self-centeredness and rejection of joy, exactly the same.
And many of those perfect moments that help you to envision what the presence of God might be like, are probably associated with the presence of other humans – people who, perhaps, have already gone before you into eternity and with whom you are hoping to be reunited as we all dance together around the divine Throne. One of the glories of heaven will be finding again those whom we have lost, and also knowing for the first time many saints of other times and places, some of whom we have heard of and some of whom have been forgotten here on earth. This eternal union of all with each other and with God is called the Communion of Saints, and it is one of the great joys of eternity. (This is perhaps an appropriate moment to point out that one of the most widespread misconceptions of the Christian heaven is that people who go to it turn into angels. That is simply not true; angels are an entire separate order of created beings, immaterial, immortal, and genderless, among other differences from humans. Humans who are perfected in God’s presence are saints.)
As we fill in our mental image of what it will actually be like to be in the presence of God, we should also remember that in classical Christian theology, if there is an immaterial heaven where people float around on clouds amid beams of light, it is only an interim existence. Scripture promises that at the end of time, we will not be “raptured” from earth to heaven, but rather, earth will be re-created along with heaven. The whole creation will be made new, and the new creation will be more, not less, real and material than the current one.
The final book of the Bible, the Revelation to John, the “happily ever after” of the whole Christian story, depicts God dwelling with us in a city made of jewels and gold, with God’s throne in the centre and trees that bear fruit year round and whose leaves are “for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2). The city has no need of a temple or of a sun or moon, because God is in her midst and is her light. The Creeds affirm “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting,” and while some believe that the soul and body are not reunited until the end of time, reunited they will be, as St. Paul indicated in the passage about the mortal body as a seed that I cited above.
The best and most concise description of what heaven will be like that I’ve come across is in a short story by Jo Walton. In it, St. Zenobius, a medieval Florentine, is welcoming a new crop of resurrected saints to heaven.
“You may have heard it called ‘worship,’ but we usually call it ‘the Great Work.’ Those of you who have a theatrical tradition on your worlds can think of it like putting on a great play. It’s also been compared to doing scientific research, and to the Renaissance. It’s our great work of art. Your life on your planet has honed you into a tool for joining in. it’s like music and like painting and sculpture and chemistry and cosmology and dancing and costuming and a whole host of other arts and sciences you may be interested to learn. We all participate in our different ways. It’s a performance, a great performance with its acts and seasons, a performance that began with the Big Bang, an artwork whose canvas is galaxies. … Come on now, all of you. It’ll be such fun.” (2)
Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce. HarperCollins, 2001, p. 75.
Walton, Jo. “St. Zenobius and the Aliens,” in Starlings, Tachyon Publications, San Francisco, 2018, pp. 116-117.
