MAPPING ETERNITY: SPACE FOR THE LIFE EVERLASTING

The Bramante Staircase, Vatican Museum. Creative Commons.

“Where will you go when you die?” 

I grimaced when I drove past that bold question, emblazoned on a billboard right off the interstate. Living in Texas, the highways around my home are cluttered with aggressive church signs that seem to believe the road to heaven is paved with afterlife anxieties. Yet for all the failures of blunt billboard evangelism, I realized that question — where will you go when you die? — captures something insightful about how we discuss eternal life.

While eternity is a span of time, our conversations often focus on destinations: heaven above, earth below, and death down below. Thinking about eternal life in terms of space, rather than time, adds a different dimension to our understanding of salvation. In scripture, we see how spatial language can help us understand eternal life in relation to the cosmic movement of Jesus Christ. 

I’m sure this all sounds like science fiction: what do space-time relations, different dimensions, and cosmic movement have to do with eternal life? But I promise it’s far more mundane. Have you ever noticed how commonly we use spatial metaphors in our everyday lives? Consider our emotions: when we’re sad, we feel down. When we’re happy, things begin to look up — maybe we even feel elated (from the same root as elevated). Hope is uplifting, depression crushing. We can be in high spirits, or have low self-esteem.

This up-and-down language makes a certain sense to us as creatures who live in space. We feel the tug of gravity, and so we understand this language on a visceral level. It is our embodied experience that inclines us toward spatial metaphors, which orient us within abstract concepts. We do this all the time, subconsciously mapping our realities with spatial language: 

• Consider our hierarchies: Those to whom we assign privilege and power sit on top, while those without are on the bottom. On which floor would you expect to find a CEO’s office? What about her cleaning staff?

• Consider our ethics: when insulted, do we take the high road or strike back with a low blow? 

• Consider our economies: is business picking up, or is the stock market down? 

• Consider our eternal dimensions: where will you go when you die? Will you dwell down in the grave, or up in heaven?

This sense of space is often subtle, unintentional, only unconsciously noticed. Yet our language forms the topography of our lives, where “up” is frequently associated with positive things and “down” with negative ones. We know what it means to be downtrodden, to be uplifted, to be brought low, to stand tall. Our embodied sense of this up-and-down axis is a source of deep understanding. 

We use these same dimensions to talk about the afterlife: the good place — heaven, or paradise — is somewhere up above us. The bad place — be it Sheol, Gehenna, Hades, hell, or simply the grave — is somewhere beneath us. While these associations are not universal, they are common across many cultures. The apostle Paul used this same spatial imagination in his ministry to the churches of the 1st-century Mediterranean. His letters describe the gospel in terms of space, portraying eternal life as a dynamic force that moves through and beyond our up-and-down categories.

Trace the implicit movement of Philippians 2:5-11, the Christ-hymn that we read on Palm Sunday. This familiar passage carries us into the drama of Holy Week and the exultation of Easter, but it renders the lateral movement of Jesus (into Jerusalem, out to the cross) in vertical space. The scene begins in the heights of heaven, establishing Christ’s equality with God. It then moves down to earth, as Christ exchanges the form of God for a lower, mortal form. The scene descends even further from earth to the grave, with Christ’s humiliating death on a cross. It then ascends back to heaven, as the risen Christ is exalted above all things by sharing the very name of God.

And at that name, every knee shall bow: both in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth. The three spaces converge: heaven, earth, and grave are drawn together in worship. Resurrection, oriented within our spatial imagination, pulls all things upwards unto God. The swooping, parabolic movement of Jesus — the highs and lows of the gospel story — portrays eternal life as an active, dynamic reality.

I suspect this is why we commonly talk about eternity in terms of space, rather than time. Eternity can feel static, ponderous, unchanging. But our experience of eternal life is full of energy. Spatial metaphors are so powerful because they introduce the possibility of movement. Our moods, our hierarchies, our ethics, our economies, our eternity; when we map these ideas out in space, we discover a language to help us express change.

Philippians clearly illustrates that Christ is not confined to a static binary of “up” and “down”. He transcends these spatial categories, moving through them in order to make God’s saving love known to us. We find hope in his humbling and exaltation, as in Christ’s motion we see the chance for our own movement. Perhaps we too might rise above our earthly struggles and the specter of death — maybe we will find in Christ the path to eternal life. This is the spatial logic of the gospel: because Christ has moved down into our spaces (earth and grave), we can move up into Christ’s space (heaven). 

This highlights the relational dimension to our spatial imagination. In Postmodern Geographies, geographer and theorist Edward Soja argues that there is a dialectical relationship between spatial and social spheres. They are interconnected, and react to each other: a change in space causes a change in relationship, and vice versa. 

Paul’s spatial rendering of the gospel reveals the interconnection of space and relationship. God’s love for us propels Christ to move, swinging low to earth and grave for our salvation. That same love pulls us heavenward alongside the risen Christ, who we long to glorify. The good news of Easter is this salvation in motion, a dynamic reconciliation that we mirror in baptism: dying and rising, descending and ascending, joining the parabolic movement of Christ. As one of my favorite collects prays, “let the whole world see and know that things which were being cast down are now being raised up.” Eternal life is our participation in this cosmic turn, the whole of creation being raised up towards the throne of Christ.

This spatial imagination is not just a quirk of Philippians. We see the same language again in Romans 8, and can map Jesus’ movement through verses 32-34: from heaven down to earth, as God gave up Christ for us; from earth down to the grave, as Christ died for us;from the grave up to heaven, as Christ intercedes for us at the right hand of God. Christ is the trustworthy judge: we know he is on our side because he drew close to us through incarnation and death. The dialectic between space and relationship helps us see how Christ is on our side.

The essence of eternal life is stated most clearly in the stirring conclusion to Romans 8. Nothing can separate us from the love of God: neither death nor life, heavenly figures nor earthly powers, things present nor things to come, height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation. This exhaustive list covers the categories we’ve laid out so far: the forces of time and space; the powers of heaven, earth, and grave. Even the very axis of up-and-down that has kept us oriented begins to fade away. The inseparable love of God transcends them all. When it comes to eternal life, the space that matters most is proximity: nearness to the God who is the source of all life.

Ultimately, this spatial language orients us towards Easter hope. It is not the only way to think about eternal life, but it does help us sense the rising current of resurrection and reconciliation in our own lives. No matter where we are located in a given moment, in our highs or our lows, Christ is present with us — ceaselessly lifting us up, drawing us closer to God’s love. As the psalmist puts it, “Where can I go then from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I climb up to heaven, you are there; if I make the grave my bed, you are there also. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand will lead me and your right hand hold me fast.” (Psalm 139:6-9)

So, where will you go when you die? Nowhere that Christ has not already gone, and nowhere that will separate you from God’s love.