Heaven Can’t Wait

Jesus had asked the angels to sing. In the parking lot of an Arby’s in North Platte, Neb., 4-year-old Colton Burpo told his father, Pastor Todd Burpo, that he’d visited heaven while undergoing appendicitis surgery. Colton had climbed into the lap of Jesus, who was dressed in a white robe with a royal purple sash. The Son of Man then summoned winged angels and requested music. There were halos and bright colors, a rainbow horse and a throne for the Son at the right hand of the Father. Colton met John the Baptist (whom he found “really nice”) and saw the Virgin Mary (who was acting like “a mom” to Jesus).

Recounted in the best-selling book Heaven Is for Real (written by Lynn Vincent, who ghosted Sarah Palin’s memoir Going Rogue), Colton Burpo’s story has given fresh energy to a long-standing Christian view of life after death. For the Burpos, heaven is the place you go when you die.

But for some Christian leaders, the Bible points to a different view of heaven. “I don’t believe we are going to be floating around with little wings looking like Cupid playing harps for all eternity,” says John Blanchard, executive pastor of the 4,000-member Rock Church International in Virginia Beach and founder of Planet Rock Youth Ministries. “Heaven isn’t just a place you go–heaven is how you live your life,” says Blanchard, whose late father-in-law, Bishop John Gimenez, was a key figure in the rise of the religious right. “What’s trending is a younger generation, teens, college-aged, who are motivated by causes–people who are motivated by heaven are also people motivated to make a positive difference in this world.”

Angels and harps are all well and good, such Christians believe, but fighting HIV/AIDS is more urgent. This younger generation is driven by causes, says Blanchard, listing issues of social justice like combatting slavery and homelessness. “That’s a part of being an agent of heaven on earth,” he adds.

As Christians around the world prepare to celebrate Easter, a running debate about the hereafter is raising new questions about the definition of heaven–and what it says about the meaning of life. This conversation takes a subject that has occupied humanity for millennia and places it squarely amid topics of faith that are deeply relevant today. Even in the wake of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, many of us believe in heaven–85% of all Americans, according to Gallup. Most of us are apparently confident–or at least say we are–that life does not end at the grave.

Yet we don’t necessarily agree on what heaven is. There is, of course, the familiar image recounted by Colton Burpo. But there is also the competing view of scholars such as N.T. Wright, the former Anglican bishop of Durham, England, and a leading authority on the New Testament. What if Christianity is not about enduring this sinful, fallen world in search of a reward of eternal rest? What if the authors of the New Testament were actually talking about a bodily resurrection in which God brings together the heavens and the earth in a wholly new, wholly redeemed creation? As more voices preach a view that’s at odds with the pearly gates (but supported, they note, by Scripture), faithful followers must decide which approach they believe in.

It’s a distinction with some very worldly implications. If heaven is seen as life’s ultimate reward, then one’s vision of paradise shapes how one lives. It is an essential tenet of Christian faith, of course, to love one’s neighbor. But if you believe the world will be destroyed at the last day while the blessed look down from a disembodied heaven, then you are most likely going to view the things of this world in a different light than someone who believes there will be a bodily resurrection on an earth that is to be, in the words of a great hymn, “our eternal home.” Accepting the latter can mean different priorities, conceivably putting issues like saving the environment up there with saving souls. As Blanchard suggests, it also has consequences for churches hungry to reach young people. A heaven that demands stewardship now may well resonate more with an activist generation.

Those who advocate the heaven-on-earth view must confront a widely held (and for many, deeply cherished) belief that goes beyond religion. Across the history of Christianity, the blue-sky afterlife is intertwined with culture, politics, economics, class and psychology. Seeing heaven as the world beyond this one can offer powerful comfort, particularly in life’s most dire circumstances. In a recent interview with Time, Trayvon Martin’s parents said they believed their slain son was “in heaven with God, and he has on a hoodie.”

But a more intimately connected heaven and earth is worth a deeper look. The debate doesn’t fit easily on the usual left-right, blue-red, liberal-conservative spectrum. That’s because each understanding is rooted explicitly in faith in the salvation history of Jesus. The divide isn’t about a secular ideal of service vs. a religiously infused vision of reality. It’s about whether believing Christians see earthly life as inextricably bound up with eternal life or as simply a prelude to a heavenly existence elsewhere.

A word of disclosure: I’m a Christian–a poor one, to be sure–who keeps the feast and says his prayers. For me, the scholarly redefinition of heaven as a manifestation of God’s love on earth has been illuminating, for it at once puts believers in closer proximity to the intent of the New Testament authors and should inspire the religious to open their arms more often than they point fingers. Heaven thus becomes, for now, the reality one creates in the service of the poor, the sick, the enslaved, the oppressed. It is not paradise in the sky but acts of selflessness and love that bring God’s sacred space and grace to a broken world suffused with tragedy until, in theological terms, the unknown hour when the world we struggle to piece together is made whole again. We could do worse than think in such terms.

A History of the Afterlife

In earliest Christianity, the understanding of life after death was, like so much else in the young faith, the product of both classical pagan and Jewish thought and custom. For the ancients, the dead were largely consigned to the shadowy underworld of Hades; at times the virtuous and the heroic were given eternal life in the elysian fields or distant western islands.

Platonic assertions that the soul was immortal but the body temporal put pagan philosophy in conflict with evolving Jewish ideas of resurrection. Many 1st century Jews were awaiting the coming of the kingdom of God (sometimes called the kingdom of heaven), which was to be brought about by a Davidic messiah who would inaugurate a new age of justice for Israel and a general resurrection of the dead. The early Christians–who were, of course, Jews trying to work out the meaning of their experience of Jesus–were more Jewish than Platonic. The story of Jesus as interpreted by Paul and as told in the Gospels created a unique understanding of salvation and life after death. No one in 1st century Judaism had been looking for a human atoning sacrifice.

Yet there the disciples were on that first Easter, trying to make sense of a crucified king and an empty tomb. As they recalled the words of Jesus in his lifetime–words they had not understood at the time–early Christians started to work out a powerful new vision of human destiny. Those who believed in Jesus were to be saved, which did not mean a glorious eternity in an ethereal region. It meant, instead, a two-step process. First, when a believer died, his body was left behind and his soul went to a place of rest in preparation for the second phase: a bodily resurrection into “new heavens and a new earth”–not simply a heaven.

Jesus was to return, probably imminently, to set the world to rights. “When 1st century Jews spoke about eternal life, they weren’t thinking of going to heaven in the way we normally imagine it,” explains Wright, the New Testament expert, who is now at the University of St. Andrews. “Eternal life meant the age to come, the time when God would bring heaven and earth together, the time when God’s kingdom would come and his will would be done on earth as in heaven.”

After Jesus failed to inaugurate the new kingdom in the lifetimes of the disciples and early apostles, subsequent generations of Christians–now two millennia’s worth–were left to speculate about the nature of life after death. And the further believers have moved in time from the New Testament era, the further many Christians have moved from New Testament understandings about heaven. The power of poets and artists, of Dante and Michelangelo, created indelible images; the fiery story of Revelation, though problematic and highly metaphorical, has long been taken too literally. (A book on the subject by Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, has just reached the best-seller list.) What’s been truly left behind is what Jesus and his contemporaries were likely talking about when they talked about heaven.

Heaven in America, Then and Now

Different understandings of heaven in American history tell us something about the values of given eras. In excellent books in recent years, Gary Scott Smith (Heaven in the American Imagination) and Lisa Miller (Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife) have explored these ever mutating visions of the afterlife. For the Puritans, heaven was centered on the praise and constant worship of God himself: the Lord was the center of attention. In the Victorian era, the imagery of family became more intimately associated with views of heavenly life; the Mormon proposition that families were bonded one to another for all eternity was the fullest manifestation of this domestication of the afterlife. For African Americans during the battle over abolition and the Civil War, heaven was seen as a glorious afterlife, a release from their earthly chains. It is no wonder that slaves would sing for a sweet chariot to swing low and carry them home, since their temporal home was so miserable.

In the more prosperous 20th century, heaven became a kind of glorious Disney World–or, depending on your taste, a transfigured Tiffany’s, a celestial Cartier–a place where the redeemed were rewarded with the type of riches they had sought in life. This is the view that is so familiar: in the words of Billy Graham, heaven “is far more glorious than anything we can imagine. Heaven is like the most perfect and beautiful place we can conceive–only more so.”

And so from the young (4-year-old Colton Burpo) and the old (93-year-old Graham) we are to see heaven as a place apart from the world where we find peace and light and love.

Rethinking Heaven

A seemingly unlikely leader of the charge against the Burpo-Graham view is Wright, the former bishop, an intriguing figure in contemporary Christianity. Born in 1948, he is a thoroughgoing Englishman–donnish in his scholarship and vivid in his writing. Wright is impossible to consign to any single theological or ideological category. He weighs scholarly and historical evidence with a fair mind, often coming to orthodox conclusions. A deeply conservative Roman Catholic friend of mine described reading Wright’s 2003 book The Resurrection of the Son of God, which argues that Jesus did indeed physically rise from the dead, as the “most bracing intellectual experience” he’d had in a decade. On questions of homosexuality–a familiar source of controversy in the Anglican Communion–Wright is also more conservative.

Yet in several books, including Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (2008) and After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters (2010), Wright has articulated a radically different view of heaven than the one American Christians tend to carry in their heads. “Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden dimension of our ordinary life–God’s dimension, if you like,” explains Wright. “God made heaven and earth; at the last he will remake both and join them together forever.” Even in the climactic images of the 21st and 22nd chapters of the Book of Revelation, Wright points out, “we find not ransomed souls making their way to a disembodied heaven but rather the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, uniting the two in a lasting embrace.”

Unsurprisingly, our polarized age is now producing polarized visions of heaven. Many Christians often focus more on accepting Jesus as their personal savior and the subsequent enforcement of biblical laws in preparation for the world to come–what they think of as the blue-sky heaven. “Many people think that eternal destiny is determined by behavior,” Charles Stanley, senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Atlanta, writes on his website InTouch.org “Our entrance into heaven has nothing to do with how good we are; what matters is how good Jesus is, and what He did for us.” To accept Jesus’ atoning sacrifice, Stanley says, is to be given “a ticket to heaven which can never be revoked.”

But led by Wright, scholars and historians like Union Theological Seminary’s Christopher Morse argue that the Bible, rightly read, foreshadows a different human destiny than the one anticipated by so many pastors, artists, poets, hymn writers and ordinary believers. This point of view is one in which the alleviation of the evident pain and injustice of the world is the ongoing work that Jesus began and the means of bringing into being what the New Testament authors meant when they spoke of heaven. The earth is not a temporary place that will disappear on the last day, and heaven means “God’s space.” And so with all respect to the views of believers like Stanley, the Wright school holds that one should neither need nor want a ticket out of the created order into an ethereal realm. One should instead be hard at work making the world godly and just.

Both camps in the heaven debate share the Christian conviction that Jesus is Lord. Both sides believe in good works. (Colton’s dad, Pastor Burpo, whose ministry sponsors programs for homeless kids, among others, says, “People who are heaven-minded are world changers … you are just passing through, but you are here to make a difference.”) The issue is one of emphasis. And the balance is in flux. Among younger believers in particular, the 21st century has seen a tangible move within evangelical Christianity to focus less on the enforcement of conservative convictions about sexual ethics and more on following Jesus’ commandment in Matthew 25 to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger and clothe the naked as though they had found Jesus himself hungry, homeless or bereft.

It’s worth noting that the theological view of heaven as a spur to social justice is more prevalent in richer parts of the world than in poorer regions. In Europe and in the U.S., upward mobility and wider prosperity give believers the leisure to think in broader terms about religion. However, as Cleophus LaRue, a National Baptist preacher who teaches homiletics at Princeton Theological Seminary, points out, the global South still believes in the miraculous. The poor often cling to the hope of a future heaven to persevere through life’s hardships.

“So much of the emphasis saying ‘Let’s get away from this overly future orientation and focus on now,’ it tends to come from white dudes wearing skinny jeans who live in the suburbs and not poor suffering people,” says Erik Thoennes, chair of biblical and theological studies at Biola University and a pastor at Grace Evangelical Free Church near Los Angeles. “Just listen to some Negro spirituals and you will get a massive dose of future orientation, because they did not have the option of thinking that we have heaven on earth or that heaven is just an ethical heart within you.”

God’s Space–and Ours

At odds with all this is the secular scientific view expressed by Stephen Hawking last year. Dismissing the idea of heaven to the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper, he said, “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

The view prompted Wright to engage Hawking in the Washington Post, where Wright suggested that the secular dismissal is itself tied to a misconception of the afterlife. “Of course there are people who think of ‘heaven’ as a kind of pie-in-the-sky dream of an afterlife to make the thought of dying less awful,” he wrote. “No doubt that’s a problem as old as the human race. But in the Bible, ‘heaven’ isn’t ‘the place where people go when they die.’ In the Bible heaven is God’s space, while earth (or if you like, ‘the cosmos’ or ‘creation’) is our space. And the Bible makes it clear that the two overlap and interlock.”

The case of Trayvon Martin offers a real-time illustration of the theological complexities of thinking about heaven. His parents believe him to be both at rest and at work, hoodied as a vivid symbol of the struggle to right the wrongs that led to his death. If the Wright camp is correct about the nature of things, there will someday be a second step: a bodily resurrection for Martin and all other believers on an earth ideally made better by the work of reform inspired by his death. Such, in this view, is the work of religion: bringing reality closer to conformity with theocentric aspirations in a world in which loving one another as we would be loved is a sacred act and a way of expanding the dominion of God–or heaven–in the world.

On Easter, in Christian churches large and small, many will hear the words of the 15th chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. It is about resurrection–first Jesus’, then the great resurrection that is said to await all believers. The closing image of this mighty passage, though, is about not eternal bliss and peace but work, deeds, action: “Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord,” wrote Paul, “because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” In a vision of ultimate reward, a reminder of what is essential: the work that is always at hand.

Seven More Heavens
How other religions imagine the place where God resides

Buddhism – The Western Paradise
Buddhists of the Pure Land schools can achieve rebirth in wonderlands that are way stations toward Nirvana — the ultimate cessation of ego and desire. For example, the Buddha Amitabha has vowed that all who meditate and call on his name can enter his Pure Land, the Western Paradise, to be brought along to full enlightenment.

Tibetan Buddhism – Mount Kailasa
No human being has ascended Mount Kailasa in the Himalayas, but pilgrims of many faiths circumambulate it. Tibetan Buddhists associate it with Demchog, the central deity of an archetypal mandala. Kailasa is also the residence of the great Hindu god Shiva, whose meditative power emanates from the mountain to charge the universe.

Hinduism – Vaikuntha
The great Hindu god Vishnu reposes far above the highest heavens in Vaikuntha, a gathering place for those who have achieved moksha, or spiritual liberation, through him. It is also called Vishnupada (Vishnu’s footstep), and because the god walks the earth, there are terrestrial Vishnupada, gateways to the sacred and eternal.

Islam – Al-Jannah
Islam believes the dead must await the Day of Resurrection to receive judgment. But Islam also provides many details about the rewards and pleasures awaiting the souls who are ushered into heaven, starting from its name, which means garden in Arabic, to rivers of wine and honey and, of course, the privilege of seeing God’s face.

Judaism – Atziluth
While the Torah says little about heaven, the mystical writings on Kabbalah — particularly the works of the disciples of 16th century rabbi Isaac Luria — divided the cosmos into several spheres and layers, throughout which move the sparks of souls. The highest of these realms is Atziluth, from which the pure deity emanates.

Taoism – Da Luo Tian
In ancient China, heaven — tian — was not merely sky but a god. Then Confucianism leached the anthropomorphic from the idea. Taoism, however, layered it up like a cosmogonic pagoda. The Jade Emperor governs the universe from Da Luo Tian — the highest of 26 heavens — using an intricate celestial bureaucracy that parallels the earthly administration of imperial China.

Zoroastrianism – Garo Demana
The religion of Zarathustra inspired many an Abrahamic tenet, including the dichotomy of heaven and hell. After death, souls must try to cross a bridge. The blessed will ease over into Garo Demana — the House of Song. The damned head for Drujo — Demana — the House of the Lie.