Barry's Blog

The story is told of a church choir director who was trying to be creative in the worship service. Instead of having the men sing the first verse and the women the second verse, he thought he would have the women sing the first line and the men respond. As it turned out, he realized that he had made a terrible mistake and swore never to do it again. In a hymn celebrating Heaven, the women sang, "I will go home someday," and the men thundered back, "Glad day, glad day!!"

We may laugh at the story, but it does at least suggest that part of our American spiritual landscape has embedded in it the Judao-Christian hope of Heaven. Yet, not all would agree on the specifics of the afterlife. Mark Twain once opined, "Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except heaven and hell and I have only a vague curiosity about one of those." Ambrose Bierce, in the Devil's Dictionary, described Heaven as, "A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own."

There is definitely a lot of muddled thinking by Christians, and those who profess other faiths, or no faith, about Heaven, and whether there really is an afterlife at all. N.T. Wright, an Oxford scholar who serves as the Bishop of Durham, is a prolific author who has written recently on the subject of Heaven. In his book, "Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church," Wright takes to task the often misunderstood take on heaven as some sort of ethereal existence, not much different from the cartoons of Heaven we might see in The New Yorker magazine of folks floating around with harps on clouds. Rather, Wright argues that the Christian hope of Heaven has more to do with God transforming our present mortal bodies into a glorious body like that of Jesus (see Philippians 3:20-21).

Wright correctly observes: "The traditional picture of peole going to either heaven or hell as a one-stage, postmortem journey represents a serious distortion and diminution of the Christian hope. Bodily resurrection is not just one odd bit of that hope. It is the element that gives shape and meaning to the rest of the story of God's ultimate purposes."

There are many questions that we have about Heaven, many of which are not clearly answered in the Scriptures. And even when we read the Biblical passages about the afterlife, if we are not baffled as to how to precisely understand them, we are probably kidding ourselves. We should take consolation in Augustine, arguably the greatest theologian ever to live, who in the fifth century observed that God, like Heaven, is ineffabilis, "ineffable." 

And what do we say tto people who believe that Heaven is a tale fit only for children? I love C.S. Lewis' response to such charges: "There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of "Heaven" ridiculous by saying they do not want "to spend eternity playing harps." The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible...People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs!"

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow