Heaven, Eternity, and the Present

I struggle with the concept of heaven. The way that it’s articulated and imagined in culture and the church holds very little interest to me. This is a marginal view held from people within the church; it’s possible that I’m really only one in a very small minority of Christians who would make this statement, at least publicly. Mine is such a unique position that oftentimes it’s the promise of heaven that Christians use as the central argument or image to evangelize. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the C.S. Lewis’ quote, “the fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can’t supply is proof that Heaven must be our home,” but it’s never quite captured my imagination the way that it does for countless others. There are a number of different reasons why I’ve really struggled with understanding heaven, but there are really two questions that I can’t resolve: why would God intentionally place me on Earth knowing that this isn’t where I belong? And, why would creation be a blessing at all if this is really impermanent and unimportant? These questions have nagged at me for much of my life. Though I appreciate Lewis’ sentiment that things don’t seem right and that we have a deep desire for justice and grace, I’m left uninspired by the thought of some spiritual existence where things are easy.

One of the major reasons that heaven is unappealing to me is that the imagery of such a place seems to be shaped more by culture rather than the Bible. Heaven is not even primarily a Christian promise. Most major religions feature a claim about a spiritual existence after death. However, it’s not just people of other faiths who believe in an afterlife. Many agnostics also believe that heaven exists, or at least they hold out hope that there might be a place for the departed. This is likely influenced by the fact that society throughout the ages has been deeply religious, and though some people wish that we would leave humanity’s religious history behind in the past I don’t think that will ever be truly accomplished. We cannot disentangle ourselves from history so easily, because our past provides a sense of meaning and purpose. Society will continue to be shaped by its religious past, at least for the foreseeable future. Regardless, this weaving of religious belief and secular life has developed a soft, sterile view of heaven that really shouldn’t be interesting to anybody. The church, possibly even particularly the church, hasn’t helped clarify anything about heaven. Many Christians tend to believe that heaven is the place where good people go when they die. However, the way that we define “good” is tribalistic and leaves no role for salvation. Jesus did not come for the country club Christians who have their lives together. It’s not primarily a place where good, moral people find themselves after a successful life. Rather, heaven is a place for forgiven people, which is a point that is lost on many.

I would be mistaken if I thought that heaven had no place in the Christian faith. Of course, Jesus spoke about heaven. However, even more than that he spoke about the Kingdom of God. As a Christian, we believe that heaven is where Jesus sits enthroned, but what we often forget is that Jesus told us to pray for God’s Kingdom to be as present on Earth as it is in heaven. The difference between the two seem to be that heaven is a place while God’s Kingdom is linked to the presence of God’s will. Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is near, and we must take that statement seriously. Why would we hope for an afterlife in some distant land when we are already blessed with the core promise in the present? I am not tempted to look for an escape from this world. I have quite a pleasant life, filled with love, joy, family, and friendship. Rather, I yearn for the present love of God who laid down his life for his friends, which is promised to us in the here and now through the third person of the trinity, and I want to be shaped by the same Spirit.

There was a brief period when heaven did hold my imagination as a young boy. More than anything else, I was captivated by the idea of being perfect. I would imagine myself running and never getting tired; knowing everything that there is to know, including the very character of God, and having all mysteries unlocked to me; and being surrounded by beauty that far outstrips the beauty of Earth. These things are typically what I hear when I listen to others talk about heaven. I started having issues with this view when I was a teenager. My first realization that our cultural view of heaven is insufficient is when I started to note that I enjoy struggle. This jeopardized my faith in a profound way. I want to challenge myself to the limits of my ability and see if maybe I can go a little bit further, striving to see if I am better today than I was yesterday. For example, I recently went for a 15k run. Prior to that, my farthest run was 8 miles, so this presented an opportunity to test myself. I did really well through the first 10k, but the last third of the run was difficult. Though I hobbled to the finish line, I accomplished the thing that I set out to do, which was really something that I wasn’t sure that I could do. It was exhilarating to push myself to my current physical limits, knowing that I will continue to grow stronger and faster. This shift in my thinking when I was a teenager was troublesome, because I thought that belief in Jesus and heaven were synonymous. My concern that an unending existence where it was impossible to better myself physically, intellectually, emotionally, or relationally started to become alarming. To be given everything without needing to work for any of it is a nice fantasy, but if we really consider what it would be like then I think we might understand the nightmare that it would actually present. I desire challenges that I can overcome, and if I was to lose that then I would be missing something essential to what it means to be human.

Within the Christian community, there seems to be some confusion between struggle and strife. Strife is when somebody struggles needlessly or without end. It could also mean the type of struggle that doesn’t actually result in growth. The term that I heard growing up was “Thorns and thistles.” It was a great metaphor for strife. Removing thorns and thistles is an endless endeavor. Personally, I imagine weeding when I think of “thorns and thistles.” Weeding has always been my least favorite chore. There are always more weeds to pull up regardless of how hard or long I work. It’s a Sisyphean endeavor. Furthermore, if I ever did weed the entire lot there would be more to pull up in just a few days. Weeding always came across to me as a futile chore. It’s work to keep the wilderness away from a tamed landscape. However, weeding is necessary. In order to successfully grow the intended plants within a plot of land we must remove the plants that threaten to choke out the ones that we’ve planted. It’s a worthwhile and rewarding endeavor to cultivate produce and beauty from the land. Planting is hard work, and we should uphold the dignity of that work. It’s that there are things that frustrate our hard work that weren’t originally meant to be obstacles. To return back to the topic of exercise: The effort that I put into my runs isn’t the thing that presents an issue. Rather, the thing that should be lamented is the pain in my knees that threaten to keep me off the road.

If we dove into the difference a bit more, we would realize that there are hindrances that could be considered either struggle or strife, depending on how they’re viewed. There is a lot of overlap between the two categories. However, rather than wrestling with the difference between struggle and strife, we are tempted to clump them both together. When we do this we make heaven sound like the perfect retirement home: A place of endless rest where there’s not much to do or accomplish. This image is what has conquered the cultural imagination. It seems to me that this so-called ideal was created by a culture that worships work only to find that it’s exhausting and doesn’t really satisfy our desires. I believe that work is good, but it’s a terrible master. Unfortunately, work has become an idol within our society where we think that we can earn a good life through our own effort. We don’t have a healthy view of work, so the depiction of heaven is where the burden of work-as-worship is removed. Unfortunately, this seeps into our witness to a dying world. We promise a place that is shaped more by capitalism and consumerism than the Bible.

My discomfort with heaven is really rooted in my understanding of what it means to be human. We are embodied souls set in an environment that is proclaimed as very good by the Creator. Yet, the way that we think about heaven defies these facts. Too many of us center the fall as the foundation of this world and then create a philosophy that values the spirit and despises the flesh. I find that I still think of heaven as that great retirement home in the sky, because it’s such a prevalent feature of how our society thinks about it. I’m not attracted to that vision at all. More than anything, what entices me to the faith is Jesus. It’s not the rest that I hope to find in a place that gives me hope. What gives me hope is the peace and love that I find in a person, and that makes all the difference.