Sensus Divinitatis

I’ve been to too many funerals lately, and I’ve been thinking about death and heaven. I recently preached a sermon on Revelation 21–the vision of the “new heaven and the new earth” that has given Christians hope for millennia. The problem is we also have 2000 years of other cultural images of heaven and the afterlife that don’t quite line up with the Biblical picture. So we have to tease these things apart. In the end, some might feel like they have missed something pretty significant about Biblical eschatology (the end times).

Let me start with this: ultimately we must say there is much mystery in all this talk of the afterlife life, as Paul says, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him.” (1 Cor 2:9). On that note, I must also say that this blog is on heaven, and not hell. Hell can wait. One mystery at a time.

My cues are the Bible as seen through a contemporary Reformed lens. If you look up our “Contemporary Testimony” in the Christian Reformed Church (my background) called “Our World Belongs To God” you will see it has a final section on the end of time that is not called “Heaven” but rather “The New Creation.” There it says “We will take our place in the new creation” and “we will reign on earth” and “everyone will see our world belongs to God.” So the earth has a future and that is important for an age embroiled in the risks and repercussions of climate change.

What is the new creation? Well, let us start with death and heaven.

British agnostic writer Julian Barnes in his book on death entitled Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008) opens with the line “I don’t believe in God but I miss him.” He says, with some regret, that the dreams of heaven have been traded for the tempting images of “multinational corporations trying to sell us stuff” like kitchen appliances, flashy cars, high-status jobs, and the development of our exhausted personalities. Consumerism has become our true and only heaven. 

Barnes says much of this is just a distraction. “We carry death within us. Though that takes a bit of getting used to. It’s very hard for us to think there’s nothing special about me dying, that there is no plan to it.” To imagine there is no heaven is not easy even if you try (to turn John Lennon on his head). All civilizations throughout human history have had some notion of the afterlife life—whether it’s Hindu reincarnation, Buddhist emptiness, Muslim paradise, traditional religions ghostly ancestors, or even Marvel Comics Endgame, it seems the afterlife is bred in the bones for most human beings. Most sense there must be more, even a purposeful plan of some kind…

We all have a mythology on this. I don’t mean “lies”–I mean stories we tell ourselves about how things all began and how they will end. Stories that give us meaning for our lives. Some stories appear more sophisticated or plausible than others, but don’t be fooled: they are all mythologies. They are all human stories. The question is: do you have a good story, and does it inspire your people to do good?

Writing about death and heaven is really really important. Theologian N. T. Wright in his book Surprised by Hope says “What you think about death and life beyond it, is the key to thinking seriously about anything else.” He goes on to say, “Most people simply don’t know what orthodox Christian belief is… [and] have little or no idea what the word resurrection actually means.” (12).

So let’s look, for heaven’s sake. The Biblical story of death, like its story of creation, is a good one.

Heaven on Earth

Most Reformed theologians will tell you that we live with distorted ideas of what death and heaven mean because we have absorbed hundreds of years of caricatures from broader culture, from ancient Dante to The Simpsons and the Left Behind: The Earth’s Last Days rapture books and movies. Another popular source of heaven images is Near Death Experiences (NDEs) that have been given giant book contracts and even Hollywood movies. NDEs are fascinating to read about, but they are complicated to interpret, and they involve human perceptions from an intensely unusual state of mind. Some are quite dubious and disputed. Still, for some people, these stories are like another Scripture. In the end, these cultural stories are usually of a disembodied existence light-years away; sure, with light and friends, and sometimes in cartoons we are living on clouds and playing harps and as some have said, being totally bored. Theologically, these are bad dreams that twist the Biblical story and distract us from our earthly embodied calling as embodied souls. They suggest escape and to a large degree, irrelevance to the planet.

If you want to read someone who comes down hard on this disembodied heaven, read Richard Middleton’s book A New Heaven and A New Earth: Reclaiming a Biblical Eschatology (2014). Middleton is a theologian in the Reformed tradition (with some Wesleyan connections) whose writing goes back to a seminal summary of God’s renewing work in The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian Worldview (1984). His constant refrain for decades has been that a Christian lifestyle must include a deep investment in transforming and renewing God’s earth. Today. And if our theology takes us away from that, away from justice and peace and righteousness, it must be coming from somewhere other than the Bible. Most likely, its is the old Greek (Platonic) dualism, that prizes the soul and downplays the body, and thus champions an upper heaven over a lower earth, the spiritual over the physical.

The old hymns like “This world is not my home, I’m just a-passin’ through, my treasures are laid up, somewhere beyond the blue” or “When the roll is called up yonder I’ll be there”–they all carry the same message of abandoning the planet. Last Sunday in our congregation we sang a song called “Creation” by Phil Wickham with the line “I have been saved and heaven is my home.” Biblically speaking, though, heaven isn’t our home. Our home will be the new earth.

Middleton says quite boldly in this book on the new earth: “There is not one single reference in the entire biblical canon (OT and NT) to heaven as the eternal destiny of the believer… not once does Scripture itself actually say that the righteous will live forever in heaven.” (71) He tells the reader: “I have come to repent of using the term ‘heaven’ to describe the future God has in store for the faithful.” 237

Why?  Why this shyness for “heaven” talk?

Because the Biblical story is not of believers going to heaven but of a new heaven and a new earth coming down from God and forming a new creation. Revelation 21 is read every funeral because it gives hope for bodies and the earth–except better with no more crying, dying, or pain. It is a dream worth repeating of a renewed earth with a bustling city full of people and beauty. Whether its OT Isaiah 65:17,18: “See, I will create new heavens and a new earth…for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight,  and its people a joy” or NT 2 Peter 3:13 where we read: “In keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells”—the message is the same, and echoes the heart of the Lord’s Prayer: “thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Heaven is not pie in the sky when you die, forever and ever. It is not a divine mist full of spirits. The cultural mandate of Genesis doesn’t suddenly end and we no longer have any work to do, resting on clouds far away singing songs in a minor key. We don’t go to heaven in the Bible, heaven comes to us.

In-Between Period or The Intermediate State

Now some have said in response to this teaching, what about the thief on the cross who was told, “Today you will be with me in paradise?” Well, this gets a little complicated. Paradise is not the end of the journey but more of an intermediate place it seems. It’s not heaven although you could use “heaven” to describe it. N. T. Wright in Surprised by Joy is a little more cautious than Middleton, although he says exactly the same thing: he says, “The word ‘heaven’ can be an appropriate, though vague, way of denoting where [our] rest takes place [in this intermediate state]. But this time of rest is the prelude to something very different, which will emphatically involve earth as well.”

So this is the Biblical picture: we die in a thousand different ways, and as Philippians 1 says, that means to be with Christ, and it is better by far. This is the intermediate state before judgement and resurrection at the end of time. Some call it “being asleep in the Lord.” There is uncertainty and disagreements about details here. How do we exist without bodies? Do we just exist as spirits and wake up at the last judgment, as if no time has past? It is not clear. It is certainly not purgatory. The Bible only whispers about this state of our existence after death. But it is with God and it is good.

What the Bible shouts with horns blasting and firecrackers exploding, is that Jesus rose in his physical body from death, and this is the pivotal moment of history because he is the first of those to rise again and some day, not right when you die but at the end of cosmic history, we shall all rise again. At that time, Jesus returns to the earth, and the dead rise to his fair judgment, and those gathered to his side will receive resurrected bodies, and there will be a new heaven and a new earth. Jesus resurrection is the paradigm for the renewal of the whole cosmos.

So we die, we sleep, and we rise again with Christ to reign on the new earth with him. So you could say, “We go to heaven to be with God when we die,” but that is not the end of the story and so it makes death sound like an escape from earth to a distant land. In fact, God’s plan is for a new earth for us to “reign with him” as the Contemporary Testimony says. That’s the future for those who love God and his creation and that destiny for our resurrected bodies gets lost in the mix of heaven talk.

We go to be with the Lord when we die, and await the coming of the new earth. This is really just expanding on the Apostle’s Creed where Christians say, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.”

Think of it this way. Genesis 1:1 says in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Heaven is a created reality. N. T. Wright says, “Heaven is not a future destiny, but the other, hidden dimension of our ordinary life—God’s dimension, if you like. God made heaven and earth; at last he will remake both and join them together forever.” (19) It is the “place” where we picture God on a throne with angels as in Isaiah 6. But it is not fully here. Yet.

Heaven overlaps with earth today, and one day will be joined to it. That is why we pray: Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven. Heaven’s rule will be put into full practice in our world, the new earth. That is basic Reformed teaching in the tradition I know, which has a Dutch Neo-Calvinist heritage.

This is why we confess our world belongs to God, now and forever. God so loved the world, he didn’t want it to perish but have a renewed life. That’s John 3:16 with a view of salvation as wide as the cosmos. That’s Colossians 1, where it says Jesus will reconcile “all things” to himself. It’s Romans 8:22 where we read “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth” waiting for redemption. You’ll see it everywhere in the Bible once you are alert to it: a new creation.

Heaven is Not Our Home

Now you can find other opinions on this, to be sure, but I’m giving you pretty much the general Reformed neo-Calvinist take. Some evangelical Christians talk of rapture and the destruction of the earth and everyone going to heaven far away as the earth burns up in battles and fire and smoke (eg. Left Behind). That is a very recent theology called dispensationalism, which is a new kid on the theological block (only about 160 years old). But that’s not our way in the Reformed tradition, and I don’t think it is truly Biblical. It is also a disaster for any environmental ethic today—why care for something that will just burn up some day anyways?

Another Reformed writer Paul Marshall wrote a book entitled Heaven is Not My Home to make the point. Nathan Bierma’s book with a similar emphasis is entitled Bringing Heaven Down to Earth. See also Snyder and Scandrett’s Salvation Means Creation Healed. So many have tried to communicate this teaching in different ways through the last decades but it’s not familiar still to many who frequent Reformed sanctuaries. Cultural cues are more powerful.

Now just pause a moment. Jamie Smith has written of the danger of some taking this renewed earth idea too far and detaching it from the role of the church, justification, and grace, and thus naturalizing shalom and justice into some sort of “functional secularism” that mirrors progressive political concerns apart from the redemptive work of God. He writes: “The New Jerusalem is not a product of our bottom-up efforts, as if it were constructed by us. The New Jerusalem descends from heaven (Rev. 21:2, 10). And the light of the holy city is not a “natural” accomplishment, but is the light radiating from the glory of the risen, conquering Lamb” (Revelation 21:22-25).

Jerusalem is the Jewish capital city, the city of David. It must be remembered that John gets this dream, this vision of the new earth while on exile in a prison on the Island of Patmos under the reign of a hostile Roman Emperor. So if Revelation is about anything, it is a word to the beleaguered and downtrodden people of God to acknowledge the conflict and violence of their day, and to say to them: in the end, as John writes in his other letter (1 John 4:4) “he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.”

“Revelation” in the Greek is “apocalypse” — and while evil is destroyed, the earth is renewed. It is not the coming of a wasteland. Apocalypse means revelation–a dream of what is to come, and it is ultimately the dream of a city.

This city that John sees is no Greek dualistic dream: it has rivers and gardens and open gates and walls studded with precious jewels. You have to realize the Jewish lore behind all this. Commentator William Barclay says, “This is a dream of the Jews which never died and which is still in their hearts—the dream of the restoration and the re-creation of Jerusalem, the holy city.”  This dream was “forever at the heart of Judaism”: Isaiah, Haggai, Ezekiel… it was the symbol that shouted to a beaten down and grief-stricken people that eternal bliss awaits, not in some disembodied ghostly way, but in a real, concrete, earthly way worth betting your life on. Jerusalem, new, with streets of gold.

Metaphors like this are the best we have to imagine what lies beyond the grave. Reformed theologians have speculated about the sports, gardening, book-reading, recreation, and laboratory experiments that will be our activity on the new earth. No one knows for sure, but these are dreams that give hope, hope for a modern world that has lost hope in its nihilistic literary sophistication and base consumerism. Especially as the shadow of climate change falls across our forests and cities, we need hope for a renewed creation. It may be the possibilities that lie immanent in creation are limited, but the transcendent and gracious power of God can re-create everything.

I hope so. And Jesus resurrection is the clue that it can be done. Our spiritual life is joining in that redemptive plan for a renewed earth.