“Can You Believe It?”
Hence will arise an unmixed state of holiness and happiness far superior to that which Adam enjoyed in paradise. . . . And to crown all, there will be a deep, an intimate, an uninterrupted union with God; a constant communion with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ, through the Spirit; a continual enjoyment of the Three-One God, and of all the creatures in him!
—John Wesley1
In the final episode of the John Adams miniseries from HBO, President Adams speaks of his deeply beloved wife, Abigail, who had recently died: “I cannot conceive that God would create such a creature as her simply to live and die on the Earth.”2 Adams lived during the period of modernity when intellectuals were increasingly rejecting traditional Christian belief, including the doctrine of the afterlife. Adams, however, retained deep Christian sensibilities, and these are reflected in his poignant statement about the death of his wife. If there is a God of love, he thought, it is inconceivable that death could be the end of her story. Indeed, if he did not believe in an afterlife, he would not believe in any sort of God at all.
Recall again the extraordinary claims Christianity makes about the love of God and the implications of that love for the life to come. Here is a passage from the great Puritan theologian Richard Baxter that vividly drives this point home.
Is it a small thing to be beloved of God? . . . Christian, believe this and think on it. Thou shalt be eternally embraced in the arms of that love, which was from everlasting, and will extend to everlasting; of that love which brought the Son of God’s love from heaven to earth, from the earth to the cross, from the cross to the grave, from the grave to glory . . . that love will eternally embrace thee. When perfect, created love and most perfect, uncreated love meet together, O the blessed meeting!3
In the first chapter, I pointed out that Friedrich Nietzsche thought the Christian doctrine of immortality absurd, a thing to be scorned. Nietzsche’s attitude about life after death could hardly be more sharply at odds with that of Adams. There I suggested that the deeper issue underlying Nietzsche’s sensibility was his inability to conceive of a God who loves us as deeply as the Bible assures us he does. Here again are his words: “God makes himself the ransom for what could not otherwise be ransomed; God alone has power to absolve us of a debt we can no longer discharge; the creditor offers himself as a sacrifice for his debtor out of sheer love (can you believe it?), out of love for his debtor.”4
Although Nietzsche could not believe it, we should at least give him credit for grasping what a radical, astonishing claim Christianity makes about God and his love for us.
Postmodern Suspicion and Shriveled Hope
Indeed, I cannot help but wonder whether his incredulous question “Can you believe it?” lays bare the deepest taproot of postmodern suspicion. As much as they might want to believe it, wary postmodernists suspect that this sort of love is a massive illusion. They fear it is only a beautiful mask that will inevitably be stripped away, exposing the disappointing truth that lies behind it.
It is not hard to see why postmodernists are skeptical. Even when we have experienced real love of the human variety, it is frail, flawed, and finally fleeting. Not only does death take away the persons we dearly love, but almost everyone in contemporary Western society has been touched in one way or another by divorce and has felt the disillusionment of love that does not keep its promises. Most people enter marriage with high hopes and the best of intentions that their love will not only endure but flourish and continue to delight “until death do us part.” Far too often, however, they fail to sustain the love they thought would last forever, and in the wake of their disappointment they may lose faith in love itself. It is hard to maintain trust in something that raises such soaring hopes that all too frequently come crashing down long before death intervenes.
Still, we are creatures of hope, and the fact remains that one of the most telling measures of what we dare to hope is what we find incredible. Do we find it inconceivable, as Adams did, that human beings and the relationships they cherish are made only to be broken, that they shall perish forever in the dust of death? Or are we inclined to agree with Nietzsche that it is inconceivable that the Christian account of love could be true? Is it beyond belief that there could be a God of infinite power and wisdom who loves us so much he was willing to die for us?
How we answer these questions will determine what sort of happiness we can hope to achieve. Those who find a God of love inconceivable will naturally resort to hopes that are severely diminished and shriveled compared to biblical hope.
As we have seen, Christianity is realistic about our fallen world, but at the same time it is undeniably a religion of irrepressible hope, as epitomized by its doctrine of heaven. Indeed, Christian faith audaciously bids us to intensify our hopes and enlarge our desires. It fires our imagination with visions of happiness and fulfillment beyond our wildest dreams. Reality, we are assured, outstrips our imagination—it is vastly more wonderful and beautiful than we have yet to conceive.
By glaring contrast, I was recently struck by this description of secular hope:
The conflict between scientific naturalism and various forms of antireductionism is a staple of recent philosophy. On one side there is the hope that everything can be accounted for at the most basic level by the physical sciences, extended to include biology. On the other side are doubts about whether the reality of such features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, purpose, thought and value can be accommodated in a universe consisting at the most basic level of physical facts—facts, however sophisticated, of the kind revealed by the physical sciences.5
These lines come from Thomas Nagel’s remarkable little book Mind and Cosmos, a book that challenges the reigning orthodoxy of scientific naturalism and reductionism.
Nagel himself is a committed atheist, but he is highly dubious about the dogma that all of reality can be explained in terms of the physical sciences. “The world is an astonishing place,” he writes, “and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle’s day.”6 Indeed, the aspects of reality that are the most interesting and immediately accessible to us are the very features of reality that most resist scientific explanation, things like consciousness, reason, objective moral truth, and meaning. Still, Nagel seeks an explanation of these “astonishing” features of reality in atheistic terms.7
But here is what strikes me about the quote above. Notice in particular this line: “There is the hope that everything can be accounted for at the most basic level by the physical sciences.” When I read this line I want to cry out, “Why would anyone hope this?”
Let me be clear. I can, at one level, understand regretful atheism. I can empathize with those who reluctantly come to the conclusion that God does not exist, that it’s all matter and energy determined by mindless, heartless laws of nature—that the same laws of nature that somehow generated human life will eventually destroy all of us as the stars burn out and the physical remains of the universe go on expanding and disintegrating forever.
But what I cannot understand is why anyone would celebrate this vision of reality or hope that it is true. Why would anyone be delighted to think that when we have mastered all the laws of physics, when we have learned everything there is to know about biology, we will have gotten to the bottom of reality? Why would anyone be excited to conclude that there is nothing more to know or to give meaning to our lives? To regretfully come to this conclusion is one thing; to enthusiastically embrace it is another thing altogether. To celebrate it with a sort of triumph makes no rational, moral, or emotional sense.
It is one thing to believe your wife has a brain but not an eternal soul. It is another thing to be glad about it. It is one thing to think her most heartfelt, loving thoughts toward you are ultimately reducible to chemical events in her brain, but it is quite another thing to savor that “thought.” It is one thing to believe death is stronger than love and will get the last word. It is another thing altogether to relish this prospect as a matter of hope.
Think again of President Adams when he lost his beloved Abigail. What if his faith in a loving God had wavered under attacks from modernist skeptics? What if he had said, “I hope these skeptics are right, and everything can be accounted for without God. Indeed, I hope she has met her final end, for I cannot conceive of her living beyond this life on earth”? Would you not find this a bewildering thing to hope for?
But there is another deep root of contemporary shriveled hope that must be acknowledged, and this may explain why many people might actually wish that everything can be explained in biological and physical terms. I refer to the fear of boredom that haunts contemporary culture, a fear so prevalent that it even casts a shadow over the hope of heaven. Just as we fear that love cannot last, so we fear that neither can joy.
This is, I want to emphasize, a relatively recent phenomenon. Carol Zaleski has noted this, quipping, “Our ancestors were afraid of Hell; we are afraid of Heaven. We think it will be boring.”8 According to historian Gary Scott Smith, worries that heaven might be boring first emerged in the United States after the Civil War. “Until then, life for most people involved constant work and little entertainment, and few expressed fear that heavenly life might be monotonous, dull or routine.”9
A culture with ample time on its hands and an obsession with entertainment is one conditioned to fear that boredom is the inevitable end of every pleasure, no matter how initially exciting it may be. Better in that case to live in a world of finite expectations where everything can be explained in terms of biology and physics, where we can get to the bottom of everything and eventually see through it as purely natural phenomena. A life that goes on forever is a terrifying thought if it cannot outrun boredom.
The boredom challenge has been answered by a number of responses, starting with the fundamental Christian conviction that God is an infinite being who has endless aspects of himself to reveal to us. Another suggestion is that God in his infinite creativity could provide never-ending patterns of enjoyable activities and pleasures that would never grow old. And there are others as well.10
These responses are helpful for blunting the boredom challenge, but at the end of the day I suspect the deeper issue is a variation on Nietzsche’s question. Can we believe there is a God who is an eternal fountain of joy and happiness, whose very nature is to be ecstatically happy? Can we believe that the delights of love have no end? If such a God exists, eternal happiness is not only a possibility but a reality.
Perhaps our fear of boredom is a telling indicator of how far we have fallen from God and what he intends for us. If so, then heaven holds out the hope that time will not be measured by growing old and losing the vitality and zest for life. Rather, it will be measured by growing ever closer to God and sharing ever more deeply in his boundless joy and energy. To believe in God is to believe not only that love is stronger than death but also that joy is stronger than boredom.
I have been arguing in this book that the Christian doctrine of the afterlife has strong rational credentials as well as emotional appeal. The trinitarian vision of heaven is a powerful idea that can help us resolve problems ranging from the nature and ground of moral obligation to the problem of evil. It holds out the hope that even the worst of things can come to a glorious end rather than the best of things coming to a tragic end. It provides a rich account of personal identity and a deeply satisfying account of the meaning and purpose of our very lives. Even the doctrine of eternal hell makes rational and moral sense when understood in the light of this vision.
When we reflect on the existential significance of these issues, it is no exaggeration to say that to be bereft of faith in heaven is a loss of incalculable proportions for our very humanity.
All of this should be taken into account when we answer Nietzsche’s incredulous question, “Can you believe it?” And if we do take it into account, I think it is clear that we ought not only hope that the Christian account of the afterlife is true but that we may heartily believe that it is. Perhaps we should even think it inconceivable that it is not.