8
How can we say that heaven has a history? History implies time, and heaven is a state in which time does not exist.
What in Heaven’s Name Are We Talking About?
Can heaven be described as a place? That is hard to say, because to our understanding there is no space where there is no time; but there is no doubt that most Christians have thought of heaven in spatial terms. The Bible presents it in that way, and it is hard to think of it otherwise. The Bible tells us that the Son of God came down from heaven and went back there once his mission on earth was accomplished and that those who believe in him will go to join him in heaven when they die (John 3:13–17). Those statements seem to imply that heaven has a time and space dimension and that it is constantly growing in population as new souls are added to it. If I am not there now, but expect to be before the twenty-first century is out, where shall I be going and how will my entrance be recorded if heaven has no past or future?
How time and eternity relate to each other is a mystery that has preoccupied the greatest minds of the church since the beginning. The Bible tells us that there was war in heaven and that Satan and his followers were cast out of it (Rev. 12:7–9). When and how did that happen? Satan was already in rebellion when God created the world, so it must have been before that, but when? We cannot say that evil has always been inherent in the spiritual realm, because that would imply that God created it, and we are told that everything he made is good (Gen. 1:31). We are also faced with the problem that although Satan was cast out of heaven, he seems to have had ready access to it. Certainly he was there when he persuaded God to let him tempt Job! (Job 1:6). What does that mean? Is he still wandering about in the presence of God, or has he been ejected from heaven since Job’s time?
Another important question concerns the incarnation of the Son. The issue here is whether the Son left heaven when he came to earth, or whether in some mysterious way he continued to reign there alongside his Father. The language of Scripture certainly suggests that he left, and there are some who have interpreted passages such as Philippians 2:7 in that sense.1 According to that way of thinking, the Son later ascended into heaven and took back the glory that had been his from the beginning, a view which can also claim biblical support (see John 17:4–5). But John Calvin, among others, objected to this interpretation and insisted on what is called the extra calvinisticum, which holds that the incarnate Christ was also (extra) reigning in heaven with the Father and the Holy Spirit the whole time that he was on earth.2 The logic of this is that God was not diminished by the incarnation of the Son, and so the whole Trinity must have remained in place during that time.
Oddly enough, there has been much less interest among theologians in the question of whether heaven grows by the constant admission of new believers. All Christians accept that this somehow happens, though there has been considerable disagreement about how and when it occurs. On the one side are those who insist that all who trust in Christ go to be with him as soon as they die, a view that is supported by the story of the thief on the cross and by the words of the apostle Paul (Luke 23:43; Phil. 1:21–23). Others have preferred to believe in a kind of soul sleep, according to which those who die in Christ will be kept in some sort of intermediate state until he returns in glory. This too finds some support in Scripture, though the precise meaning of the texts quoted in its defense is open to dispute (1 Thess. 4:15–17; Heb. 11:39–40). According to the Catholic tradition, only a few people go straight to heaven when they die because most of us are not good enough to get there immediately. Instead, we have to go through an extended period of cleansing in purgatory, a place invented by medieval theologians as a halfway house between earth and heaven.3 At what point a soul leaves purgatory is unknown, though the Catholic Church insists that it is a temporary state and that the souls that have been purified go to heaven, not to hell. Some take longer than others to get there—that is all.
In the twentieth century, some theologians approached this issue by suggesting that God himself may be growing and expanding, either by discovering new depths of love within his inner-Trinitarian relationships or by acts of ongoing creation or both. They abandoned what they claimed is the traditional notion that God is static, unchanging, and they embraced different forms of what is sometimes called “process theology,” which seeks to discover and explain God’s self-growth. If heaven is the place or dimension in which God is present, it must be growing and changing along with God, since otherwise they would get out of line with each other. Whatever we think about heaven, we can hardly imagine that God would outgrow it!
At a humbler level, it is probably true to say that most ordinary believers have thought of eternity as endless, ongoing time and have left it at that. They see their life after death in temporal continuity with their life here and now. It will differ from what we currently experience in any number of ways, but as far as the flow of time is concerned, there will be continuity between what we are living through now and what our life then will be—here today and there tomorrow, as it were. Most people assume that anyone who has led a decent life will end up in heaven, and especially that babies who die before reaching the age of responsibility go there automatically. Few people give much thought to what life in heaven is like, but those who do usually fall back on images of mawkish sentimentality—angels playing harps, for example—which only shows that they have no idea what they are talking about. The one thing that can be said in favor of this popular view is that it is a much more unified perception of the afterlife than was common in pre-Christian times, when notions of heaven were as varied and bizarre as the imaginations of those who came up with them.
We can sum up this discussion of the problem of relating eternity to time by saying that to write a history of heaven from the standpoint of those who live there is impossible for us, partly because we are outsiders and partly because we have no way of reconciling what to us seem like incompatible dimensions of reality. All we can do is trace what human beings have thought about heaven over the centuries, and this is essentially what a “history of heaven” has to be.
Heaven as Understood before the Coming of Christ
There has never been a time in human history when people have been unaware of the sky above them. Even the most primitive peoples know that they depend on the sun and rain for survival and that it is in their interests to have the right amount of both. They also know that the two things are incompatible, in the sense that it does not rain when the sun is shining and vice versa. It is not surprising, therefore, that people should regard the sky with reverence and even worship its features in the hope of controlling or influencing it in some way. That much is common to virtually every known culture, but the details of how the sky is thought to work vary enormously from place to place. Given that opinions about this depend almost entirely on popular imagination, it is hardly surprising.
In more developed cultures, the sky is populated with spiritual beings, most of whom are pictured as superhuman, though occasionally they are portrayed as animals, such as cows or elephants, that hold the universe in place.4 At a more sophisticated level, the movements of the stars are studied only until they become predictable, and then a class of astrologers emerges. These people not only study what we would call astronomy but also try to interpret the movements of the stars as indicators that relate directly to human life. The planets may come to be identified with gods and goddesses, and their movements are understood to represent divine activities that affect us in ways that only a trained astrologer can interpret. This kind of activity still goes on today all over the world and is remarkably popular, even though it has no scientific basis and is officially rejected by the intellectual establishment. But horoscopes defy all logic, and the fact that they are regularly printed in respectable newspapers reminds us that primitive ideas of how the sky determines our future are still alive and well, even in highly educated societies.
In most primitive cultures, heaven is a place inhabited by gods or other supernatural beings, but there is seldom any suggestion that humans are able to go there. It is true that many in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia believed that extraordinary people such as pharaohs and kings would regularly ascend into heaven, but that was because they were regarded as gods on earth who were merely returning home. After about 300 BC, however, we find ordinary people expressing a desire to be united with a god or godlike figure so that they too might go to heaven when they die. This was one of the factors that led to the development of so-called mystery cults, in which worshipers would seek to be so united to Osiris or to one of the other gods that a passage to heaven would be virtually guaranteed. The deification of human figures also became more popular, as can be seen in the cult of the Roman emperors, who were thought to become gods after their deaths. But even after taking these phenomena into account, the judgment of J. E. Wright remains valid:
The idea of heaven as a place for royal, righteous, or good people was unknown to most ancient Near Eastern peoples. Humans had no part in what took place in the heavenly realm. . . . For the peoples of Mesopotamia and Syria-Palestine, heaven was the realm of the gods alone, while the netherworld was the ultimate destiny of all humans.5
The Christian belief that heaven is the dwelling place of God and also the final resting place of those who believe in him was unknown in ancient times. In the Greek world, the gods dwelt on Mount Olympus, but the deserving dead went to the Elysian Fields, which were not at all the same thing. The life of the gods was supposedly eternal, or at least it was not bound to the limitations of human time, and they had their own life, which was often very active. The worthy dead, on the other hand, were at rest in a kind of blissful paradise, which was theirs as a reward for their sufferings and triumphs on earth. Exceptional men such as Achilles could become gods, but this was rare; most of the time the human and divine worlds were quite separate from each other. It should perhaps be said that “worth” in this context had little to do with good deeds or moral perfection as we understand them. To get into the Elysian Fields one had to be a great warrior, a man whose superhuman feats on earth made it appropriate for him to enjoy such a reward. Achilles was the legendary warrior par excellence, and it was his exceptional military prowess rather than anything else that allowed him to join the gods when he died. In the nature of the case, rewards of this kind were reserved for males. There may have been women to wait on them in the Elysian Fields, and there were certainly goddesses on Olympus, but there is no sign that the Greeks believed that females had the same opportunity as males to join the gods when they died. In ancient Greece women were inferior to men in every respect, and nowhere more so than in the options available to them after their deaths.
The lesser dead were consigned to Hades, a place of forgetfulness symbolized by the river Lethe (“forgetting”) that had to be crossed to get into it. Quite what happened there was unknown, other than that the souls who went to Hades lived in a shadowy underworld ruled over by the god Pluto. Hades seems to have been a cold, dark, and dreary place, but at least the souls who went there were kept in being, and there is no indication that they suffered or were punished because of their misdeeds on earth. Just as morality had little to do with heaven, so it had little to do with Hades either. Hades was not much to look forward to but was better than nothing, and that seems to have been the general Greek attitude toward it.
In many ways, ancient Greek perceptions of heaven were similar to those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, but over time certain distinctive features emerged. One of these was a concentration on the planets as opposed to the remoter stars. The Greeks adopted Babylonian astronomy but were more interested in creating a hierarchy of heavenly bodies that they believed rotated around the earth. There were seven of these—the sun and moon, of course, plus the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, all named after the Olympian gods.6 When the Greeks came into contact with the Jewish idea of the seven-day week, they assimilated these heavenly bodies into it, naming the days after each of them.7 It seems to have been this that gave rise to the idea that there were seven heavens, of which the seventh was also the greatest. To their minds, that explained why the Jews worshiped their God on the seventh day, because he was the greatest of all the deities, and pagans sometimes equated him with Saturn because the day was named after him. The same idea may also be reflected in what the apostle Paul says about being caught up into the “third heaven,” though the precise meaning of that is unclear (2 Cor. 12:2).8
Needless to say, the Jews themselves never accepted this idea, nor did the early Christians, who did their best to eliminate the pagan names for the days of the week. They wanted to replace them with simple numbers (second, third, fourth, etc.), keeping “Sabbath” for the seventh day and “Lord’s day” for the following one. This system caught on in Greece, whence it spread to the Slavic countries, and it also survived in Portugal, but in most other places it failed to dislodge the pagan nomenclature.9 If the names of the days of the week represent a syncretism of pagan and biblical ideas about heaven, it certainly cannot be said that the early Christians were prepared to adopt and legitimize this without protest or comment.
The other, more important way in which the Greeks altered the Near Eastern concept of heaven is due to the philosophers. Plato believed that ultimate reality was nonmaterial, being found in forms and ideas present in the supreme mind. Human beings share in that mind to a limited extent because they are rational souls that have been trapped in a material body. Under philosophical influence, some people came to believe that an individual soul could purify itself of the influence of matter and return to its original state. This was regarded as “good” as opposed to the evil that dominates our lives, thanks to the corruption that has been engendered by the mingling of the soul with matter. As a result of this, it came to be accepted that a “good” person could return to the heavenly realm whence his soul had originally come, but those who were trapped by the lusts of the material world would never manage to do that. Ideas like these made a powerful impact on the early Christians, many of whom thought in similar terms, and overcoming them was one of the biggest challenges facing the church as it sought to evangelize the Greco-Roman world.
When we turn to ancient Israel, we notice that many of the ideas about heaven that circulated in the contemporary Middle East were present in Israelite culture as well. This was probably inevitable since the Israelites had sprung from Middle Eastern stock and thought along broadly similar lines. We know that the worship of Yahweh did not displace that of the Canaanite gods, whose presence among the Israelites was seen as a constant threat by those who followed the teachings of Yahweh. Only after the exile to Babylon in 586 BC was this problem overcome, and syncretism between the worship of Yahweh and that of other gods more or less ceased.
The fact that Yahwism took a long time to become established as the only religion of Israel should not blind us to the fact that it was present from a very early time. Its distinctive feature was that those who worshiped Yahweh believed that he was the only true God. This may not have been stated in so many words, but it was implied by the nature of the worship he demanded. His people were to have no other gods before or alongside him, nor were they to make any images for the purpose of depicting him, because he was the creator of all things (Ex. 20:3–5). As such, he was not only far superior to any material object but also high above the heavens, including the sun, the moon, and the stars that other nations worshiped as deities. That they were subject to Yahweh is made very clear by the psalmist who wrote, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Ps. 19:1). To the modern mind this seems fairly obvious, but in the context in which it was written it was a denial of the claims made by just about every other nation and its religion, and in the history of heaven that is how we must understand it.
Yahwistic monotheism had a radical and far-reaching effect on popular notions of the beyond. Once it was accepted, it was no longer possible to imagine a heaven filled with divine beings, living their own lives without reference to what was happening on earth. If there is only one God, then everything that exists must be under his control, and heaven and earth must be considered as a single reality, not as two separate and unconnected ones. This is what we find right at the beginning of the Old Testament, where God is said to have created the heavens and the earth together (Gen. 1:1). It also means that heaven and everything in it is part of the creation, not an extension of the Creator. The angels who dwell there are creatures subject to God’s will and are not coequal deities. There is some evidence to suggest that Satan and his cohorts rebelled because they wanted to be like God, but they failed in this attempt and so were cast out of heaven (Jude 6). Whatever the case, heaven was not a place whose inhabitants enjoyed absolute equality with one another; there was a hierarchy of beings, all of whom were ranged in the service of Yahweh, who was fundamentally different from them.
Monotheism also means that there can be no intermediate beings, part God and part something else, as was common in ancient pagan religions. Some men, such as Enoch and Elijah, were taken up into God to presumably dwell with him in heaven, but they were exceptions and generally recognized as such (Gen. 5:24; 2 Kings 2:11). Later Israelite tradition suggested that something similar had happened to Moses, because there was no one in Israel who had seen God face-to-face as Moses had, but the biblical text says that he died and was buried in the normal way, although the location of his grave was not known (Deut. 34:5; see also vv. 10–12). Some people find echoes of the deification of pagan rulers in stories like these, but it is the differences rather than the similarities that are more significant. In pagan religions, deification was granted almost as a matter of course to earthly rulers, something that never happened in Israel. Those earthly rulers died and were buried, the assumption being that they passed briefly through the underworld before being exalted to their heavenly glory. Enoch and Elijah did not follow that route—they were taken up directly into heaven and did not see death. Finally, despite the great honor that Enoch and Elijah received, they never became divine beings. The case of Enoch is picked up in the New Testament, where it is said that he was rewarded on account of his great faith, but he is nevertheless listed as one among several other great men, and it is even implied that he did not enter the kingdom of heaven in the way that Christians do (Heb. 11:5, 39–40).
What the ancient Israelites thought happened to people after death is not clear from the Old Testament.10 They seem to have thought that the dead went to a vaguely defined place called Sheol, which was rather like Hades, except that it was not ruled by its own god. In later times Sheol was identified with hell rather than with heaven, which ties in with the early Christian perception that the saints of the Old Testament did not enter the presence of God until the coming of Christ (Heb. 11:39–40). Having said that, there is no suggestion that being in Sheol meant that a soul was cut off from the presence of God. On the contrary, the psalmist writes:
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! (Ps. 139:8)
To him it made no difference. God is present everywhere in his creation, and those who are in a covenant relationship with him retain that relationship wherever they happen to be.
Whether the Jews had any equivalent to the Elysian Fields is harder to say. Jean Delumeau has suggested that the Christian concept of paradise was the result of a fusion between the Elysian Fields and the garden of Eden, but he claims that this does not appear until the early-church period and has no antecedents in Judaism.11 This has been confirmed more recently by Martin Goodman, who cites two New Testament references to paradise and compares them to contemporary Jewish writers on the subject, concluding that “a simpler explanation of Josephus’ reticence about the notion of paradise when he expatiated on Jewish beliefs about the fate of the righteous after death would be that the idea first attested in Luke’s Gospel was not yet common among Jews. . . . It is a reasonable hypothesis that in this case the New Testament provides evidence of a Jewish concept still in its infancy, and that it was only later that it became widespread.”12
There are also indications that the Israelites believed in the resurrection of the body, though Job’s remark that after his skin had been destroyed he would see God in the flesh is difficult to interpret and makes no mention of going to heaven (Job 19:25). The Old Testament’s teaching on the subject is unclear enough that it became the subject of debate between the Pharisees and the Sadducees in the time of Jesus. The Sadducees denied the resurrection, but Jesus sided with the Pharisees on the ground that God says that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. His point was that God is the God not of the dead but of the living, but this evidently struck his hearers as something they had never heard before (Matt. 22:32–33). Additionally, Jesus said nothing about where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were living at the time, or when they had been resurrected, if indeed they had been at that point.
Jesus taught that many Gentiles would enter the kingdom of heaven along with the patriarchs of Israel (Matt. 8:11), and in one of his parables he talked about Lazarus’s being in Abraham’s bosom (in heaven), where the rich man suffering in hell saw him (Luke 16:22–23), but it is not entirely clear what he meant. In the first case, he may have been speaking about an eschatological fulfillment that had not yet arrived, and the second may be no more than an illustration, though it may give us some idea of what popular notions of heaven and hell were like at that time.
In sum, while Jews did not think that physical death was the end of human existence and believed that their ancestors were alive and in the presence of God, the precise details remained somewhat vague. In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, it seems that Jesus was tapping into a popular belief that the good go to heaven and the wicked to hell, but how widespread or official that belief was is impossible to say.13 Jewish beliefs do not contradict what Jesus taught or what his disciples later proclaimed about the kingdom of heaven and the believer’s relationship to it, but neither do they develop the idea in a way that would make the Christian approach seem perfectly natural and expected.
Heaven as Understood since the Coming of Christ
Our first clear indication that believers are meant to live with God forever comes from the teaching of Jesus. The New Testament is at pains to point out that as the Son of God, Jesus came down from heaven in order to raise us up to it (John 3:13–17; 6:38–41; Matt. 24:30–31; 1 Cor. 15:47). In other words, the first we hear about heaven as the abode of the faithful departed comes from someone whose natural habitat it is, and the fact that they go there is entirely dependent on their relationship to him.
The teaching of the New Testament brought perceptions of heaven then current in Jewish-Christian circles into much clearer focus. At one level heaven remained the mysterious dwelling place of God, out of our reach and beyond our understanding. But in another sense it became accessible because the Son of God had gone back to where he came from, taking us with him and seating us alongside him in the heavenly places (Eph. 2:6). The kingdom of heaven that he would usher in was not merely something for us to observe; it was a spiritual reality in which we are called to participate as corulers, even to the extent of sharing with him in the judgment of the angels (1 Cor. 6:3). This has been made possible because Jesus Christ is our Great High Priest who has gone up to heaven, where he offers the sacrifice he made on the cross as the eternal propitiation for our sins (Heb. 9:11–10:14). Heaven and earth are now linked in a new way because the life we live here as believers has been transformed and is continually being sustained by something that is taking place in heaven.
That in turn means that our redemption in Christ must be worked out by our full and eternal integration into that heavenly reality. It is because we have been united with Christ in his death that we are united with him in his resurrection and ascension, which will culminate in our glorification alongside him. In heaven the tribulations that afflict believers in this life will come to an end, and we shall have eternal rest, but that will be the fruit of victory over the forces of evil that we have to combat in this life. The Christian picture of heaven thus has a moral and spiritual dimension that is clearly distinguished from (and contrasted to) that of the Old Testament Sheol, which is now understood as the place where the wicked are punished. No longer was it a matter of relative indifference where we go after death. On the contrary, this life is now seen as a preparation for one or the other, and the Christian message is designed to ensure that we shall choose heaven, not hell, as our eternal abode.
In theological terms we could end the history of heaven at this point. The eschatological fulfillment of the promises made by Jesus to his disciples is still to come and must be regarded as prophecy, not history, even if we have been told what will eventually happen. But although Christian doctrine takes the New Testament as its reference point, a number of different perceptions of heaven have appeared over the two millennia since it was written that have influenced the way in which we interpret the biblical doctrine. Attempts to examine its inner workings began at a very early stage and have continued ever since, sometimes with surprising consequences. One of the earliest writers to give us a picture of how he saw heaven was Irenaeus (late second century), who wrote:
As the elders say, those who are deemed to be worthy of a dwelling-place in heaven will go there, others will enjoy the delights of Paradise, and others will possess the splendor of the city. For everywhere the Savior will be seen according to the worthiness of those who see him. . . . There is a distinction between the habitation of those who produce a hundredfold, and the habitation of those who produce sixtyfold, and the habitation of those who produce thirtyfold. The first class will be taken up into heaven, the second class will dwell in Paradise and the last class will inhabit the city.14
This somewhat fanciful interpretation has a biblical basis, but Irenaeus manages to rearrange heaven into a hierarchical system of rewards based on the accomplishments of believers here on earth. This belief was also quite clearly stated by Origen:
The apostolic teaching is that the soul, . . . after its departure from the world, will be recompensed according to its deserts. It is destined to obtain either an inheritance of eternal life and blessedness (if its actions have procured this for it) or to be delivered up to eternal fire and punishments (if the guilt of its crimes have brought it down to this).15
The belief that heaven is a place of reward for earthly suffering was particularly powerful during the centuries of martyrdom, and it became commonplace to say that those who died for Christ’s sake would automatically go to be with him in heaven.16 Ideas of this kind naturally led to speculation about who would be worthy to share in eternal bliss, which remained a major focus well into the medieval period. As time went on, many people became preoccupied with this question, especially after the legalization of Christianity brought persecution and martyrdom to an end. Gradually the idea grew that it is wise to prepare for the coming of the kingdom by imitating it as much as possible in advance. Out of that desire grew the monastic movement, which in its vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience did its best to replicate the life of heaven here on earth.
This in turn led to a picture of heaven as a place inhabited by high-achieving Christians, to whom the title saint was given. These saints included the martyrs, of course, but also a number of bishops and evangelists, as well as holy virgins who had dedicated their earthly lives to Christ to an exceptional degree. The vision of the monastery as a replica of heaven on earth also led to an emphasis on certain aspects, especially celibacy, that Jesus had spoken about (Matt. 22:30). Augustine (354–430) also exalted virginity as a foretaste of heaven, and his influence was such that this became the standard view for the next thousand years.17
Once it became accepted that Christians would spend eternity in heaven with Christ, speculation naturally arose as to what that life would be like. In his monumental City of God, Augustine dealt with this by saying that the chief activity of the blessed would be to contemplate God, but this did not exclude communication among the saints themselves.18 To his mind, there would be no special friendships or family relations in heaven, where all the redeemed would be placed on an equal footing. But because they were all united in Christ, they would not be strangers to one another either. In other words, they would be like the angels, relating to one another in complete equality but uniformly dependent on God as the source of their eternal joy and happiness.
What was less clear was whether the heavenly state would resemble the garden of Eden (Paradise) or the urban environment symbolized by the New Jerusalem. The Roman world was essentially urban, and so for people like Augustine the New Jerusalem took precedence. But the monastic life was more agricultural, and with the breakdown of city life in the post-Roman world, the theme of the garden reappeared. To many minds, heaven was a return to the innocence that had been lost at the fall of Adam and Eve, a recapitulation of human history that went back to the beginning. So powerful did this image become that by the fourteenth century, “paradise,” the garden of eternal delights, had become the standard way of referring to heaven. This vision was brought to perfection by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), whose epic poem Divina Commedia, which is divided into three roughly equal parts (“Hell,” “Purgatory,” and “Paradise”), became the standard picture of what heaven is like and remained so for the next three hundred years and more.
In Dante’s vision, paradise is not merely the place of the highest bliss in the presence of God but also the context in which love comes to perfection. This theme had already been present in Augustine but in a general way that applied to all the redeemed. Dante individualized it by taking as his guide through the heavenly realm his deceased fiancée, Beatrice. Deprived of her love in this life, Dante believed that he would find it again in a more perfect form in heaven. It is easy to see this as a sharp contrast to the monastic vision of eternal celibacy, but that is probably a misperception. The perfection of the love of a man and woman for each other was no less chaste than the celibate life; the real difference is that it was fulfilled in the union of two particular people, not in the general company of all angelic beings. It was a relationship modeled on the picture of the bridegroom and his bride, presented to us as the culmination of the book of Revelation, the difference being that what the Bible presents as the union of Christ and the church was secularized as the perfect union between two human creatures.19
Another important medieval theme was that heaven is a place of light. God is light, as John reminds us (1 John 1:5), and so it is only to be expected that his dwelling place is a realm of perfect light, which was generally called the “empyrean.”20 It has a visible and even material quality, but one that is quite different from anything known on earth. In the words of Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, “Medieval authors assumed that such a luminous place [as heaven] could not be made of the four elements they knew: earth, water, air, and fire. The empyrean must be made of a fifth and nobler element, the quintessence, which must be something like pure light.”21 The invention of a quintessence allowed theologians to speculate that heaven might contain glorified material substances such as human bodies, making it possible for the ascended body of Christ, as well as the resurrected bodies of the saints, to live in it without losing their fundamental character.22 Jesus had said that the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father, which was taken to imply that the saints in heaven will reflect the divine light (Matt. 13:43).23 That in turn allowed Albert the Great (c. 1193–1280) to say that “the saints will receive different degrees of clarity, according to their different degrees of merit.”24 In other words, heaven will contain not only a hierarchy of order but a hierarchy of virtue as well.
Yet for all the explorations of what heaven might be like, medieval theologians never formally transgressed the bounds laid down in the New Testament. In the words of McDannell and Lang, “The idea of heaven as paradise restored and the issue of human companionship in the next world made only tentative entrance in religious thought and the arts. . . . The longing for human love and companionship beyond death could be heard in the declarations of poets, but was never allowed to shape the teaching on the next life.”25 For that, the church had to wait until the Renaissance, with its idea that God and human beings were working together in harmony to make a better world. As human pleasures and concerns took on greater importance, so the vision of heaven was expanded to accommodate them. The garden paradise and the heavenly city were fused into a new synthesis in which human life was brought to perfection in a heavenly realm overseen by the presence and power of God but was essentially free to shape its own destiny in the way that Adam and Eve were originally meant to do.26
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of this era has been the now widespread belief that heaven will be a place of meeting again, of reconciling differences and of living together in peace and harmony. How far this might go was a matter of opinion, and Renaissance thinkers differed among themselves about the implications of their vision. For some it meant that the resurrected bodies will all be naked, the ultimate sign of equality and the way we were created. For others it meant that people of different ages and social classes will be able to mingle freely without the constraints imposed by human social order. Meeting old friends and establishing new relationships were both conceivable in such a heaven, where self-realization is possible without being bound by mere self-interest. The only snag with this charming picture is that God was more or less left out of it. He was always there in theory, of course, but more as the one who made it all possible than as the center of attention. Such a humanistic view of the afterlife was bound to be called into question, and the outbreak of the Reformation provided the opportunity to correct the one-sidedness of the Renaissance picture of heaven.
Put succinctly, the Reformers restored God to the central place in heaven that he must occupy if heaven is to be what the Bible claims it is: the realization of the kingdom of God.27 So strong was this emphasis in their writings that they had little to say about how the saints in heaven will live, other than pointing out that they will glorify their Savior. They did not entirely reject Renaissance notions of a reunion in heaven, but they were unhappy at the thought that the saints will be differentiated according to rank or reward. They also rejected the idea that the saints are perfect creatures, restored to the glory of Adam and Eve in Eden, because in reality they are sinners saved by grace. In themselves, the human inhabitants of heaven are the same as the human inhabitants of hell, the only difference being that those in heaven have been forgiven by being united to Christ, while those in hell have not. This view was a natural consequence of their understanding of salvation by grace through faith, not by works. Any person who thinks he deserves a place in heaven is guaranteed never to get there. On the other hand, God’s power to forgive is so great that one might almost say that those who have sinned much are privileged because they have been forgiven more (see Luke 7:47). This attitude led their Catholic opponents to accuse them of antinomianism and even of encouraging immorality, but of course this was not the case. Their concern was to magnify the grace and glory of God, and everything they said about heaven pointed in that direction.
One aspect of heaven that the Reformers disagreed on was the possibility that some form of material body could be absorbed into the spiritual realm. Lutherans generally denied this, which led them to insist that the body of Christ, once it had ascended, must be ubiquitous (present everywhere) because of its union with the nature of God. Reformed (Calvinist) theologians, on the other hand, clung to the late medieval view that there is such a thing as a finite, spiritual body and interpreted the ascended body of Christ in that way. This apparently obscure difference of opinion acquired considerable practical importance because it led to a disagreement over the nature of Christ’s presence in the bread and wine of Holy Communion. The Lutherans insisted that he is really there because of the ubiquity of his spiritual body, and the Reformed insisted with equal force that he is not because that spiritual body is not omnipresent. The legacy of this dispute can still be seen in the continuing separation of Lutheran and Reformed churches, though it must be said that nowadays few people in either tradition feel strongly about it, and those who have studied the matter most closely generally think that it is a speculative question to which no definite answer can be given.
On the Catholic side, reaction to the Reformers’ concentration on God led to greater emphasis being placed on the Virgin Mary, whose role as “queen of heaven,” which had been recognized in medieval times, was now given much more prominence than it had previously enjoyed. Protestants naturally believed that this detracted from the worship of God, and although Catholics denied that, it is easy to see why they felt that way. In popular piety and art, Mary came to be presented as the gateway to heavenly bliss and the guarantor of access to God in a way that she had not previously been, and devotion to her took off accordingly. It is not often realized, but the Marian dogmas of the Roman church and most of the pilgrimage sites where she is meant to have made appearances (Lourdes, Fátima, and so on) are of modern origin and testify to Mary’s increasing prominence in the Catholic vision of heaven.
That aside, it is still true to say that with the sixteenth-century Reformation, both Protestant and Catholic, we reach the limits of the doctrinal development of the concept of heaven, at least to date. In the centuries since then, the various views of heaven that have emerged have mixed and mingled in any number of ways. Official teachings and pronouncements tend to be reticent about the subject, but popular imagination fills the gap. The main common denominator is that heaven is always portrayed as a desirable goal, a place of rest and recovery from the troubles of this life and of reunion and reconciliation.
It is probably fair to say that in modern times, the real debate has not been about the nature of heaven but about whether there is such a place at all. From the time of the French Revolution onward, radical thinkers “stormed the gates of heaven,” as they claimed, regarding the whole idea as a pious trick designed to keep the downtrodden satisfied with their lot here on earth. The revolutionaries wanted to destroy the myth and maintained that the goals that earlier generations had projected onto the hereafter could be realized on earth. Love, joy, peace, justice, and prosperity are not unattainable ideals but realistic aims that can be achieved by social and political means. Today, most people would agree that the utopian dreams of the more extreme revolutionaries have not been realized, but criticism of them has focused more on the means they used to obtain their ends than on the ends themselves. Modern capitalist democracies do not coerce their citizens in the way that communist dictatorships have done, but the consumerist dream of an abundant future is really no different from what Karl Marx and his followers had in mind.
The difference is that Western societies believe that the free market is a more effective way of achieving the goal of creating heaven on earth than collectivist central planning is, and so far they have had the better of the argument. Whether our current abundance bears any relationship to heaven, though, is more than questionable. Material prosperity has been bought at a heavy price, with social breakdown, loneliness, and psychological disintegration replacing poverty and hunger as the curses of our age.
For Christians the dilemma this poses is the same as it has always been. We cannot reject the world we live in, but we cannot be entirely happy with it either. For us, belief in heaven is a reminder that on earth we have no abiding city, human life is transient, and the true joys are eternal. We live in this world as strangers who belong elsewhere and who are on our way home. We treat the world with respect because it too is created by God, but we do not invest in it for the long term. Heaven is our ultimate goal, and heaven is the presence of the everlasting God, whom we shall know and worship in union with Christ, the Lamb who once was slain and who now sits on its throne.
1 They have done this by interpreting the Greek word ekenōsen (“he emptied [himself]”) to mean that he gave up his heavenly status and privileges.
2 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 1:481 (2.13.4); 2:1,402 (4.17.30). Although attributed to Calvin, this view is in fact much older and can be found in a number of ancient and medieval Christian writers. See E. D. Willis, Calvin’s Catholic Christology (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1966), for a full discussion.
3 On this subject, see Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Originally published in French as La Naissance du Purgatoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1981).
4 See J. Edward Wright, The Early History of Heaven (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), for a full discussion of this.
5 Ibid., 50.
6 In English we use the Latin names of these gods. To the Greeks they were Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares, Zeus, and Cronus (Kronos).
7 We still do this, though the Latin names of the gods (used in French, Spanish, and Italian) were changed to Anglo-Saxon ones, so that Týr replaced Mars, Odin replaced Mercury, Thor replaced Jupiter, and Frige replaced Venus. Saturn, however, managed to survive!
8 Paul may have meant the “highest heaven,” since three was a sacred number just as much as seven was, but there is no way of knowing this for sure. Origen, Cels. 6.21 (PG 11:1321), comments: “The Scriptures . . . do not speak of seven heavens, or of any definite number at all. Rather, they do appear to teach the existence of ‘heavens,’ whether that means the spheres of those bodies that the Greeks call ‘planets’ or something more mysterious.”
9 The church was more successful with Sabbath and Lord’s Day than with the others, as the evidence of the modern Romance languages attests.
10 For a good summary, see Ray C. Ortlund Jr., “Heaven in the Old Testament,” in this volume.
11 Jean Delumeau, A History of Paradise (New York: Continuum, 1995), 6–15.
12 Martin Goodman, “Paradise, Gardens and the Afterlife in the First Century CE,” in Paradise in Antiquity, ed. Markus Bockmuehl and Guy Stroumsa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 62–63.
13 See the detailed discussion of this in I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1978), 636–37. As Marshall puts it, “Nothing is said about where Abraham is thought to be. ‘Abraham’s bosom’ is not a synonym for Paradise, although Abraham may be thought to be in Paradise.” In other words, the meaning is unclear, and contemporary Jewish sources do not enlighten us any further.
14 Irenaeus, Haer. 5:36.1–2 (PG 7:1222–23). The references to hundredfold, etc., are to the parable of the sower. See Matt. 13:23.
15 Orig. Princ. 1.Preface.5 (PG 11:118).
16 For a comprehensive list of the sources, see D. W. Bercot, A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1998), 427–36.
17 Augustine, Virginit. 13 (PL 40: 401–2). See Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 54–59, for a full discussion.
18 Augustine, Civ. 22.30 (PL 41: 802–4).
19 See J. B. Russell, A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 151–85, for a detailed examination of Dante’s Paradise.
20 The word means “fiery place,” but that aspect was not emphasized in the Middle Ages, which preferred to concentrate on the glory and splendor that the fire produced.
21 McDannell and Lang, Heaven, 82–83.
22 Alexander of Hales, Summa Theologica 4, 288ff.
23 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, suppl. 84:2.
24 Albertus Magnus, Commentary on the Sentences, 4:44, 31.
25 McDannell and Lang, Heaven, 109–10.
26 Ibid., 111–44, for a complete description of this.
27 Ibid., 145–80.