The Problem of Heaven

 

As Christians, our belief is that the final hope and consummation of our belief is in eternal life. One of the central trinity of Christian virtues is hope and the center of that hope is Heaven. (And, yes, you could argue that the Resurrection, which is our ultimate hope, is something different from Heaven but because I'm lazy, I'm just going to refer to it as 'Heaven' for the rest of this article.) Without this hope, St. Paul said that we would be the most miserable of all men. It is this hope which is, or should be, the driving force of faith and the guardian of charity.

But in reality, the place of this hope in modern Christianity is significantly more complicated than that. There are many who do not seem to have this hope and some who explicitly deny it. I do not mean that there are some within nominal Christianity who deny the reality of Heaven, though there are those who do. I mean, even within those who believe in Heaven, there is some difficulty about how to relate our hope for Heaven with our life on Earth. 

I still remember several years ago hearing a prominent Holiness preacher rejecting the idea of being “homesick for Heaven” because he believed it meant turning away from our work and place in this world. In a story I posted a few weeks ago, I credit Simon Stylites with a phrase he probably never said but which summarized the view of the old ascetics and some modern evangelicals: “The farther off from Earth, the nearer is to Heaven.” I do not believe this Biblical or healthy. A love for God may require rejecting this world, just as it may require rejecting your family. But rejecting your family is not a good step towards loving God, and rejecting this world does not get you closer to Heaven. Being a saint may make you a martyr but being a martyr does not make you a saint.

But that is not the point I want to make in this article. There is another view, or perhaps more accurately, an attitude, a state of mind, an atmosphere which infects and eats away our hope of Heaven.

We can start our discussion here. C. S. Lewis wrote several notable passages about Heaven and the Christian's hope, but many of these appear to have been written in defiance of a doubt which seemed to haunt him throughout life—a doubt, not of the existence of Heaven, but of its desirability. For instance, take this passage from Transposition: “And the trouble is that any adult and philosophically respectable notion we can form of Heaven is forced to deny of that state most of the things our nature desires... Hence our notion of Heaven involves perpetual negations: no food, no drink... no movement, no mirth, no events, no time, no art.”

We know very little about the state of Heaven and mostly what we know about it are the things which aren't present. Perhaps for most people, the main stumbling block is the passage in Matthew 22:23-33 where Jesus explicitly states that marriage does not exist in Heaven and therefore, assumably, family life and relationships do not exist. (This does not imply that we will no longer remember them, but merely that they will no longer have actual existence. A law may be repealed or nullified and people still remember that it was once a law.) 

For those who have known happy family life, it is hard to believe that it will be ripped away from them and they will still be happy. And for those who have known that kind of happiness, it is a hard pill to swallow that even in all eternity they will never know it.

Of course, it would be possible to ignore this doctrine. It is only one passage in scripture (though that passage is repeated three times) and it is rather ambiguous. (Jesus says we will be like the angels which would be much more informative if we knew more about what angels are like.) But I think most people will find that trying to imagine even the best of human life extended eternally does not come up with any sort of coherent picture of Heaven either.

So this is the problem. If Heaven is so completely unlike Earth, why should we desire it, at least while we still have Earth? Why should, say, a young person just starting out on the journey of life consider a matter of “hope” to believe in a future state which is so radically unlike everything he has on Earth?

As I said before, the primary focal point for this discussion is Matthew 22:23-33 (and the parallel passages) since, other than that, we have very few concrete details concerning the future state. And I came up with the idea of this article because last time I was reading through this passage something very odd struck me about it.

For those who do not remember the passage, I will briefly recount it here. The Sadducees (who denied Heaven) came to Jesus with a riddle concerning a woman who was married to and widowed by seven different men. The question was whose wife she would be in Heaven. And Jesus' response was: “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.”

And what struck me about the passage was not so much Jesus' answer itself, but the attitude of it. There is in Jesus' words a fierceness, almost a ferocity which seems very strange, especially given that the question, to me, seems like a legitimate one.

Of course, it was not asked for legitimate reasons. The Sadducees did not ask the question because they wanted an answer nor even because they wanted to begin an honest conversation about the issue. They (seemingly) asked the question because they wanted to make Jesus look silly by giving Him a question He couldn't answer. So, in that sense, Jesus' fierceness is understandable, but his words are not directed at their motives but at the question itself.

It feels like a teacher when a student asks a question which the teacher had just answered five minutes before. It is partly that the question is asked merely to cause trouble but partly that it is a question they should know the answer to. “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.” In essence, Jesus is saying: You should already know this.

And that is what seems so odd, given that there is nowhere else in Scripture that deals with this question of marriage in Heaven. There really doesn't seem to be any way that anybody could have known the answer to this question if Jesus Himself hadn't specifically given it. So what is the reason behind Jesus' fierce answer?

Obviously, this is a supposition. But I think it makes sense if we consider what the Sadducees were really saying. They were not asking this question because they legitimately wanted to know. If we did not have this passage, many of us would have wondered about human relationships in Heaven and, if we had the opportunity, might have asked Jesus for information. But that isn't why the Sadducees asked the question. Even aside from the ulterior motives which prompted them in this case, the question was not meant to be answered.

Instead, what we have is a technique where a question is asked, not so much to get an answer, but as a statement or as a way to provoke thought about the question. It is not, in itself, a dishonest method and you could argue that Jesus Himself sometimes used it. But the point is that the Sadducees were not really asking a question. They were not saying: we don't understand this about Heaven. They were saying: there can't be a Heaven and one of the reasons is this. They were saying that there could be no future state because it would be impossible to manage to reconstruct human relationships beyond the grave.

And to that, Jesus' answer was: “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.” And if you think about it from this perspective, the warmth of Jesus' response makes sense. The Sadducees were saying that they were positive there could be no future state because they could not see any way that God could arrange some particular aspect of it. They were saying that the God who created this world could not figure out how to create another one. And I think as we look at this attitude, we will realize how fitting Jesus' response is. Such an error really comes from not knowing or fully appreciating the scriptures and the power of God.

And that brings us back to the point I started with—with the feeling many people have that Heaven will be somehow a disappointment, that it is somehow undesirable. It is a doubt that God—the one who made the heart of man and then created a world so that “all thy longings have been/Granted in what He ordaineth”--could actually find a way of satisfying man's heart in Heaven. To find Heaven cold and uninviting because there is no marriage is to say the very one who first designed and planned out marriage cannot be trusted to make something good without using the same exact pattern He used before. And to all of this, I think in the end, the only proper response is: “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.”

(In passing, we should note that this is also the answer to those who believe that a hope for Heaven and enjoyment of this life are incompatible. There is a continuity between this world and the next, because both are made by God.)

But, indeed, I think the answer is a stronger one to us than it was to the Sadducees, simply because we know more about the scriptures and the power of God than they did.

I remember reading a story (I believe it was one of Stan Lee's) about a race of super-beings living somewhere on Earth. In the story, due to certain circumstances, these beings were being forced to vacate their city and construct a new home elsewhere. But while they were planning this, their leader Black Bolt found a child crying one night—and the child explained that he was crying because, no matter how good their new city might be, it would not be home. And the narrator gave some comment along the lines of: “And Black Bolt understood his sorrow, for he too had the soul of a child and knew what it meant to love his home.”

And that is what is significant about the Christian doctrine of Heaven. It is not merely that Heaven exists—it is not merely that God, who made the Earth, will also make Heaven—it is that Jesus of Nazareth, a man made in all points like unto us yet without sin, has gone to prepare a place for us. Heaven cannot be inhuman because it is being made by a human being, by a man who walked where we have walked, who knew life as we knew it, who knew what it meant to have a home and knew what it meant to be homeless and long for a home, who experienced both the joys and sorrows of life. To think that He would either be unconcerned with our needs or would be unable to create a world to meet them—to think that the one who lived in order to die in order to give us life would not be able to make that life worth having—to such a view, there is only one response: “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.”