Is heaven real?

In my 20 years of preaching I have never written a sermon on heaven nor have I heard one from a colleague. My suspicion is that the dearth of sermons on this topic is more widespread than my experience of two main stream Protestant denominations. This is surprising since the most used Christian prayer is the Lord’s prayer which posits “Our Father in heaven” and prays that “your (God’s) will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. The absence of talk about heaven poses the question as to what Christians mean when they prayer as their Lord has instructed them.

The church is divided between those who know too much about heaven and those who are uncomfortable with it. While the former would give us a tour the latter are embarrassed by its seeming naiveté.

While belief in heaven as the abode of the righteous dead is common in world religions we must beware of smearing them into a generic “one size fits all” concept. This is very much like the mistake many make when they say that all the religions of the world worship the one God. That is, we start with the one concept that we all agree on - God - and then work from there. While this may appear enlightened and tolerant all it achieves is a homogenised world religion that can say nothing specific.

The heaven and the God that Christians speak of have a particular history not shared with the other religions of the world. Therefore we can’t begin where we are all in agreement, instead we must begin with particular concepts associated with a particular people exactly in the place where we are most in disagreement. This is at its sharpest when the Christian, talking of God with a Muslim, must point to the nation of Israel.

I was stimulated to write on heaven after re-reading what has now become a Christian classic, Dogmatics in Outline by Karl Barth. This was a series of lectures given in the ruins of a German university immediately after World War II. Barth takes the Apostles’ Creed as his guide and begins with “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth”. From this he concludes that heaven, like earth, is a part of the creation and as such is creaturely and exists in time.

This is surprising since if heaven is part of the creation why do we have no evidence of its existence? Were the Russian astronauts right in proclaiming its absence from their vantage point above the earth? Barth goes on to resolve this dilemma by saying that heaven is the sphere incomprehensible to man while the earth is the sphere comprehensible. It is not that heaven is like the inner workings of the atom or the outer reaches of space that will become known in time, but that there is no human path by which heaven may be comprehended, thus flying in the face of human scientific triumphalism that proclaims the limitlessness of human knowledge.

Since heaven is part of the creation it may not be worshiped, it is not God. This understanding is a corrective to the popular hope in heaven, the hope that one will not cease to be in death but survive and continue “in heaven”. Rather than being faith in God this is faith in heaven and a failure to grasp that we are creatures and that we go the way of all creatures.

Heaven is separated from earth not spatially but by its nature as the realm of God unapproachable by man. However, heaven is above the earth. God looks “down from heaven” and according to the gospel of John, Jesus came down from heaven. Jesus’ ascension into heaven is part of the gospel according to the gospel of Luke. A literal understanding of these spatial references produces absurd conclusions. Heaven is above earth in that it is the sphere in which God’s will is done and in which Jesus sits in session with the Father. The earth is beneath heaven in that it is the sphere separated from God and therefore deficient or below.

Both the Priestly account of creation (Gen 1:1-2:4a) and the Yahwist (Gen 2:4b-3:24) mention that God created the heavens and the earth. It is clear from the Priestly account that “the heavens” does not refer to the sky but neither accounts give any other information apart from them being a part of creation. It is almost as though an editor has hastily added “the heavens” to the introduction to both accounts and then left it at that. This brevity belies the importance of heaven in both the Old and New Testament as the abode of God and is inversely related to the embarrassing imaginative projection that heaven has had to sustain down through the ages.

The problem with the popular account of heaven as the abode of the righteous dead in eternity is that it is completely static, as the word eternity denotes. Heaven is thus timeless and unchangeable, and definitely not creaturely. Body-soul dualism is translated to earth-heaven dualism, the one material, earthly and changeable, and the other spiritual eternal and unchangeable.

These two spheres are understood to exist as parallel spheres that never interact. This is in opposition to the biblical account in which the two spheres interact in the God-man Jesus. In him the ways of heaven become the ways of earth. In him the will of the Father is done on earth as it is in heaven. In him God reaches out to man and brings him to heaven, but man in this remains a creature and lives his life.

The Christian promise of a renewed heaven and earth rests on the intersection between the two. When the separation between heaven and earth is breached the reign of God on earth is inaugurated. In the New Testament the kingdom of God is the kingdom of heaven, the two phrases are interchangeable. It is that reality that breaks into the earthly sphere whenever peace overcomes war and love overcomes violence. It is encountered before its time in the celebration of the Eucharist as the heavenly banquet prepared for all humankind.

So the concept of heaven works in theology not only as the abode of God which is incomprehensible to men but as a promise of the healing of all things towards which world history is destined to run. The central prayer of Christians is that “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven”.

Thus heaven is not just a cipher or a literary figure, it has content. Its content is found in the original creation in the Garden of Eden in which God could walk at the time of the evening breeze and talk to His creature directly. It is no accident that Jewish thought around 200BC identified the garden as paradise and the abode of the righteous dead. A trickle of this tradition is found in Luke 23:43 when Jesus says to the repentant thief on the cross beside him “today you will be with me in paradise”, one of only three uses of the word in the New Testament.

Contrary to popular theology, the significance of heaven is not that it is the abode of the righteous dead but that it is the creaturely and thus historical sphere towards which the earth must eventually tend. We are given a sense of this state by the prophets:

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den. (Isa 11:6-8 NRSV)

To the reformation of nature is added the reformation of the individual and of human society. These are poetic expressions of the dominion of God and heaven. Thus while we lack descriptions of the furniture of heaven and of the creatures that find their home there, the significance of heaven is filled out in terms of the restoration of the earth to become the peaceable kingdom in which the enmity between man and God is healed. The rebellion of man against God could only be a rebellion against his own nature and could only cause him misery, while restoration can only restore man to his original state of grace first experienced in the Garden of Eden.

While we know that the lion will not lie down with the lamb such poetic expressions prick our longing and raise the spectre of the healing of all things. Without this longing, which is a longing for heaven, there is the danger that we will settle down and accept the terms of the present. When heaven is the place where the individual goes after death longing for the healing of the earth is diverted, but more, this is a stance that is exactly conditioned by death, that is ruled by death and it is this conditioning and rule that God’s action in raising Jesus from the dead has put to flight.

Can we then ask the question about whether heaven is real? The reality of heaven resides in the truth of God’s reconciling action in Christ. If this is a lie, then heaven does not exist. If it is the truth, and the work of Christ in the world has the power to transform that world, then heaven is more real than the world we see passing away before us.

When will we begin to hear sermons on heaven? Well, we already do when we hear sermons that take the yearning core of biblical texts seriously. When preachers listen to the promise of the text that a new earth and a new heaven realised in our own lives exists on the horizon and is even now breaking into our existence then we have a sermon with heaven at its heart. When the celebrant knows that the feast he presides over is from above then we have a sacrament governed by heaven. So perhaps heaven is not so far from the church’s mind and practice as we might think. It is just that it has assumed its true form as a summons to reconciliation.