Posted on 04/18/2005 8:59:32 AM PDT by logos
In their fascinating book Heaven: A History, Colleen McDannel and Bernhard Lang observe that even among conservative Christians "eternal life has become an unknown place or a state of vague identity." A recent article in Time magazine made the same point, although it reported that 81 percent of those they polled professed to believe in heaven as a place "where people live forever with God after they die." While they still believe in heaven "their concept of exactly what it is has grown foggier, and they hear about it much less frequently from their pastors."
The attitude of many people toward heaven is reflected in the 1990s movie Michael. John Travolta in the title role plays an angel who is permitted one more visit to earth before he must go to heaven forever. The implicit message is that earth is better than heaven. Thus Michael wants to partake of the sinful pleasures of earth before submitting to the eternal boredom of life with God. This point was made in a student paper that went on to compare Lewis's writings on heaven with those of a contemporary theologian. While their formal beliefs about heaven were essentially the same, the student remarked that the description of heaven by the noted theologian gave him no desire to go there. Reading Lewis's account of heaven, however, stirred in him a deep sense of joy and excitement and awoke the longing for heaven.
The three most profound pages in Mere Christianity may be Lewis's brief discussion of the Christian virtue of hope and its relation to the longing for heaven. This longing is precisely the longing for deep and lasting happiness that all human beings have felt stirring in their hearts. Heaven is about happiness and joy, and if we do not understand this and believe it heartily, then the desire to love god and be properly related to him will be correspondingly weak and vague. Apologetics cannot succeed in making a relationship with God desirable without at least a glimpse of the hearty delights of heaven. Nor is the real terror of hell really understood until it is grasped that sin is the destruction of joy and satisfaction.
If our deepest longing is really for God, then that longing is a desire for heaven. At the heart of our apologetic task is the charge of helping people name their deepest longings.
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Oh, that we would desire God. He is the source of bliss.
Of course we all want to go home again to live with Heavenly Father. That's the point.
What a beautiful insight, logos! So true... and sometimes this knowledge is buried very deep....
Thank you oh so much for this excellent series!
Odysseus, in that famous tale of Homer, is presented with a temptation to become immortal and live with forever with a goddess. He refuses, I think, not because Ithica is better than Calypso's Isle, or the other way around, but he knows that he is a man. And so the tension between heaven and earth must be seen in light of utopian hopes which overlook the true nature of humanity to imagine ourselves more than what we are. This tension is very strong in Augustine's City of God and ever after him, it has been a Christian problem, although St. Paul gave his preference, as did Socrates.
It may be OK to say that heaven is the name for lasting happines. It need not be a place. If it is a place, it probably should be capitalized. Heaven, the Celestial City, the New Jerusalem.
In any case, one problem here is historical. As soon as the future guarantees our beatitude, the present sags like a bad sock. Unless . . .
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