July 26, 2009: Imagining Heaven (Part 2)

When I compared Alice Sebold's and C. S. Lewis' visions of heaven last week, I wonder if any readers thought, "Why bother imagining heaven at all? Can't we just go by what the Bible says about it?" And that might seem like a simple and obvious thing to do. But the problem is that the Bible never gives a single coherent view of the blessed afterlife.

What it gives instead is a variety of images that are hard to put together in a single frame. I would go as far as to say that our finite minds cannot assemble all the images meaningfully.

Sometimes heaven is viewed as a city (Revelation 21:2). Sometimes it is a country comprised of cities (Luke 19:11-19). Sometimes the scale is reduced, and it is viewed as a many-roomed mansion (John 14:2). Sometimes it is a serene countryside (Isaiah 11:6-9). What will we be doing there? In Matthew 25:1-13 and Revelation 19:9 it looks like we're having a party in a wedding reception hall. In Revelation 4 and 5 it looks like we're worshipping in a great throne room. In Hebrews 4:1-11, I think we're just relaxing in a hammock under a shade tree.

So, which is it? Are we relaxing, dancing, or bowing? Are we in a room, or a great hall, or an open space? Are we in a city with a huge throng, or are we walking along grassy hills with a lion on our left and a lamb on our right? And is Jesus at our side speaking words of love - or is he off in the distance, seated on a throne before which we lie prostrate?

Yes.

I suppose if you wanted to insist on a literal fulfillment of all the images you could gerrymander a way to do it. Like this: on Tuesdays in heaven we exit our condo units at the mansion and walk over to the big worship center for some angel-led praise. Wednesdays we drink and dance and stuff ourselves at a party. Thursdays we tour the cities we've been assigned to govern and take care of administrative duties that have piled up during the week. Fridays we frolic with wolves and lions by a viper's pit (and give thanks they're all vegetarians now). Saturday, hammock. Sunday your choice. Then Monday is the day everybody looks forward to, because, since Matthew 22:30 says we are like genderless unmarried angels, we get to indulge in that mysterious thing God has prepared for us that we all like better than sex.

Or we can let the literalisms go and recognize that the images given to us are just that - images. They are word pictures designed to communicate the incommunicable. None of the pictures is false – they are simply inadequate for the task of conveying even a little bit of heavenly reality to us.

For a while it intrigued me (I'm not sure I could say it bothered me) that, while I preferred to see heaven as beautiful open countryside - the Rocky Mountains! - the Bible more often saw it as a city. I don't like cities, especially crowded ones. Why does the Bible give me such an inferior picture?

Then a couple things occurred to me. First, the "wilderness" known by ancient Israelites simply wasn't all that beautiful. They didn't have a Glacier National Park, or a Grand Canyon, or even Smokey Mountains. (Of course, I must confess I've never been to Israel and have not been able to evaluate the scenery there. But I have seen pictures. Meh.)

Secondly, Israelite wilderness was not a lush vacationland but a barren, hostile threat. Their wilderness was the place where you could die of thirst, find no food, maybe be set upon by thieves or foreign soldiers. It was the city, your city, where you found refuge, safety, food, comfort, fellowship. So of course, to such a people, heaven must be pictured as a city. That is the best place they knew. But I wonder, had Revelation been written in 21st century America, if urban terminology would have been used at all. To me, at least, the very word "city" conjures up no thoughts of heavenly delight but rather of crime, noise, blight, honking horns, crowded subways, unpleasantly overwhelmed senses, and the smell of car exhaust.

I think the main thing we need to understand about heaven is that we will be with Christ and we will like it. Beyond that, it's a little hard to see. Paul said once, "Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12). And when he caught sight of heaven, he wasn't even allowed to talk about it (2 Corinthians 12:2-4). Some things about heaven will remain unseeable and unknowable until we get there.

I'm getting married in 11 days. That's pretty heavenly.