HEAVEN
“Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, what
God has ready for those who love him”
1 Cor 2:9 & Is 64:3
Heaven can not properly be defined
Lack of experience or data
Heaven is unique with nothing to compare
But
WE CAN SPEAK ANALOGICALLY
We can say what it is not
and
What it is like
Earthly Analogies
What does not appear in our experience
cannot be defined, only related to what does
appear in our experience by analogy
Heaven is to earth
as
the butterfly to the caterpillar
or
the adult to the fetus
Earthly Analogies for Heaven
Three steps in thinking about God
Dionysius the Aeropagite
Positive Theology
Begin with earthly analogies
Negative Theology
Correct them
Superlative Theology
Note that the reason for correction and negation of the earthly analogy is
not that heaven lacks anything earthly but that it is so much more
Positive Theology gives positive analogies
Isaiah 55:8-9
1 Cor 2:9
Words are too definite and specific
Earthly Analogies for Heaven
There are six earthly activities that continue in heaven
They are our fundamental task, the meaning of life
To understand God
To love God
To understand others
To love others
To understand yourself
To love yourself
There are two distinctively human activities
Knowing & Loving
There are three infinitely precious objects
God, neighbor & self
HEAVEN
What Does Scripture Say?
Biblical descriptions of the salvation and
perfection humans enjoy
eternal life glorification immortality
incorruptiblity light peace
harmony with the animals and the cosmos
banquet wedding feast homecoming
reign with God vision of God
union with Trinity union with Christ
Communion with angels and saints
HEAVEN
What Does Scripture Say?
Dwelling place of God
1 Kgs 8:30; Ps 2:4; Mk 11:25; Mt 5:16; Lk 11:13; Rv 21:2
Dwelling place of the angels
Gn 21:17; Lk 2:15; Heb 12:22; Rv 1:4
Dwelling place of Christ
Mk 16:19; Acts 1:9-11; Eph 4:10; Heb 4:14
Dwelling place of the blessed
Mk 10:21; Phil 3:20; Heb 12:22-24
HEAVEN
What Does Scripture Say?
Two basic visions of heaven
“Theocentric”
Heaven as an intimate union with and contemplation of God
“Anthropocentric”
Heaven as reunion with
spouses, children, relatives, and friends
Heaven is the fulfillment of the human
heart’s deepest longings
HEAVEN
What Does Scripture Say?
“The clean of heart will see God”
Matthew 5:8
“We shall see Him as He is.”
1 John 3:2
“At present we see indistinctly, as in a
mirror, but then face to face. At present I
know partially; then I shall know fully as I
am fully known.”
1 Cor 13:12
“Beatific Vision”
“Benedictus Deus” (1336) Pope Benedict XII
“Since the passion and death of the Lord Jesus
Christ, these souls have seen and see the
divine essence with intuitive vision and
even face to face, without the mediation of
any creature by way of object of vision;
rather the divine essence immediately
manifests itself to them, plainly, clearly, and
openly, and in this vision they enjoy the
divine essence.”
HEAVEN
Seven alternate theories
• Atheistic materialism - We are simply material organisms when we
die its over
• God but no life after death - God either does not love us enough or
lacks the power to save us
• Skepticism - No one can ever know what happens
• Ancient Paganism - We become pale copies, ghosts inhabiting a
gloomy dark underworld
• Platonism - The body dies forever the spirit lives forever
• Pantheism - We are part of the cosmic ocean at the end we melt back
into the sea
• Reincarnation - We get another earthly mortal body until we are
enlightened enough to reach either Pantheism or Platonism
HEAVEN
Ten refutations of reincarnation
• It is contradicted by scripture (Heb 9:27)
• It is contradicted by orthodox tradition
• It would reduce the Incarnation to a mere
appearance, the crucifixion to an accident
• It implies that God made a mistake imprisoning
our souls to live in bodies
• It is contradicted by psychology and common
sense (no natural unity)
HEAVEN
Ten refutations of reincarnation
• It entails a low view of the body as prison or punishment
• It blames sin on the body’s power to confuse and darken
the mind
• We can’t remember our former lives so how can I learn
from my mistakes
• Rememberings of past lives are really mental contact with
souls in heaven, purgatory or hell
• The beginning of the process that began our entrapment in
bodies must have occurred while spiritual. How could we
have committed evil in the state of heavenly bliss?
The Christian Alternative
Resurrection of the Body
After death the whole self, including the
purified, perfected soul and a new, immortal
body given by God’s supernatural power, is
destined to live forever
What might this be like?
Objections to Heaven Answered
The idea of heaven is pre-scientific
superstition
This objection is not scientific since it uses no
evidence to refute the idea
Many “pre-scientific” ideas are valid, true,
and important
birth, death, life, good, evil,beauty, pleasure,
pain etc. etc.
Objections to Heaven Answered
There is no scientific evidence for heaven
There is no scientific evidence for the notion
that nothing exists except what is proved by
scientific evidence
This is simply an assumption that arbitrarily
limits the bounds of reality to the bounds
of the scientific method without the use of
evidence or intellect
Objections to Heaven Answered
Heaven is obviously wishful thinking.
If there were no heaven, we would have to invent it.
It is a necessary dream.
• The heaven of the Bible is selfless, self-forgetful,love and
saintliness, not the gratification of selfish desires
• Even the physical details or symbols of heaven do not
correspond to the popular picture
• Even if there is a correspondence between our dreams and
heaven it does not eliminate the possibility of God having
created us for it
• If an effect can not exceed its cause, how can the idea of
heaven be caused by our finite minds
Objections to Heaven Answered
The very form, or structure, of the idea of heaven is
mythic or legendary. The golden streets are just
another version of the “happy hunting grounds”
or the Elysian Fields
• Distinguish imagery from substance. To disbelieve in the
substance because you take the imagery literally is a
foolish mistake
• The fact that all religious cultures have imagery for heaven
is proof for its existence not vice versa
• The biblical version of heaven does not appeal to natural,
worldly, selfish desires
Objections to Heaven Answered
Believing in heaven is escapist
• Who talks the most against escapism? The
jailers! (C. S. Lewis)
• Heaven is not escapist it is the fulfillment of
all good earthly desires
• The first question about any idea cannot be
whether it is escapist but whether it is true
• Even an escapist idea can be true
Objections to Heaven Answered
Heaven is a diversion. Whether true or false,
it distracts us from our present tasks.
• Heaven is our ultimate destination our present tasks are
most often a distraction from it
• Concern for a higher thing does not lessen or demean a
concern for lower things. Our concern for the future does
not demean our concern about the present
• Throughout history it has been those who believed most
strongly in heaven who have made the greatest difference
to earth
Objections to Heaven Answered
Heaven is irrelevant to the here and now. You can
love or hate this world whether you believe in the
next or not
• Heaven is more than relevant to the present; it actually begins in the
present
• The joy of heaven begins now for the believer in Jesus Christ
• If heaven is not in us now, it will never be in us forever, because
heaven is where God is.
• If God is in our souls now then heaven is in us now
• This is one of Jesus’ central teachings (Mt 13:45-46, Mk 8:36, Rev
22:17)
What could be more relevant?
Objections to Heaven Answered
Heaven is a bribe. It makes religion selfish. You
work for heavenly reward, not for pure love. Its’
mercenary.
• Some rewards are not mercenary but natural and right
• They are not artificially tacked on to the activity but are the
result of the activity in its perfected state
Heaven is not a reward externally added on
rather
It is love of God and neighbor perfected
Objections to Heaven Answered
Heaven is too dogmatic. How can we know anything
about heaven? I f eye has net seen, ear not heard,
nor heart conceived then it can only be faith or
speculation not knowledge
• Analogical and negative knowledge is knowledge.
Knowing what a thing is like or what a thing is not is
knowledge
• Faith is accepting divinely revealed data
• Philosophical reasoning and reasoned speculation can lead
to truth
Objections to Heaven Answered
Heaven is egotistical. What arrogance to think you
are destined to be spiritually married to God.
God said it not us
It is indeed amazing
God is amazing
Objections to Heaven Answered
Heaven is too selfish. It is the idea of infinite and eternal
happiness. What makes you thing your little ego is so
important, or that it can carry such a heavenly load of
happiness?
• Heaven is wholly unselfish and self-forgetful
• Egotism is illusion and will be destroyed
• In heaven everyone will be standing themselves in
unselfconscious ecstasy
• They will be so in love with God and others they will not
notice themselves.
Objections to Heaven Answered
Heaven is too unselfish; too spiritual, too
mystical for ordinary human tastes
• Those who lose their life for my sake will find it
• Self-forgetfulness is our supreme joy because we are made
in the image and likeness of God whose very essence is
self-giving love
Heaven’s self-abandonment brings the
greatest self-fulfillment
We can test this theory even now!
Objections to Heaven Answered
Heaven is too earthly. Golden streets and jewelry
and city gates and a sea of crystal this is obviously
a mere projection and extension of some of the
earthly things valued by a past culture.
• Images are mere analogies, pointers
• The objection confuses culturally relative imagery
with the not culturally-relative substance or
essence of heaven
Objections to Heaven Answered
Heaven is too unearthly, too spiritual. How can we
be human and be happy without sex, food,
clothing--even some frustrations and challenges?
Perfection would be terrible for us.
• How do we know what will be too spiritual for the
changed beings we will be after death?
• Why set limits on human growth?
• The objection is too limited in imagination and too
bound to present worldly goods as if it were
impossible that higher possibilities existed.
Transformation
• Heaven’s transformation of earth (Rev 21:1) and the new
humanity (1 Cor 15:44) neither simply extends and
perfects, nor simply transcends and abolishes, the present
humanity and earth but transforms it
caterpillar to butterfly
tadpole to frog
frog to prince
God goes around kissing earthly frogs and
transforming them into princes!
Transformation
Transformation answers all questions of form:
Will we have X in heaven?
Emotions - YES! Aquinas, But rather than coming
from the body into the soul they will come from
soul into body
We will control our emotions not our emotions us
Joy - Yes! Augustine, The love we receive from God
will “overflow in a torrent of joyful pleasure”
All will be greater because sin harms and
never helps any good
Objections to Heaven Answered
Do we become part of God in heaven or not? If so, this is
pantheism, not Christianity. If not, if we only approximate
and approach and imitate him from without; this is not
enough, for we still have something more (God himself) to
aspire to and desire.
Such a heaven would not be complete fulfillment.
• We do not become God but we do more than just imitate or
approximate him
• We share his own inner life but by grace (gift) not by
nature
• God pours himself into us
In heaven everyone will be wise and content with what they
are not prideful or envious of what God is
Objections to Heaven Answered
Heaven will be boring. Nothing to do but worship--an unending church
service. Sheer happiness without unhappiness is boring. We
appreciate everything only by contrast with its opposite. We need
darkness to set off light, if heaven has no pain we won’t appreciate its
pleasure.
• The wiser one is the less one needs pain to appreciate pleasure
• No word for boredom exists in any pre-modern language. Only the
spoiled and jaded experience boredom even now.
• The picture of a heavenly church is symbolic of God’s total presence
• Heaven is not the mere lulling and satisfaction of desire. It is not mere
contentment. It is passionate and dynamic and stimulating pure joy.
• Heaven is perfect love and work. Love is a work, not just a feeling,
and good work must be a work of love,
Even Freud said the two things that make life worth living are
love and work
Objections to Heaven Answered
How can we be happy in heaven if any of our loved ones are
in hell? If we stop loving them we are not good; if we keep
loving them, we are not happy.
• We know that there will be no sadness in heaven but we do
not know how (Rev 21:4)
• In whatever way God manages not to be sad, even though
some turn away from him, he will teach us
• He can not see the damned because they have chosen to
step outside reality (Mt 25:31-46)
• Hell is a place of eternal death not life
• If your love for another is that strong then God placed you
here to bring that person to him now in your own lifetime
Objections to Heaven Answered
Heaven is eternal. But eternity seems inhuman
because without time there is no change, no
progress, no work,. Passive, changeless adoration
perhaps seems fit for angels, but not for us.
• Eternity includes all time rather than excluding it.
• Love is hard work. Only after the fall did work
become onerous (Gen 3:17-19)
• Heaven will surpass all the good in in work,
change and time
Objections to Heaven Answered
If all time is present at once in heaven, there can be
nothing future, only present, and thus nothing left
to hope for. But we cannot live without hope. “It
is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.”
• If that were true how could anyone travel hopefully. There
would be nothing to hope for.
• If “arriving” is threatening, boring or less joyful than
hoping then we do not hope to arrive
Heaven is far better than hope it is :
fulfillment, consummation
Objections to Heaven Answered
The “resurrection body” and the “new earth” seem
impossible, mythological and anthropomorphic
• The God who created this earth can surely create a
new earth and if an earth then a new body as well
• Myths are but dim confused foreshadowings of
this truth
• The new earth and new body are not a reduction of
God to present human proportions but are rather
beyond our present power to comprehend
Objections to Heaven Answered
Are we free to sin in heaven? If not, we are unfree
robots, not free willed humans. If so, heaven is
dangerous, like earth. And if anyone chooses to
sin, it’s Eden and the Fall and earth all over again
• Free to sin is like healthy disease. It means freedom of
enslavement
• Free will is the means to a higher freedom
– the means is freedom from compulsion
– the end is the freedom from evil
• In heaven no one will sin because no one will want to
• We are now enslaved by sin and ignorance in heaven we
will be free. Sin will loose its attractiveness
Objections to Heaven Answered
If we will all be perfect saints in heaven, where will
individuality be?
• God is like a diamond with infinitely diverse facets not
dull but infinitely interesting
• It’s the tyrants and sinners that are alike individuals are the
saints who dance to God’s music
• God is like salt that brings out the individual flavor of each
food it seasons
Rev 2:17
Our heavenly individuality is so real that only God knows its
secret
Objections to Heaven Answered
Then heaven sounds so individualistic that it
is egotistical
• He that loses his soul will save it
• Love is self-giving.
• Through self-giving we touch a rhythm not only of all
creation but of all being
• Self exists to be given away
Outside the system of self-giving is not earth,
nor nature, nor “ordinary life,” but solely
and simply hell.
Objections to Heaven Answered
Will we all be equal in heaven? The traditional picture is one
of inequality: a hierarchy of greater and lesser rewards.
But this seems to make God and elitist, an aristocrat
• We will all be equal in heaven in the same sense that we
are all equal now
– equal in worth and dignity as possessing human nature, the image
of God, and equal in being totally loved by God with nothing held
back.
– This does not mean we will be the same
– We will be totally filled with the love of God but some vessels will
hold more than others
• One of the chief joys of this life and the next is sharing
differences and experiencing the pleasure of humility, to
look up to, admire and learn from another who knows
Objections to Heaven Answered
If God’s light and truth permeate heaven, there will be no
privacy. That will be intolerable
• Privacy is needed only because of sin
• We hide from others because
– we feel shame
– we fear misunderstanding and rejection
In heaven there is no shame
(for all sin is gone)
and no misunderstanding or rejection
by God or his saints.
We will share there the intimacy we long for but fear here
Objections to Heaven Answered
Is there sex in heaven? If not, most people today will not
want to go there. If so it just seems too earthly.
• That many will not want to go there says much about our
society
• Sexuality, or sexual identity, is part of our divinely-
designed humanity, and is not abolished but transformed
• Sex is first something we are, not something we do
• Since we will have real bodies, physical copulation will be
possible, just as it will be possible to eat (Christ did that).
• But we will probably never give it a thought since total
intimacy and oneness with other souls is available versus
the clumsy, partial, temporary oneness of intercourse
Objections to Heaven Answered
To love heaven is to be a traitor to earth, leaving it
behind like a rat leaving a sinking ship.
• Unless the Bible lies earth is not our true home heaven is
• Earth is only the setting of the play remove the people and
it will no longer be dear to us
• The people left behind will join us
• Perhaps we do not even leave them behind
• Perhaps the blessed dead are present but invisible
observers of us the living (Heb 12:1)
We are now surrounded by such a great
cloud of witnesses
Objections to Heaven Answered
Given a choice most people would prefer earth to heaven
Earth and heaven are not rivals
Earth is related to heaven as:
shadow to substance,
seed to plant,
courtship to consummation,
pregnancy to birth,
hope to fruition
An eternity of earth would grow boring
Earth is the just the nest when we are meant to fly
Objections to Heaven Answered
Heaven sounds so alien, far, other, threatening, unfit
for human habitation. Like trying on new clothes
that just aren’t you
We are designed and made for heaven
it is our home
A place is set at the table with our name on it
Our Father has been waiting for a long time
He knows us each by name
When the time comes
We will gladly put away our toys and go home.
Heaven Our Relationship With God
Grace
a foretaste and anticipation of
eternal life
Sanctifying grace
God’s supernatural created gift infused in the
soul truly transforming it and enabling it to
partake in the divine nature
Uncreated grace
The Triune God dwelling in the just
Heaven Our Relationship With God
Grace is a participation in the life of God.
It introduces us into the intimacy of Trinitarian life:
• TRUTH - by Baptism the Christian participates in
the grace of Christ, the Head of his Body.
• OMNIPOTENCE - As an "adopted son" he can
henceforth call God "Father," in union with the
only Son.
• LOVE - He receives the life of the Spirit who
breathes charity into him and who forms the
Church.
A proper and truly differentiated relationship
Heaven Our Relationship With God
The Christian is the son or daughter of the Father
(and not of the Son and the Spirit)
The brother or sister of the Son
(and not of the Father or the Spirit)
The temple of the Holy Spirit
(and not of the Father or the Son)
These relationships are not interchangeable thus it
is more proper to pray to God the Father, the
Son, and the Spirit in different ways rather than
to God in a generic sense.
Heaven will maintain these relationships
Heaven Our Relationship With God
Our immediate “beatific vision” of God in
heaven is “mediated” to us through the
humanity of Christ
Bishop Joseph Ratzinger
“Heaven, therefore, must first and foremost be
determined christologically. It is not an extra-
historical place into which one goes. Heaven’s
existence depends on the fact that Jesus Christ, as
God, is man, and makes a space for human
existence in the existence of God.”
One is in heaven when and to the degree that one is in Christ
Can We Lose Our Blessedness?
Each will receive the degree of happiness
according to his or her merits
Council of Florence (1439)
– “The blessed see clearly God himself, one and three, as
He is, though some more perfectly than others,
according to the diversity of merits”
– All are perfectly and fully happy but in diverse manners
– All the blessed are forever united with God
and therefore are no longer subject to the
possibility of ever losing God