Pilgrim March » Heaven Series

Heaven 3: Metaphors

John — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:16:00 +0000

Talking about heaven is a little like talking about your unborn child. It’s like talking about that vocation you want to be when you grow up. It’s like talking about the job you want when you graduate from college. Talking about heaven is like talking about an unknown future, except it’s unique in that the essence of the experience can’t be paralleled by anything we have ever experienced before. While I was awaiting the birth of my daughter, I could have talked about her with reasonably accurate predictive detail. By looking at other infants or considering the type of child I was or my wife was, I could have set my expectations appropriately. But to talk of heaven is to speak about things for which we have very little direct parallel. So it’s best for us to first confess that we cannot really speak of heaven. It goes beyond the limits of words.

But speak of heaven we must; and speak of heaven Jesus did. Literal description is rarely (if ever) used. The literary category most frequently employed by Jesus, the authors of Scripture, and many Christians throughout history has been that of metaphor. So let’s consider a few biblical metaphors we find in the Bible that point us toward heavenly realities:

The Seed and the Plant
In 1 Cor. 15, Paul compares our earthly bodies with our heavenly ones. He uses the metaphor of a seed and a plant to describe the transformation that will occur.

15:37 And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare seed 23 – perhaps of wheat or something else. 15:38 But God gives it a body just as he planned, and to each of the seeds a body of its own.

Here Paul describes both the continuity and discontinuity between our bodies now and our bodies then. A wheat seed is at the same time radically different from the final wheat plant and essentially the same.

The King and the Kingdom
Heaven will include the dissolution of corrupt earthly rule. Jesus, the one who suffers and serves even the most wretched (think washes Judas’ feet), is the coming King who will rule with wisdom and justice. This means the end of oppression and injustice.

Colonizing the Earth (from N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope)
In Phil. Paul writes to Christians living in Philippi, a Roman Colony. Augustus had settled his military veterans there after the battles of Philippi and Actium. The purpose of these soldiers and the purpose of colonization generally is to infuse the colonized culture with the values and customs of the colonizers. Paul uses this parallel to describe the role of the Christians in Philippi. As Wright says:

“So when Paul says, ‘We are citizens of heaven,’ he doesn’t at all mean that when we’re done with this life we’ll be going off to live in heaven. What he means is that the savior, the Lord, Jesus the King…will come from heaven to earth, to change the present situation and state of his people.” (pg. 100)

Heaven isn’t a place we escape to, it’s a culture, and even new reality, that overtakes earth. It’s a utopian dream that cannot be achieved apart from the return of Christ and the resurrection.

New Birth
In Romans 8, Paul describes the whole of creation waiting and longing to be reborn. He uses the metaphor of labor to describe this longing for transformation:

“8:21 … the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage of decay into the glorious freedom of God’s children. 8:22 For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers together until now. “

Like the seed and the plant metaphor, this metaphor maintains both continuity and discontinuity between the world as we know it now and the world to come. It also highlights the suffering and hardship creation endures as it awaits its new birth.

Marriage
The marriage of heaven and earth is described in Revelation 21-22. Heaven comes down to earth and they are joined together in wedlock. In this picture, heaven and earth aren’t polar opposites. Earth isn’t the material bad and heaven the unchanging good. Earth doesn’t corrupt heaven, heaven transforms earth and they are united together.

Conclusion
In all these metaphors, it is clear that heaven is a place or culture that is coming to earth. Christians then are people who care deeply about the earth and about the well-being of its inhabitants. We look forward to the future not as people who want to escape earth, but as a people who long for earth to be all that it is meant to be. We are people who pray with Jesus, “May your kingdom come, may your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Heaven 2: Shadows?

John — Sat, 03 May 2008 13:31:00 +0000

For those of us who have ever worked on a difficult project with other people, we know that often times the key to success is compromise. When making decisions about how to move from the project vision to the practical details, everyone on the team needs to be willing to come together to find the best realistic solution. This is especially true, if you, like me, tend to be an idealist. I can sometimes find compromise difficult because I so highly value the academic ideal way things are ‘meant to be’. While someone else sees my idealism as a stubborn intractable personality, I can see it as a commitment to the way things are supposed to be with a touch of perseverance.

It was in a moment of tension between me and a more grounded co-worker, that he said to me, “you know we aren’t dealing with platonic ideals here…” He was saying, “John, here in the real world, things have to work. Real, physical, life and blood people are going to use this program and it has to work.”

My co-worker was referencing a Platonic worldview. He was jokingly calling my attention to the day-to-day nitty-gritty details and challenging me to come off of my idealistic high horse. At the center of Platonism is this sort of ideal vs. real dualism. A Platonic worldview believes this world is a shadowy reflection of the true world. This physical material universe is a copy or distorted mirror-image of the non-physical immaterial true world. The true world is the world of forms and types, perfect and unchageable. Our world is the world of copies and material objects. Within this worldview, death means being set free from the physical to go and be alive in the non-physical ideal. To me this sounds an awful lot like the popular Christian idea of heaven. Earth is the imperfect material copy of the perfect immaterial heaven.

For evangelical Christians, heaven is the place you go after you die. You escape earth; you leave your body; you go to heaven. In heaven we get new bodies for sure, but we think of them as bodies like angels floating around on the clouds. Heaven is a spiritual place; earth is a physical place. These are the ideas that I find I’ve inherited from my evangelical tradition, and I don’t think they are biblically accurate or very inspiring.

If I believe that I’m going to leave this world and go to another place after I die, it’s hard for me to become inspired and hopeful about my actual life here on earth. For me it produces two responses. The first response can be called escapism, which causes me to take on a sort of headonistic attitude, ‘eat drink and be merry’. Who cares about the state of the world? Who cares about the state of the climate? Who cares about my own personal growth? The second is a form of hard asceticism. If heaven is a spiritual place, then everything physical is evil. If God is spirit and spiritual, then I want to mortify everything physical in my life and only nurture the spiritual. This is the sort of thing that cause evangelicals to disdain wine and fear enjoying sex too much.

In the following posts, I’d like to present a different view. One that I think is more consistent with the biblical narrative, and one that I’ve found to be very inspiring and hope-filling.

Heaven 1: If you were to die tonight….

John — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:07:00 +0000

A few years back (8, I think), I went through an Evangelism Explosion training. The training consisted of teaching you a packaged Evangelistic sales pitch that could be presented verbatim on demand. The presentation always began with the question:

“If you were to die today and find yourself at the gates of heaven, what would you say? What reason would you give for why you should be allowed to enter?”

Or something like that. The rest of the presentation was pretty standard evangelical stuff: sin, separation from God, substitutionary atonement, reconciliation through Christ, salvation from hell by praying a prayer. Once we learned the presentation, we would head out into the community, spread the presentation, and tally the results–count the number of people who prayed the prayer. I happened to be in Africa at the time, and this presentation proved to be extremely effective. Almost everyone who was willing to talk with me, would end up praying with me, often in tears.

Hundreds of us hit the streets. When we reconvened later that evening, we calculated the total number of people who had been ‘saved’. The numbers were staggering. Literally hundreds of tallies went up on the overhead projector. Shouts of hallelujah and praise God rang out in the chapel as we celebrated the guaranteed future entrance of these souls into heaven.

While I had some doubts about the methodology and some regret that there was really very little follow-up, I was mostly very pleased with the program. Everyone seemed emboldened in the act of evangelism, and the results were plain to see.

But I wonder how biblical a promise we were selling? As I reflect on this project now, it seems like we were selling a form of Platonism dressed up in Christian-ese language. We were telling people that when they died, they would go to this ‘heaven’ place up in the sky where they would experience a perfect world. They would leave this world behind and find a new and better disembodied spiritual world with God.

As I’ve studied the New Testament over the last few years, one thing has come repeatedly to my attention: evangelicals consistently misunderstand heaven and life after death as described in the Bible. Over the next couple of posts, I’m going to share some thoughts on heaven, and why I think it’s important to have a more ‘biblical’ perspective on it. I believe it has an important effect on the way we live our lives today.