Heaven.
What comes to mind when you hear that word?
Ask Google and here are some of the top images that pop up:
The Pew Research center (according to a 2015 study) found that about 72% of Americans believe in Heaven. The definition of Heaven used for their research was "where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded." (See the entire Pew Research article HERE)
When I asked people (via my Facebook page) to give me a few words to describe Heaven, here's a look at some of what people said:
- Unfathomable and indescribable
- Eden, paradise
- Peace, Peaceful
- Perfection
- Rest, home
- Peace and light
- Jesus, intimacy
- Never-ceasing worship
- The mountains and a nice creek or river
- Can't say - haven't been there
- Peace and harmony
- Forever peaceful
- Coinherence
- Perfect reunion
- My home
- God's foreverland
- Utopia
- Amazing, peaceful
- Home, peace
- No judgment, Complete understanding
- Home, perfection
- Serene, peaceful
Interesting. Notice no one said things like "evil, darkness, confusion, sadness, loneliness."
Heaven is seen as a place of peace and goodness with almost never any mention of sickness or sadness. It is literally 'all good.'
You may read that and say, "Well of course there is nothing negative - that's not what Heaven is about!" Yes, I agree, but I would just note that if you asked people to describe life on this planet (as I did) you get a more mixed bag, like these responses:
- Finite journey
- Not our home
- Asleep awake
- Really hard
- Stumbles and starts
- Pursuits, uncertain
- A glass darkly
- Hunger Games
- Hedonistic, terrifying
- Shadowland
- Broken, fallen
- Beautiful and challenging
- Bleak, exhausting
So what does this tell us? More specifically how do our views of Heaven inform me as I start a series of blog posts on the topic of Heaven.
1. People see Earth as broken and Heaven as perfect or at least fixed (compared to the earth). The blessings that this life has to offer are wonderful, but most people see them as mixed with great pain and suffering, confusion and sadness. Heaven seems to be a antidote to the brokenness of this world.
2. Most people believe in some form of the afterlife. Do we all agree on what Heaven or the after-life look like? Certainly not, but it is worth noting that the notions put forth by - for example - the new atheists like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris - are not representative of what the majority of Americans think. The idea that there is nothing after death and that we all just become worm food - most people don't seem to think that is the case.
3. We live in a tension of wanting it and yet rarely thinking about it. There is an irony to our views on Heaven. While most people believe in the afterlife or Heaven, most people spend very little time thinking about it. There are many reasons for this - fear of the unknown, the frenetic pace of life, and I would argue that a large part of this is because of modern healthcare. Regardless of your opinion on Obamacare or the VA, the world is in the healthiest place it has ever been. Sicknesses that would have been a death sentence 25 years ago are now being managed or cured. This makes us think less about death and the afterlife since we don't see it as a looming threat. Travel back in time few hundred years and people were living decades shorter, and so there was a greater felt-need to figure out what we believed about Heaven.
4. We seem to know there is something wrong. We long for a better home, a fuller experience of life. We long to see relatives who have passed away. We ache to have wrongs made right and justice served. We desire to see brokenness and pain and sickness end, and to have life made whole. In general, we agree that there is no human effort that can finally resolve all these issues, and so we long for a new, perfect home.
C.S. Lewis said it this way:
"If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy,
the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."
In the next several posts, I will be looking into the topic of Heaven and engaging with the idea both philosophically and theologically. I hope you'll join me.
- tC
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