Heaven: What Do People Think About It & Introductory Thoughts | Heaven Series, Part 1

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

Is Harvey Weinstein a Canary For Our Sexually-Shipwrecked Culture? Absolutely.

(Photo Credit - TheIndependent.co.uk)

Sometimes when you write a blog post about a cultural occurrence, it takes a long time to build an argument.  That should make sense - life can be complicated and we should want to stay from over- simplifying issues that are subtle or nuanced.  

In the case of Harvey Weinstein, the question I'd like to raise here is simple, and it is as follows.

1. The actions taken by Harvey Weinstein over many years in Hollywood are deplorable, heart-breaking, and sinful.

2. We are learning that this kind of behavior - while perhaps most notable with Weinstein - is, unfortunately, not as rare as we might like think.  While the details remain to be seen in many of the most recent cases, we are in the double-digits when it comes to cases of men in positions of power using their influence to sexually harass or assault women.

(Photo Credit: L.A. Times)

Here is my question:

While yes, we should be heart-broken for the pain that has been caused, should we be so shocked?

The reality seems to be that many, many Hollywood movie stars and people of influence in Los Angeles knew about Weinstein's actions and did nothing.  Thus it seems many of them were not shocked when it 'went pubic.'

And I'm not sure we - the average citizen in the United States - should be shocked either.

Without standing on a soapbox and preaching a 'we've lost our footing' and 'America was once a Christian nation' sermon (those kinds of sermons are often rooted in nostalgia rather than in reality), the question I am really asking us is WHY are we so shocked by this behavior?

We have given ourselves over to the gods of self-fulfillment, self-actualization, and self-aggrandizement, and yet we are surprised when people live out of these kinds of ideologies.  

We have rejected a myriad of sexual norms as we've elevated personal expression over fidelity and the psyche over the body.  These are not just norms held by Christians that we've rejected - they are norms the most civil societies have lived with for millennia.

We have - for all intents and purposes - said, "Do whatever you please when it comes to sex", and then when we see men abuse this kind of unrooted power, we are legitimately angered and saddened, but I am kind of shocked that we are shocked.

Yes, Weinstein is responsible. Yes, he should face the full legal ramifications of his actions.  

But are we brave enough as a culture to look into our own lives and ask how we have accepted and encouraged a sexual standard that harms others, a sexual standard that leverages power to prey on the less powerful.  Are we willing to see how we may have helped to feed the beast of sexual assault?

How do we respond?  

This will be addressed in a future post.

For now - be sad and angry, but for me - I'm unfortunately not shocked.

- tC 

Asking The Most Important Questions: A New Series - "What IF.."

Over the next several weeks, I want to walk on a journey of thought together.  Let me share how this idea came to mind.

I spend a good deal of time in the woods, often alone.  In these moments of silence and solitude, I get to thinking about various topics but one that comes to mind a great deal is those who don't believe in or who have rejected the idea of God and - ultimately - those who have rejected the reality of Jesus Christ.  

As I've been thinking about this eternally-important topic, I began to look back at my own journey of faith and I had came to some conclusions.  I saw that while I might love apologetics (the rational defense of Christianity), I do think that the mix of reason and faith is what led me to my conclusions and putting my trust in Christ.  I think the Christian faith is reason-filled and rational, but it is not just that.  It is an act of faith to trust in the unseen God and to have a relationship that is different than any other relationship I will ever have.  To be a human or to be a Christian, we are always making the best choices we can based on what information we have in the moment of decision.

A phrase came to mind as I have been pondering this concept of faith-and-reason.  The phrase was (as you'd probably guess from the title of this post), "What if...".  I imagined sitting in a coffee shop (probably at the Starbucks inside Target on Rte. 33 in Greenland) across the table from a skeptic friend and instead of making the case for some biblical doctrine, I saw myself asking, "What if..." - and then fill in the blank.  What if there is more than just this life?  What if the physical world is not the end of all things?  What if the Bible is actually God's Word communicated to humanity?  And the list goes on.  

The beauty of questions is they place the emphasis on discussion and ask the person with doubts to engage.  It isn't a 'take it or leave it' kind of approach.  Instead it says (in my mind at least), "I get the doubts, I get the uncertainty - but let's just ask together 'What if...' and in turn, what might the implications be.   

This approach also allows us to consider the skeptic's perspective.  For example, if I ask, "What if there is more to life than just the physical or natural world", then we might also reasonably ask, "What if there is ONLY the natural and physical world?  What are the implications to your worldview and life?"

And so over the next few weeks I want to ask us a variety of 'what if' questions and we will ponder the implications together.  Thanks for walking with me on this road.

- tC 

The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: A Top 5 Book For Me - Here's Why

(Photo Credit: The Gospel Coalition)

It probably seems strange that a book about avowed atheist Christopher Hitchens is now in the "Top 5 Books I've Ever Read" List.  I found this book remarkable, inspiring, and faith-strengthening.  Let me tell you why.

One of the ways I work to redeem the time is by listening to podcasts, sermons, lectures, and debates when I am involved in some mundane task such as mowing the lawn or - in the worst case scenario - painting.  In recent months, I've been listening to a good number of debates between atheists and Christians.  When you search YouTube for "Debate Does God Exist", Christopher Hitchens often appears at the top of the list, and for good reason. Hitchens' book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything was a New York Times best-seller, and reached #2 on Amazon, falling behind only Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Hitchens also wrote a wide variety of other essays, articles, and books such as The Portable Atheist, Mortality, and his autobiography Hitch-22, addressing topics as broad as politics. literature, and American history.  Hitchens was sometimes known as one of the "4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse", along with Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett.  These men represent a new version of atheism, an aggressive version that is not merely content with taking a stance, but they are instead atheists who are actively working at converting others to their atheistic worldview.   

To say it lightly, Christopher Hitchens had strong opinions, and not just on God, but on - it seems - almost everything.  Hitchens was actively involved in debate while in college, and then throughout his career he made a point to take a strong stance against all things God-honoring and 

Christ-centered. 

The Faith of Christopher Hitchens by necessity offers the reader some background on Hitchens (his childhood, his relationship with his parents, his political involvement) but the main focus is on a friendship that Hitchens struck up with Larry Alex Taunton, an evangelical Christian writer and thinker.  Taunton is also the founder and executive director of Fixed Point Foundation, an organization that aims to "defend and proclaim the Gospel in the secular marketplace, and to equip others to do the same."  Through organizing debates, Taunton and Hitchens struck up a friendship that lasted all the way up to Hitchens' passing in 2011.

If you look at the cover of the book, the sub-title reads "The Restless Soul of the World's Most Notorious Atheist", and as you read this engaging and beautifully written book, you sense the unsettling nature of Hitchens' friendship with Taunton.  Taunton is intelligent, measured, kind, and a genuinely nice person - and Hitchens had a hard time figuring out what to do with this.  Taunton and Hitchens struck up a true friendship, one where Hitchens defended Taunton from some of Hitchens' own groupies, and when news of cancer came, Taunton was one of the first people to whom Hitchens reached out.

So why did I love this book so much?  Here are 3 reasons.

1. In a world where so many seem to be oblivious and disinterested in God, this book shows the truth that God has indeed set eternity into the hearts of all mankind (Ecclesiastes 3:11).  If Hitchens - despite his public persona and atheistic bravado - was truly a restless soul looking for "a higher love" (his own words), then I take great comfort in knowing that God is certainly working in the lives of those who appear to have no interest in God.  There are days and even weeks when I walk around wondering if anyone I see out-and-about (at the gas station, at Target, at the grocery store) is thinking about God.  This book lays out the truth that so often the external shell of callousness or aloofness toward the things of God actually hides a longing that exists in all people, even if it remains in large part hidden from the public eye.    

2. This book affirms the truth that true love and friendship, combined with a clear and bold declaration of the Gospel, are powerful, Spirit-used tools.  Taunton was bold and loving, direct and consistent, and perhaps most of all sacrificial in his love toward Hitchens.  Though it would have been much easier to keep the discussion academic, Taunton took time to share his life with Hitchens, and this made a significant impact.  At one point, Taunton shares with Hitchens that he (Taunton) and his wife have adopted a child.  This throws Hitchens for a loop - he cannot grasp the selflessness of such an act.  You can imagine the shock when Hitchens learns that this child is also HIV-positive.  This makes no sense to Hitchens, but he knows there is something beautiful about this kind of love.

If you run toward brash preaching of the Bible, this book will temper you.  If you run away from speaking about God and instead think that 'a kind life is enough', this book will press you.

3. This book reminds us that there is a power in the Word of God.  While Hitchens is dying of cancer, he and Taunton take two trips - one down south to Taunton's home and then later on, they travel out west for a debate and some sight seeing.  In various forms and at various time on these trips, Hitchens and Taunton read and discuss portions of the Bible, the Gospels in particular.  Hitchens, as much as he speaks in harsh terms, cannot run from the image of Jesus he reads in the Bible.  It is clear that the Gospels are impacting him, and while he may never admit it publicly, the questions he asks and the answers he gives to Taunton show a Jacob-like experience is ensuing.                            

I recommend this book for these three reasons and many more.  When I completed this book, I felt sad because I wanted to know more of the two main characters and where they had been in their journey of friendship.  That sadness - to me - is the sign of a well-written work.

          

- tC