Is heaven where we go when we die, or God's space in the here and now of this world?
Corbis
Disputation of the Holy Sacrament by Raphael
Meacham's book American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House was published in 2008
As
the world’s Christians prepare to commemorate the death and
resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a debate over heaven is not as sexy
or politically charged as other familiar battles in the American culture
wars. It’s hard to argue for more air time for eschatology than
contraception, but the theological and cultural conflict over heaven is,
in the end, perhaps more important than most such battles, for it is
about how Christians view the purpose of life.
The conversation about the nature of heaven that we tackle in the April 16 issue of TIME (
available to subscribers here)
is challenging popular piety. “Heaven is a new state of affairs in
which God’s grace, God’s love, God’s mercy is coming into the present
situation,” Christopher Morse, professor of theology and ethics at New
York’s Union Theological Seminary, told my colleague Elizabeth Dias. “It
is breaking in and breaking up all that opposes love and freedom in the
world.”
(
MORE: Meacham: Why We Question God)
My own interpretation of, and interest in, religion is both personal
and historical — which is to say, my personal experience led me to a
historical inquiry about the nature and course of the faith of my
fathers. I grew up in the Episcopal Church, attended Protestant chapel
services every day in school from the time I was 4 until I was 18, and
then attended an Episcopal university.
History is an essential element of my attraction to religion both in
terms of writing and living. Who wouldn’t want to understand the forces
that, at least in terms of Christianity, determine the very nature of
how we tell time and whether we believe in the Christian story or think
it a fairy tale?
To me, the work of N.T. Wright, an Anglican bishop and New Testament
scholar whose books I find enormously compelling, lies squarely in the
tradition of the medieval scholastics, most notably Thomas Aquinas, who
embodied the sanctification of reason in matters religious. We have been
given the power of thought and the capacity for interpretation and are
to use them as a means to understand, as best we can, the cosmos in
which we find ourselves. We don’t —
can’t — begin to know
everything. In my own case, I’m with Hamlet, who said that “there are
more things in heaven and on earth … than are dreamt of in your
philosophy.”
(
MORE: Does Heaven Exist?)
If
heaven is understood more as God’s space on earth than as an ethereal
region apart from the essential reality we know, then what happens on
earth matters even more than we think, for the Christian life becomes a
continuation of the unfolding work of Jesus, who will one day return to
set the world to rights.
If you begin to think about the drama of life in such terms, you
begin to invest more meaning in the here and now — not in the “eat,
drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” pagan way, but as a way of
infusing everything with potentially sacred meaning. The love of
friends, the brush of your spouse’s hand, the eyes of a young child —
these become not hints or glimpses of what heaven may be like as a
posthumous region but of what
earth may be like if light and love achieve dominion over darkness and envy.
This is a debate that doesn’t fit easily on the usual left-right,
blue-red, liberal-conservative spectrum. That’s because each
understanding we explore is rooted explicitly in faith in the salvation
history of Jesus. The divide isn’t about a secular ideal of service vs. a
religiously infused vision of reality. It’s about whether believing
Christians see earthly life as inextricably bound up with eternal life
or as simply a prelude to a heavenly existence elsewhere.
If, like me, you find the former option intriguing, then heaven is
the reality one creates in the service of the poor, the sick, the
enslaved, the oppressed. It is not Disneyland in the sky but acts of
selflessness and love that bring God’s sacred space and grace to a
broken world suffused with tragedy. We could do worse than think in such
terms.
MORE: See TIME’s April 16 cover story, “Rethinking Heaven.”
Doubt if you can send me a copy from on line. I found
the article but I cannot get to it without a subscription or a $5
seven day pass.I did find an article about the article and I put it on on our Ownbey blog at the following: http://ownbeyss.blogspot.com/2012/06/20120602-rethinking-heaven.html Looks like he thinks Heaven is here on earth as we prepare for the return of Jesus with the reality one creates with service . . . thanks, don
