Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Heaven: But Never Dreamed of Asking

By Peter Kreeft

In the style of C. S. Lewis, Kreeft provides an unexcelled look at the nature of Heaven that offers readers a refreshingly clear, theologically sound, and always fascinating glimpse of that "undiscovered country." Kreeft's engaging and informative account thoughtfully answers intriguing questions about heaven that speaks to the mind and heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Oct 27, 2009
• ISBN: 9781681491585

Peter Kreeft

Peter Kreeft (PhD, Fordham University) is professor of philosophy at Boston College where he has taught since 1965. A popular lecturer, he has also taught at many other colleges, seminaries and educational institutions in the eastern United States. Kreeft has written more than fifty books, including The Best Things in Life, The Journey, How to Win the Culture War, and Handbook of Christian Apologetics (with Ronald Tacelli).

Book preview

Introduction

Will my dead cat be alive in Heaven?

Can I get to Heaven without being religious?

Why won’t Heaven get boring?

What kind of body will I have in Heaven?

Is there sex in Heaven?

Why can’t you get there in a rocket ship?

Can you time travel in Heaven?

Is Heaven here on earth?

Can anyone answer such questions? Is this book possible?

Everyone asks such questions, consciously or unconsciously. For next to the idea of God, the idea of Heaven is the greatest idea that has ever entered into the heart of man, woman, or child.

But wait. Right here at the beginning we run into a problem. My uncle put it this way:

I hear you’re writing a book. What’s it about?

Heaven.

Heaven, eh? Do you have some thoughts about it?

Of course I have some thoughts about it. How could I write a book about it if I didn’t? Isn’t that a silly question?

No, I don’t think so. Follow my thought for a minute—these thoughts of yours: they’ve entered into your mind and heart, right?

Of course. What are you driving at?

Just this: according to the Bible, your book must be wrong.

What? How can you say that? You haven’t even read it yet. In fact, I haven’t even written it yet!

"Well, the Bible describes Heaven this way: ‘Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.’¹ And your thoughts have entered into the heart of man. Therefore your thoughts can’t be the truth about Heaven."

He had me there. I almost threw the manuscript away.

But then I thought of the answer, weeks later. I thought of the other great idea, the idea of God. It too is the idea of something (or rather Someone) that eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.² Yet that fact has not stopped us from writing millions of books and billions of words about God.

Many of those words are silly or stupid. Most of them are secondhand platitudes. But some are helpful and enlightening. And a few are even awesomely wise and wonderful. Perhaps the same is true of our words about Heaven. And perhaps all four kinds of words are found in this book.

What’s Different about This Book

Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.³ Why is this one necessary?

Because there are only three kinds of books about Heaven, and this one is of a fourth kind.

First and best, there are the classics, the great old books written by the saints and sages. Unfortunately, these are rarely read today, and many are out of print. Also, they require the understanding of some premodern philosophical and theological language and techniques of reading that many modern readers have lost (unless they have had teachers like Mortimer Adler or read books like How to Read a Book).⁴ By all means put this book down and read instead Saint Thomas Aquinas’ treatise on the resurrection in the Summa Theologiae—if you can find it and if you can understand it.⁵

The other two kinds of books available are current books, which are pretty sharply divided into the popular versus the scholarly, the inspirational versus the professional. This division can be unhealthy for both kinds, for it tends to reduce inspirational books to sentiment and cliché with little intellectual bite, and scholarly books to detached dullness and technicality with little existential bite. The first do not speak to our minds and the second do not speak to our hearts or our lives: a case of heat without light or light without heat. That is why I constantly turn back to the blazing sunlight of a Saint Augustine or a Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.⁶

Very few orthodox Christians in this century have combined (1) the inspirational and the scholarly, (2) ancient wisdom and modern language, and (3) imagination and Christian orthodoxy. Among these few, C. S. Lewis stands out as unmistakably the prime example.⁷ He has probably influenced more unbelievers to believe and deepened and toughened the faith and understanding of more believers than any other writer of the twentieth century.

But Lewis never wrote a theological study of Heaven, although he did write (1) a great little poetic fantasy about it, The Great Divorce, a kind of twentieth-century miniature of The Divine Comedy; (2) an unutterably moving and unforgettable sermon about it, The Weight of Glory; and (3) two highly imaginative and intelligent chapters on it in his two most ambitious theological books, The Problem of Pain and Miracles.⁸ In the spirit of those writings, this book is an attempt to write the sort of book Lewis might have written about Heaven. (If you hear a softly satirical chuckle from far, far away yet very close, that is Lewis listening to such presumption: He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh.⁹) But this is not a book about Lewis, a summary of his thoughts; it is about Heaven. It looks along Lewis, not at him (to use one of his own very useful distinctions).¹⁰ It uses his eyes and mine in binocular vision.

Rather, the vision is multi-ocular. Many other and greater explorers have discovered this undiscovered country¹¹ in the past. But their travelers’ tales are not well known today. The old maps are not read. If some of my discoveries, like Lewis’, are rediscoveries of Augustine’s explorations, or Aquinas’, well and good; I have traveled in the company of giants. Like the medievals, we should remember that we are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. If we see farther than the ancients, it is only because we have their shoulders to stand on.¹² It is better to be right than to be original, and the surest way to be unoriginal is to care nothing about being right and to care only about being original, while if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out often, become original without ever having noticed it.¹³ Good philosophy is piggyback thinking: you stand on my shoulders, I stand on Lewis’, Lewis stands on MacDonald’s,¹⁴ MacDonald stands on Augustine’s, Augustine stands on Saint Paul’s, Saint Paul stands on Christ’s. That far up, you see far. We need a Great Chain of Thinking to see the Great Chain of Being. Here is one small link.

Part I

Heaven and Us

Chapter One

What Difference Does Heaven Make?

If a thing makes no difference, it is a waste of time to think about it. We should begin, then, with the question, What difference does Heaven make to earth, to now, to our lives?

Only the difference between hope and despair in the end, between two totally different visions of life; between chance or the dance.¹ At death we find out which vision is true: does it all go down the drain in the end, or are all the loose threads finally tied together into a gloriously perfect tapestry? Do the tangled paths through the forest of life lead to the golden castle or over the cliff and into the abyss? Is death a door or a hole?

To medieval Christendom, it was the world beyond the world that made all the difference in the world to this world. The Heaven beyond the sun made the earth under the sun something more than vanity of vanities.² Earth was Heaven’s womb, Heaven’s nursery, Heaven’s dress rehearsal. Heaven was the meaning of the earth. Nietzsche had not yet popularized the serpent’s tempting alternative: "You are the meaning of the earth.³ Kant had not yet disseminated the poison of subjectivism⁴ by his Copernican revolution in philosophy,⁵ in which the human mind does not discover truth but makes it, like the divine mind. Descartes had not yet replaced the divine I am with the human I think, therefore I am as the Archimedean point, had not yet replaced theocentrism with anthropocentrism.⁶ Medieval man was still his Father’s child, however prodigal, and his world was meaningful because it was my Father’s world" and he believed his Father’s promise to take him home after death.

This confidence towards death gave him a confidence towards life, for life’s road led somewhere. The Heavenly mansion at the end of the earthly pilgrimage made a tremendous difference to the road itself. Signs and images of Heavenly glory were strewn all over his earthly path. The signs were (1) nature and (2) Scripture, God’s two books, (3) general providence, and (4) special miracles. (The word translated miracle in the New Testament [sēmeion] literally means sign.)⁷ The images surrounded him like the hills surrounding the Holy City.⁸ They, too, pointed to Heaven. For instance, the images of saints in medieval statuary were seen not merely as material images of the human but as human images of the divine, windows onto God. They were not merely stone shaped into men and women but men and women shaped into gods and goddesses. Lesser images too were designed to reflect Heavenly glory: kings and queens, heraldry and courtesy and ceremony, authority and obedience—these were not just practical socio-economic inventions but steps in the Cosmic Dance, links in the Great Chain of Being, rungs on Jacob’s ladder, earthly reflections of Heaven. Distinctively premodern words like glory, majesty, splendor, triumph, awe, honor—these were more than words; they were lived experiences. More, they were experienced realities.

The glory has departed. We moderns have lost much of medieval Christendom’s faith in Heaven because we have lost its hope of Heaven, and we have lost its hope of Heaven because we have lost its love of Heaven. And we have lost its love of Heaven because we have lost its sense of Heavenly glory.

Medieval imagery (which is almost totally biblical imagery) of light, jewels, stars, candles, trumpets, and angels no longer fits our ranch-style, supermarket world. Pathetic modern substitutes of fluffy clouds, sexless cherubs, harps and metal halos (not halos of light) presided over by a stuffy divine Chairman of the Bored are a joke, not a glory. Even more modern, more up-to-date substitutes—Heaven as a comfortable feeling of peace and kindness, sweetness and light, and God as a vague grandfatherly benevolence, a senile philanthropist—are even more insipid.

Our pictures of Heaven simply do not move us; they are not moving pictures. It is this aesthetic failure rather than intellectual or moral failures in our pictures of Heaven and of God that threatens faith most potently today.⁹ Our pictures of Heaven are dull, platitudinous and syrupy; therefore, so is our faith, our hope, and our love of Heaven.

It is surely a Satanic triumph of the first order to have taken the fascination out of a doctrine that must be either a fascinating He or a fascinating fact. Even if people think of Heaven as a fascinating lie, they are at least fascinated with it, and that can spur further thinking, which can lead to belief But if it’s dull, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a dull lie or a dull truth. Dullness, not doubt, is the strongest enemy of faith, just as indifference, not hate, is the strongest enemy of love.¹⁰

It is Heaven and Hell that put bite into the Christian vision of life on earth, just as playing for high stakes puts bite into a game or a war or a courtship. Hell is part of the vision too: the height of the mountain is appreciated from the depth of the valley, and for winning to be high drama, losing must be possible. For salvation to be good news, there must be bad news to be saved from. If all of life’s roads lead to the same place, it makes no ultimate difference which road we choose. But if they lead to opposite places, to infinite bliss or infinite misery, unimaginable glory or unimaginable tragedy, if the spirit has roads as really and objectively different as the body’s roads and the mind’s roads, and if these roads lead to destinations as really and objectively different as two different cities or two different mathematical conclusions—why, then life is a life-or-death affair, a razor’s edge, and our choice of roads is infinitely important.

We no longer live habitually in this medieval mental landscape. If we are typically modern, we live in ennui; we are bored, jaded, cynical, flat, and burnt out. When the skies roll back like a scroll and the angelic trump sounds, many will simply yawn and say, Pretty good special effects, but the plot’s too traditional. If we were not so bored and empty, we would not have to stimulate ourselves with increasing dosages of sex and violence—or just constant busyness.¹¹ Here we are in the most fantastic fun and games factory ever invented—modern technological society—and we are bored, like a spoiled rich kid in a mansion surrounded by a thousand expensive toys. Medieval people by comparison were like peasants in toyless hovels—and they were fascinated. Occasions for awe and wonder seemed to abound: birth and death and love and light and darkness and wind and sea and fire and sunrise and star and tree and bird and human mind—and God and Heaven. But all these things have not changed, we have. The universe has not become empty and we, full; it has remained full and we have become empty, insensitive to its fullness, cold hearted.¹²

Yet even in this cold heart a strange fire kindles at times—something from another dimension, another kind of excitement—when we dare to open the issue of Heaven, the issue of meeting God, with the mind and heart together. Like Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones,¹³ we experience the shock of the dead coming to life.

You have had a shock like that before, in connection with smaller matters—when the line pulls at your hand, when something breathes beside you in the darkness. So here; the shock comes at the precise moment when the thrill of life is communicated to us along the clue we have been following. It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. Look out! we cry, "It’s alive! And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back—I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with Christianity. An impersonal God"—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power that we can tap—best of all. But God Himself alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (Man’s search for God!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that!¹⁴

When it does come to that, we feel a strange burning in the heart, like the disciples on the road to Emmaeus.¹⁵ Ancient, sleeping hopes and fears rise like giants from their graves. The horizons of our comfortable little four-dimensional universe crack, and over them arises an enormous bliss and its equally enormous absence. Heaven and Hell—suppose, just suppose it were really, really true! What difference would that make?

I think we know.

Heaven: Realism or Escapism?

But the question of Heaven is more than this. It is not just a question about the difference it makes to us, a question about our desire, our hopes, our future. It is a realistic question, a question above objective reality. It is the question: How big is reality?

That is the primary question. My greatness depends on reality’s greatness. If reality docs not extend to Heaven, I cannot either. Even if I am a small fish, I am greater if I am a small fish in a big reality-pond than if I am a big fish in a small reality-pond. That is why C. S. Lewis makes the surprising judgment that it is more important that heaven should exist than that any of us should reach it.¹⁶

To see what difference Heaven makes in this realistic way, to see what Heaven means to reality, take the sum total of all past and present human experience, the entire universe, all of space and time and history and matter and mind—everything anyone has ever experienced. Add to it all future possibilities that we or any other creatures can or may experience on earth or in space or on other planets for billions of years to come until all the stars grow cold. Add an infinite number of evolutionary cycles, big bangs, and new universes if you like. Let us call this quantity of reality X. It is a partially unknown quantity but also partially known. Now let us ask of X: Is that all there is? Heaven is the negative answer to that question. There is more.

Our spontaneous reaction to this prophetic announcement should be an ecstatic Bravo! Our deepest need is for reality, for more and ever more reality. The ontological thirst, the thirst for being, is our deepest thirst.¹⁷ In every desire, even for truth and goodness and beauty, we desire being; we desire that the object be real. Self-generated fantasies satisfy only imaginary needs.¹⁸ Our spirit, unlike God, is not independent and self-contained; it cannot feed upon itself or fecundate itself or actualize itself We need reality as our spirit-food. We eat reality. Knowing is a kind of eating: a spiritual assimilation.¹⁹

Eventually, if only at death, we must meet reality face to face. So we had better begin rehearsing now. If Heaven is not real, every honest person will disbelieve in it simply for that reason, however desirable it is, and if it is real, every honest man, woman, child, scientist, theologian, saint, and sinner will want to believe in it simply because it is real, not just because it is desirable.²⁰ Our deepest desire is not for the desirable but for the real—if we are honest.

The question of Heaven, then, is a realistic question, not an escapist question. Anyone can misuse the idea of Heaven as an escape from the reality of earth. But that is a misuse, not a proper use, and misuse presupposes use, as counterfeit money presupposes real money. In another book (Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing, especially chapter 5, What Difference Does Heaven Make to Monday Morning?) I tried at some length to prove the point that Heaven is not escapist; let us consider here only the apotheosis of the attitude of escapism: suicide. If Heaven exists and is so great, why not escape earth right away and get there as quickly as possible?

Escapism and Suicide

First of all because you don’t get there that way. The God who revealed Heaven also forbade suicide, and all the medically dead and resuscitated patients who had committed suicide and had seen something of the next life reported hellish rather than Heavenly experiences.²¹ They saw that suicide was a disastrous mistake, that all the problems they had tried to escape followed them, but after death they could no longer do anything to change them.

This does not mean that we may not hope for the salvation of a suicide. In Descent into Hell Williams showed how a suicide may eventually attain salvation.²² But it means that his or her salvation is always despite, never because of, the suicide. Suicide is not the road to Heaven.

God forbade suicide for a good reason: it would be like deserting our post, as Socrates put it.²³ Or, to vary the metaphor, it would be like trying to get into college from elementary school by burning down the high school. The reason against suicide is the same as the reason against skipping grades in school. It is not an external, arbitrary command from God but an internal, necessary law of our nature. That is why God gave us the powerful first instinct of nature, self-preservation: to keep us in school, to keep us from being dropouts. What can be learned here, must be learned here.

What we learn here, what we do here, is freely to create in time the baseline of our eternal identities. We shape our souls here, and the dimension of eternity is added to that shape in Heaven. It is as if earthly squares become heavenly cubes; earthly triangles, heavenly pyramids; earthly circles, heavenly spheres. The shape into which we shape ourselves now is the shape of our eternal selves; only the size (that is, the dimension) is changed.

That is why Heaven is not a distraction from earth and why the point of this book about Heaven is not escape from living here and now but is precisely how to live here and now. For these two dimensions of our identity, time and eternity, earth and Heaven, are not an either-or but a both-and, like the two natures of Christ.

The natural tendency of uncorrected thinking is to separate: divine or human, heavenly or earthly, eternal or temporal. Thus originated the twin ancient heresies of Docetism and Arianism (still very much alive under many different names), which first separated the two natures of Christ, then affirmed one at the expense of the other. For Docetism, Christ was rather like Clark Kent: a Superman only disguised as a man, human only in appearance (doceo).²⁴ For Arianism, Christ was like Buddha, merely a perfect man with godlike thoughts.²⁵

The same two heresies pull apart the Bible, which, like Christ, is the Word of God in the words of men.²⁶ Fundamentalism is like Docetism: it tends to overlook the human and to see the Bible as miraculously dictated by God word for word. Modernism is like Arianism: it overlooks the divine and reduces God’s word about us to our words about God. The origin of both is the same: separating the divine and the human, Heaven and earth, forgetting that in the Bible, as in Christ, the human becomes divinized by the divine becoming humanized. In Christ, Heaven is not escapism and