Visualizing Heaven

We can’t visualize Heaven, that is, the world in which the resurrected will live with the Lord Jesus Christ for time without end, but we need to try just because of the sorts of creatures we are. We’re flesh-and-blood creatures needing images to believe in the reality of a place or an entity, yes, even the triune God who we imagine as Father and Son and Holy Spirit as flame or dove. The Holy Spirit has, in fact, been more difficult for us to understand and relate to just because of the lack of a proper analogy from human beings.

The problem is that we are a particular sort of creature, made of flesh-and-blood. We understand best what can be seen or smelt or felt. Even a mathematician working in very esoteric fields needs his symbols on the page to contemplate and manipulate. This problem is that much greater in the modern world just because we have come to understand our physical human nature pretty well in terms by modern empirical knowledge. We accept that physical nature when we enter the hospital to extend our lives or when we take a troubled loved one to a psychiatrist to deal with one disturbance or another, but we Christians tend to visualize heaven as a place in which we’ll flitter about as some sort of spiritual creature with wings. And, of course, we flitter in the company of winged angels.

Whether you regard modern empirical knowledge as an evil that has infected our views of reality or as enhancements of our views of reality, the fact remains that our modern views of reality are radically different from traditional views of reality. This is true even for those who consider high school chemistry as much a mystery as quantum mechanics. By not recognizing this, Christian leaders and teachers have turned another, truer mystery — heaven or the world of the resurrected — into a ghostly realm. We can try to imagine realms which are mysterious and beyond direct knowledge by using our hearts as well as our heads but heaven has become an unreal place, beyond the human imagination, because we accept the universe of Einstein and the ape-men of Darwin for the material advantages that flow from the modern sciences but we refuse to try to understand this world and the world of the resurrected as being different phases of the same reality. The part of that reality we know is the best guide we have to the part we don’t know.

We human beings probably couldn’t live in a place so alien as to be fully beyond our imaginations even in principle. Heaven is no longer a place for us to anticipate. We try to long for heaven but it’s a ghostly longing and possible only to the extent we can separate our human selves into a piece that lives in this world and a piece that can somehow live in a realm not even imaginable to our physical selves.

The radical secularization of Christian society was made possible by this inappropriate Christian response to modern empirical knowledge and perhaps even partially caused by that response. We’ve split our own minds into two pieces, one that can handle the ‘real’ world with its practical concerns and its verifiable scientific claims and one that has faith in something we can no longer imagine in specific terms. Faith is no longer grounded in that ideal unity of the Christian which is a union of all our parts including our brains and our minds, our bodies and our souls, including our imaginative faculties. Faith is not expressed in modern terms as are the fields of knowledge we respect more. Christian philosophy and theology are typically expressed in premodern terms. The same is true of Christian works of visual art and literature, Christian popular song and the earthy sayings which spring out spontaneously.

We have no unified conception of God’s Creation and thus no way to visualize anything that’s not directly in front of us.

Why not use the old images of clouds and winged angels? Are they not drawn from the Bible? No. The Bible is surprisingly vague and even abstract on this issue of the after-life and we get hints of the reasons in the reverently strange stories of the Lord Jesus in His post-resurrection appearances. The Lord’s perfected body was not subject to the constraints of flesh-and-blood bodies, the sorts of bodies which are our substance in this mortal existence. The Lord’s human substance was still a body but wasn’t constrained by some of the laws of this universe. And, yet, it was similar enough to a flesh-and-blood human body that the disciples, creatures of this world, could perceive Him and converse with Him. It was apparently close enough to flesh-and-blood that the Lord could eat a piece of fish.

Surely, we can have confidence that the world of the resurrected exists if our faith is founded upon the stories of He who is the first of those who rise from the grave. Surely…

But our faith is of a whole with our other thoughts and feelings, the entirety of our beings. Even the most selfless and saintly of us remains a particular creature in one spot and we need to look out to see our environments or the world in which they are enclosed, though we see that world only with our imaginations. We human beings have a need to be able to imagine a place, however inaccurately, for that place to take on some sort of real existence for us. In the end, we have to accept on faith that God will construct a perfected world in which live His Son and those who are part of the Body of Christ. In the meantime, while we’re waiting to see if the Lord accepts us into His Body, we need a grounding for our faith that we might have a home on the other side of our graves, a test of its plausibility, if you will. Our inability to produce imaginative views of heaven is a very bad sign. It isn’t the case that our faith is in vain but it is the case that we’ve not properly nurtured that faith, or the mind and soul which underly a healthy faith.

We can do better though I have only very tentative ideas about what heaven might be like. I have less than that when it comes to imagery. How am I sure we can do better? I have confidence that the human mind is the sort of entity which can encapsulate God’s world, making its own the very the thoughts which God manifested as shaper of this world and even some of the more abstract thoughts He had manifested in the basic stuff of Creation which He created from nothing. This is a matter of principle. Obviously, no particular human mind could ever encapsulate the entire world.

Creation is a rational whole — Christians can’t believe otherwise. We should be able to imagine the world of the resurrected by creatively and rationally extrapolating from this world. Else, we’ll be in a state of explicitly or implicitly casting doubt upon the reality of that world of the resurrected.

To be sure, we can do that only by first imagining this world into a plausibly real existence by gaining a good understanding of this physical universe in terms of modern empirical knowledge and then imagining that universe as a world by applying the order implied by our Biblical knowledge of God’s purposes as Creator. We can produce the sort of worldview and confidence that would unleash imaginative efforts in music and drama and architecture as well as in further imaginative efforts in theology and philosophy but we either reject our faith and head out into the brave new world or else we fearfully try to hold onto our faith by using images at odds with the rest of our modern views and behaviors.

Do I have any advice for starting this revival of the Christian mind and imagination? Nurture first the imagination as I recommended in the bibliographical essay at the end of my book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand. Take this advice for yourself or give it to any students under your guidance. Read Moby Dick for the sheer pleasure and not as a duty. Read Don Quixote and The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Read One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Violent Bear It Away.

With a healthy imagination, a man could make better sense of modern empirical knowledge. He might even find himself capable of seeing God’s world and seeing at least hints of that greater world on the far side of the grave.