Discussion Group Report

"The ways in which people imagine heaven tell us how they understand themselves, their families, their societies, and their God. They give us insight into both the private and public dimensions of Western culture. Changing ideas about love friendship, work, God and spiritual growth in the other life can serve as guidlines for understanding cultural ideas and ideals of this life ... Heaven is the key to the deepest mysteries of religion and can be used as a key to our Western culture," say Colleen McDannell (University of Utah) and Bernhard Lang in Heaven, A History.

In the ancient world, say the authors, belief in life after death was widespread, considered normal, and not generally weakened by skepticism. The Christian concept of heaven grew out of the speculations on the afterlife by the ancient jews. The Semites - Assyrians, Babylonians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, and Hebrews - pictured the world in tiers: an upper realm of the gods (heaven), a middle human world given to us by those gods (earth), and a lower part (Sheol), a greak dark and silent cave below the surface of the earth, which housed the dead and the infernal deities. Human communication with the upper, divine world, through community rituals celebrated the agricultural cycle and brought rain to water the crops. Ancestor worship, which was private and familial, brought personal protection and numerous offspring. If living relatives neglected their veneration, the fate of the dead worsened.

In the eighth century BCE, the Assyrian oppression of Israel became intolerable, and Israel's response was a prophetic movement to the exclusive worship of the only god with real power: Yahweh. He would eventually intervene, and alter the political scene in favor of his people. The Israelites now belonged to a national God rather than to a family deity or divinized ancestors. Ancestor worship was forbidden. Israelite theology focused on the practices of a this-worldly religion rather than on futile speculations about the life of the dead.

After the Babylonian destruction of the Jewish state in 586 BCE, the dream of an independent Israel restored by divine intervention continued. However, many Jews, recognizing the difficulty of achieving independence, made their peace with thier overlords and accepted foreign rule. They became aware of the relationship between certain beliefs of the Zoroastrian religion of Iran and their own hopes of liberation. Jewish theologians adapted new doctrines, such as a concept of resurrection, to their speculations on the fate of the dead. The idea of a glorious communal future with a restored Israelite nation faded into the background, giving way to speculation about the post-mortem future of individuals. Whenever Diaspora Jews met Greek intellectuals, the idea of an immortal soul surfaced. It was up to the gods either to punish or reward the death. The rewards could quite enticing.

Two major images have emerged which dominate Christian theology, pious literature, art, and popular ideas. The theocentric centers in God and the anthropocentric focuses on the human. Some Christians expect to spend heavenly life in eternal solitude with God alone, while others cannot conceive of blessedness without being reunited with friends, spouse, children or relatives. Throughout history these models emerge, become prominent and weaken.

In the New Testament, heaven was not the place or time when an elect group who lacked something would find fulfillment, but rather the promise that Christians would be permitted to experience the divine fully with a clear, uncompromising, charismatic fixation with on God. In the early Augustine period, in a different cultural climate, the original charismatic inspiration gave way to more intellectual philosophical concerns that focus on "God and the soul." Medieval scholastics speculated on heaven as a locality, the empyrean: a transcendent, light-filled place outside of but enveloping the universe. The fruition of the divine light provides the highest bliss human creatures can attain. Medieval mystics envisioned a more intimate, blessed union with Christ, who meets the soul as freind, companion and lover. Protestant reformers, along with their Catholic reform counterparts, rejected scholasticism as unbiblical, and mysticism as visionary fancy. As elected and transformed people, true Christians enjoy praising the Lord more than anything else - in this world, and the next.

Much of the contemporary theology reiterates the theocentric heaven. "Eternal life will concern God; this is all we know." Theologians of diverse background present a heaven of minimal description. At times the human presence in heaven becomes so weak that it almost disappears, and nothing of ourselves continues after death.

McDannel and Lang ask, "Are we witnessing the emergence of a post-Christian theology, one whose relationship with classical afterlife affirmations is vague and ultimately irrelevant? Or have the social developments and scientific discoveries of the past century robbed heaven of any believable images for even the most devoted Christian?"