Heaven and Hell

What is heaven like? What and where is heaven? How do we know what comes after death? What is life after death like?

Maybe heaven isn’t so much of a “where” as a “when.” The Scriptures suggest that whatever heaven might be, it is most certainly when we are together with God. We don’t know what it might be like as a future reality beyond material life. Early Christian theologians referred to the mystery of heaven or eternal life as “glorification.”

Maybe the most we can do is ponder images. In the Hebrew prophets, Isaiah writes about the “beatific vision” where the lion and lamb are at peace with one another; war and conflict and human strife cease. In the Christian scriptures, Jesus preaches about the kingdom of God where the last are first, the downcast are uplifted, and where the soul is at peace with self, others, and God.

Earliest Christian views on the afterlife (especially in the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans) lay claim to the idea of the resurrection of the dead—that in the fullness of time, when the kingdom of God finally and fully dawns, those who have died will be raised to share forevermore in Christ’s fate, and death would be swallowed up.

Christian theologian St. Augustine once said in his spiritual autobiography The Confessions, that since God had made us for God’s self, “our soul is restless until it rests in God.” For Augustine, heaven simply meant something like “happiness in God,” which we experience here and now in our lives. Heaven now anticipates unending or eternal happiness with God in unbroken continuity.

Whatever the afterlife might be like (try as we might to imagine it through our physical senses or imagination), and however human conscious life is finally and fully transformed—where memory, intellect, and imagination are fulfilled or perfected (glorification) in the light of the Son—heaven, in a fundamental sense, means the hope of ongoing life in the presence of God.

C.S. Lewis tells the following story, in which he imagines the mystery and beauty of heaven, which is invisible and unimaginable to our senses, but glimpsable through the eyes of hope. In his analogy, he compares earthly beauty to heavenly beauty by comparing the experience of seeing a pencil drawing of a sunrise (lines on a page) and experiencing the colors and rays coming down from the horizon with your own eyes while basking in its warmth. He says:

“Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows up seeing nothing but the dungeon walls, the straw on the floor, and a little patch of the sky seen through the grating, which is too high up to show anything except sky. This unfortunate woman was an artist, and when they imprisoned her she managed to bring with her a drawing pad and a box of pencils. As she never loses the hope of deliverance she is constantly teaching her son about that outer world which he has never seen. She does it very largely by drawing him pictures. With her pencil she attempts to show him what fields, rivers, mountains, cities and waves on a beach are like. He is a dutiful boy and he does his best to believe her when she tells him that that outer world is far more interesting and glorious than anything in the dungeon. At times he succeeds. On the whole he gets on tolerably well until, one day, he says something that gives his mother pause.

For a minute or two they are at cross-purposes. Finally it dawns on her that he has, all these years, lived under a misconception. ‘But,’ she gasps, ‘you didn’t think that the real world was full of lines drawn in lead pencil?’ ‘What?’ says the boy. ‘No pencil marks there?’ And instantly, his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank. For the lines, by which alone he was imagining it, have now been denied of it. He has no idea of that which will exclude and dispense with the lines, that of which the lines were merely a transposition—the waving treetops, the light dancing on the weir, the colored three-dimensional realities which are not enclosed in lines but define their own shapes at every moment with a delicacy and multiplicity which no drawing could ever achieve. The child will get the idea that the real world is somehow less visible than his mother’s pictures. In reality it lacks lines because it is incomparably more visible.

So with us. ‘We know not what we shall be;’ but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like penciled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape; not as a candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun.”