What Heaven Is Not
One of the ways to gain clarity about a given thing is to explore not simply what that thing is, but rather to investigate precisely what it is not. When a scientist, for example, wonders what is behind a given effect, it can be an incredibly fruitful exercise to begin by ruling what she can discern the possible cause most definitely cannot be. And, indeed, this strategy of methodical negation is particularly usefully when it comes to the work of theology, which, in essence, is the reasoned inquiry into the mysteries of God’s revelation in Christ.
Given that, and given that the reality of heaven just is one of the mysteries that God makes known in Jesus, I propose we deploy a strategy of systematic elimination in seeking a partial answer to the question, “what is heaven?” To that end, I want to suggest two things that heaven definitely is not in hopes of moving more deeply into just what the mystery of its revelation to us entails.
Firstly, then, I want to argue that—whatever else heaven is—it most certainly is not what many Catholics often claim it to be; namely, it is not our proper home. Despite how Christians frequently speak of heaven these days, heaven assuredly is not the proper home of human beings, Christian or otherwise. To think that it is our proper home is to misunderstand the biblical picture of what God does in creating human beings and to obscure what it means to be human altogether. When God creates our first parents, after all, he purposefully makes them creatures that are, by nature, both material and terrestrial. Unlike the angels and God himself, both of whom lack any materiality by nature (though the Franciscan tradition helpfully complicates that claim with respect to angels), human beings are, by design, essentially physical beings, among and apiece with other physical beings, and outfitted for the realm of physical beings. That we are terrestrially constituted and situated in this way is something the Lord declares not just to be “good,” but, in fact, “very good.” And while it is true that in making human beings uniquely in his image he likewise equips us with an immaterial soul with which we might know and love him, it is also evident that part of what it means to image him entails our partnering with him in caring for the created order in all its materiality, of which we are an essential part.
Unless we think that the Lord created us in this way for no purpose, or perhaps fell prey to a mistake, or for some strange reason only spoke proleptically when he identified our terrestrial existence as “very good,” the logical entailment of the above is that the earth is unequivocally and providentially the proper home of human beings. And this means, properly speaking, heaven is not.
Secondly, and as a closely related consequence, whatever heaven may happen to be, it assuredly is not the great Christian hope that is outlined by Scripture. If heaven is not our proper home, that is, neither is it our central hope. This is evidenced early in the Old Testament, especially in places like Genesis 6-9, where the Lord’s merciful rescue of Noah and his family involves, not a wholesale escape from a robust terrestrial existence, but rather a restoration of creation so as to begin his plan to befriend humankind anew. So too with Abraham, Sarah, and the people of Israel, the ones through whom God’s redemptive activity was subsequently concentrated once it was discovered that sin had survived as a stowaway on Noah’s boat. As Genesis 17:8 and the rest of Israel’s biblically narrated history make plain, the people of God dwelling forever in the Land of Promise is an essential part of that redemptive work. The location of Old Testament hope is clearly not, therefore, in humanity’s finally absconding away to heaven but in unending fellowship with the Lord in an already existent land that has been divinely renewed.
The New Testament authors continue this theme. Though modern Christians commonly speak of “going to heaven” when they die and console one another in the midst of suffering with talk of someday throwing off this mortal coil by escaping to a permanent heavenly destination, this is not at all how the New Testament speaks of that in which Christians ought most to hope. Rather, time and again, St. Paul, in concert with the Old Testament prophets, calls on God’s people to keep their eyes on the horizon, hoping, not for heaven, but for Christ’s return, our bodily resurrection, and, with them both, a restored created order to be shared in concert with our beloved Bridegroom forever. St. Paul is explicit about this in places like 1 Thess 4:13-18, for example:
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.
St. John’s Apocalypse speaks similarly, describing the climax of the Lord’s creative and redemptive work in terms of a New Creation, a transfigured expansion of Eden to be occupied by resurrected human beings without end. Revelation 21 informs us that, after Christ returns to earth to conclusively fulfill the promises of the New Covenant inaugurated at his resurrection, bringing the aforementioned resurrection of all humanity in his wake, the Lord will, at long last, finally carry his Bride, the Church, across the threshold into the New Creation he has been preparing for her—a renewed created order modeled on the Garden of Eden, free of sickness, suffering, and death forever. In this New Creation, Revelation teaches, the current infinite distance between heaven, where God is specially said to dwell, and earth, the divinely ordained home of human beings, will be entirely and forever bridged; joined by the cross, the tree of life made new. And as to the location of our present hope in the midst of all this, the picture St. John paints is not one of ascendant humans in heaven. Rather, heaven, itself likewise having been made new through Christ, descends to God’s creatures on earth, so that, on the model of the Incarnation itself, the dwelling place of God and our own might be made one in saecula saeculorum.
In short, the story of our creation and the Christ-patterned promise of both humanity’s bodily resurrection and the earth’s final restoration are put forward in the Old and New Testaments as the central hope of Christians and fallen creature everywhere. And of course it is. If St. Thomas Aquinas is right in teaching that the perfecting gifts of grace always preserve what is essential to our nature thusly perfected, how could it be otherwise? Whatever else heaven may be, then, it is not our proper home, nor is it our central hope.
In fact, the only reason any souls even have the potential to go to heaven to await the resurrection is something of a cosmic accident. Human beings, as I said, are created as essentially body-soul composites. The decomposition of that spiritual-material union in death is, according to the biblical picture, entirely unnatural (whatever the logical possibilities of such a dissolution might be). Souls are no more meant for heaven (or hell or purgatory), therefore, than they are meant for their physical excising in death. Consequently, that any human soul should find itself a refugee in heaven (or hell of purgatory) is, at root, a tragedy—a stopgap measure temporarily instituted by the Lord while the entirety of his creation awaits its own Easter renewal.
Certainly, Catholic tradition teaches that the soul’s presence in heaven, wholly unnatural as it is, nevertheless is as blissful as it can be for any soul as such. But if what it means to be a human being is not reducible to what it means to be a soul—and it definitely is not—then, properly speaking, even souls in heaven must still exist in a homeless state and in anticipation of an as yet unrealized hope—the very same hope for resurrection and our home’s restoration shared by us who are still wayfarers.
Getting these things right matters. For not only is the misidentification of heaven as our hope and home theologically inaccurate, a failure at the level of truth (though that is reason enough). It also lends itself both to profound spiritual malformations—shaping how we pray, comfort one another in grief, and variously regard our human flesh—and to damaging and sinful treatment of the created order as a whole—leading to a disregard of the urgency of climate change, the irresponsible usage of natural planetary resources, and other failures with respect to crucial elements of faithful Christian stewardship. After all, if God’s plan is ultimately to rescue us from earth for an eternity in heaven anyway, what’s the point of investing our time or energy in seeking to preserve or improve our terrestrial existence in the meantime?
But, as I have argued above, heaven is not our home. And neither is heaven our hope. Instead, our hope is in the wholistic restoration of our home made possible by the resurrected Christ’s inauguration of the New Creation of the New Covenant. The future consummation of that already-not-yet reality, the transfigured renewal of creation as such and heaven’s descent to join us in it that we might enjoy Christic friendship with our Creator forever. What could possibly be better than that anyway?