CHAPTER ONE

NEWSWEEK article "Heaven"

As the Gospels tell it, the women and men who stared at Jesus' empty tomb were not inclined to believe the good news. Frightened, scattered, fearful that they had been misled, the apostles themselves were slow to accept the idea of Christ's resurrection from the dead. And yet, just as Easter is the holiest day in the Christian year, so is the resurrection the deepest wellspring of Christian faith - and hope. If God can raise Jesus to everlasting life, can humankind also expect to dwell with him in heaven?

Easter is the one Sunday in the year when Christians can anticipate a sermon about life after death. But out of principle, many Christian clergy are loath to mention heaven - or, for that matter, hell. For some pastors, it's a question of rhetorical modesty: after centruies of cajoling listeners with overly graphic sermons on the pleasures of heaven and the horrors of hell, preachers today are hesitant to describe places that no one has actually seen. For others it's a matter of intellectual integrity. "The problem is that the [mainstream Protestant] clergy simply don't believe in the afterlife themselves, either the Biblical view or any view," says Douglas Stuart, an evangelical theologian at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hampton, Mass.

While the pulpit may be full of agnostics, the pews are filled with the believers. "The laity wants something more than abstractions," insists conservative Roman Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft of Boston College, the author of three books on heaven. "They want Mother Teresa in this life and heaven in the next." In fact, public opinion polls show that most Americans not only believe in God, but also anticipate some kind of heaven. According to a recent NEWSWEEK poll, 94 percent of Americans believe that God exists and 77 perecnt believe in a heaven. Among those believers, three out of four rate their chances of getting there good or excellent.

What the "other side" looks like, who is there to greet us and what goes on in heaven is everybody's guess. The Bible itself teases us with contradictory images of a wedding feast, a celestial throne room, a majestic city with streets of gold. Believers are free to take their pick or conjure up images of their own. But how we imagine heaven tells us more about who and where we are now than what the afterworld is like.

What do Americans imagine when they think of heaven? According to a recent study, "Heaven, a History," (by Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Yale University) two images of paradise have dominated in Western culture: the theocentric and the anthropocentric. One image anticipates meeting "my Maker;" the other expects to meet "my family and friends." Today, says the sociologist Father Andrew Greeley, who has been surveying attitudes toward the hereafter for the last 16 years, Americans look toward a heaven where they reunite with earthly relations. Meeting God, Greeley reports, takes a distinct back seat to the family reunion because "they've never met God. They don't know what God is like, so it would be hard to imagine what it would be like having God as a neighbor down the street." As for the quality of life in heaven, Greeley finds that most Americans expect a continuatiuon of life on earth, but without the wars, diseases and other inconveniences that cramp their present pursuit of happiness. That's true, too, for scholarly novelist-priests. Aided by a hypnotist, Greeley discovered that his own submerged image of heaven is an emerald city on a lake which, as he approached it, turned out to be his hometown of Chicago.

Beneath his whimsy, Greeley is delivering a serious message. He says that the principal atheistic architects of the modern mind, chiefly Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, were wrong when they argued that hope in a heaven inhibits us from enjoying or caring about earthly life. On the contrary, his most recent polling data suggests that "those who believe in life after death lead happier lives and trust people more. The people who believe in [heaven] are just as committed to this world as those who don't. Belief in personal survival is not the coward's way out."

Heaven remains open to all speculators. The healthy and wealthy are free to imagine a celestial Caribbean island with an endless blue horizon and a loved one whispering, "It doesn't get any better than this." More often heaven is a subject raised at times of crisis. For the aged and the terminally ill, heaven is often a release from what ails them. The Rev. Sam Geli, a Seventh-day Adventist chaplain at Santa Monica Hospital Medical Center, finds that for many pediatric cancer patients, heaven "is a place where they will no longer have to listen to Mom and Dad cry and fight, a place where they won't have to come to the hospital for chemotherapy treatments." For AIDS patients, heaven is freedom from pain. For the elderly, heaven is the ultimate rest. "They're tired," says Geli. "Their greatest fear is that heaven is an asexual place with no husbands or wives. They want to know that they won't be alone." Geli himself thinks of heaven as a place of harmony and worries that he may be right. "Conflict is my life," he admits. "What could a hospital chaplain do in heaven if there's no conflict?"

Missing from most contemporary considerations of heaven is the notion of divine justice. Yet such a yearning, initially developed by Zoroastrians in Persia, has long been crucial to the Judeo-Christian tradition. For centuries the ancient Israelites believed that at death everyone descended into Sheol, a kind of shadowy underground parking lot similar to the Greeks' Hades. By the time of the Maccabean revolt against occupying Syrians (167-64 BC), the Israelites began to question the justice of a God who demands obedience in life but delivers the wicked and the faithful alike to inert oblivion. The answer that evolved was resurrection: the just, like the prophet Elijah, would be restored to the bosom of the Lord and the wicked would feel the flames of an everlasting Gehenna, or Hell. This view prevailed in rabbinic literature. The Babylonian Talmud (circa A.D. 600) has 300 arguements for the resurrection of the dead.

For Christians, heaven was the final judgement rendered as a reward, God's promise of salvation for those who believe in him. And, woe to those who reject the Savior. Even as the Talmudists fashioned their arguments, Christian preachers amplified the importance of the afterlife with concrete descriptions of the spiritual rewards of heaven - and even more graphic depictions of the agonies of the damned.

In Dante's "Divine Comedy," heaven, hell and purgatory are imagined as actual places, each as much a part of the late-medieval map as Florence itself. For Martin Luther, they became spiritual states corresponding to faith, despair and doubt. With the advent of the 18th-century rationalism, all that remained of the afterlife for enlightened thinkers was a distant deity who enforced civic and moral behavior: if reason couldn't make one virtuous, fear of God would. With Marx, the intellectual revolution was complete. Heaven was to be found, if at all, in this life, not in the next.

Meantime, observes American church historian Martin Marty, "Hell disappeared. And no one noticed." For liberal Protestants, hell began to fade in the 19th century along with Calvinism's stern and predestining God. In once Puritan New England, the Universalists decided that God is much too good to condemn anyone to hell, while the Unitarians concluded that humanity is much too good for God to punish - if, indeed, there is a God. Today, hell is theology's H-word, a subject too trite for serious scholarship. When he prepared a Harvard lecture on the diappearance of hell, Marty consulted the indices of several scholarly journals, including one dating back to 1889, and failed to find a single entry.

Although the Roman Catholic Church still teaches that eternal damnation is possible, the lurid descriptions of burning flesh which were once part of the retreat master's rhetorical arsenal vanished - like much else - through the open windows of the Vatican Council II. Indeed, between 1963 and 1965 the Council fathers produced hundreds of pages of official documents, but they did not mention hell even once. "Heaven and hell is not about ending up in two different places," says moral theologian James Burtchaell of the University of Notre Dame. "It's about ending up in this life, and forever in the next, being two very different kinds of persons. It's about character, not context." In other words, heaven and hell are no longer thought of as different locations, with separate ZIP codes, but radically opposed states of intimacy with and alienation from God. One damns oneself by what one chooses to do or neglects to do and thus remains forever alienated from God - and from those who enjoy his love. "Eternal life doesn't begin with death," Burtchaell insists. "It's already underway."

Even conservative evangelicals are losing their taste for fire and brimstone. At the core of evangelicalism is the belief that one must accept Jesus Christ as personal Lord and Savior or suffer in hell for all eternity. There is no purgatory for minor sinners or limbo for those good souls who never had the Gospel preached to them in this life. But now, says University of Virginia sociologist James Hunter, author of two books on contemporary evangelicalism, "many evangelicals have a difficult time conceiving of people, especially virtuous nonbeleivers, going to hell." In one of his studies, for example, Hunter asked evangelical students if they thought Gandhi was in hell. "They recognized that by their own theology Gandhi should be in hell, but the idea made them extremely nervous," Hunter says. "They recognized that to say a good man like Gandhi is in hell is to say that friends of theirs who are not born again will also go to hell, and socially that's a difficult posisition to maintain." As a result of this social conflict, he concedes that evangelicals are tempering their images of hell: "People say now, 'I think there is a hell but I hope it will be a soul-sleep.'"

Fundamentalists, however, have no doubts about hell or heaven - and who is going where. "The thing about heaven that is most precious to me," says Bill Prince, a born-again member of a Southern baptist church in suburban Atlanta, "is the thought of being in the presence of the Savior and in an environment where everyone there is a believer. Everyone has met the standards of God's entrance requirements, which means that we should all be very much alike."

If hell has, for all its old intents and purposes, disappeared from modern consciousness, can heaven be far behind? Within some liberal religious circles it has already slipped from polite conversation. "There's not much hell and not much heaven either," observes United Church of Christ theologian Max Stackhouse, a professor at Andover-Newton Theological School. "The prevailing opinion is that when you die you're dead but God still cares." Rabbi Terry Bard, director of pastoral services at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital, sums up the views of many Jews: "Dead is dead," he says, and what lives on are the children and a legacy of good works. At Harvard Divinity School, theologian Gordon Kaufman traces four centuries of decline in the concepts of heaven and hell; what is left is intellectually empty baggage. "It seems to me we've gone through irreversible changes," Kaufman declares. "I don't think there can be any future for heaven and hell."

If liberal Judaism and Christianity is a way of having God without an afterlife, reincarnation is an option for those who want an afterlife without God. The NEWSWEEK poll shows that 24 percent of Americans believe in reincarnation. For some New Age enthusiasts like Shirley MacLaine, much of the fascination with reincarnation lies in checking out one's past lives the way genealogists trace out a family tree. For traditional Buddhists and Hindus, however, reincarnation is not a substitute for Western ideas of immortality but part of a whole process of self-realization leading to release from the cycle of death and rebirth and into nirvana, or pure freedom.

Indeed, religions that were once confined to Asia are now rivals for American allegiance - in part because of the ways they solve the problem of life after death. Among the many varieties of Buddhism, the Tibetan tradition stresses that what happens after death depends on how one progresses spiritually in this life. The karma, or effects of behavior in past lives, determines who or what one will become in the next. According to Lama Wang Chen of Rime Dakshang Tagyu, a Tibetan Buddhist organization in Los Angeles, death brings a three-day suspension of consciousness followed by 49 more days of wandering the universe as a spirit. A common or unenlightened person will then return to the cycle of life as an animal or a slave. The Bodhisattva, or enlightened Buddhist, however, can return as an artist, a teacher, or whatever else he chooses. "The incarnation of Bodhisattva is limitless," says the lama. "And you can never know who's who."

Heaven in Hindu tradition is like an extended vacation, a place where the soul rests, perhaps for thousands of years, between reincarnations. The ambience of heaven varies according to the resident god or goddess, but each is a kind of garden party with flowers, choice foods, music and beautiful women. Hindus also have a variety of spectacular hells, each with its own exquisite torture. "If you failed to feed the hungry while you were living, you might be chained to a rock where birds come to eat your stomach," says Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, author of "Other People's Myths" and a professor at the University of Chicago. As a punishment for adultery, a sinner may be forced to embrace a beautiful woman whose temperature is white-hot.

Islam is much closer to Christianity in its conception of the afterlife. After death, each individual will be questioned by two angels, Munkar and Nakir, about his faith. The dead remain in their graves until the end of the world, when everyone will assemble before Allah for the final judgement. Each person must then walk the Path, the bridge that stretches over hell; the faithful will complete the journey into paradise while the damned will fall off into the fiery pits of hell. Both heaven and hell have seven grades of pleasure and torment and both are eternal. According to the Koran, the damned will be roasted, boiled and afflicted with pus. The Islamic heaven is like the original Garden of Eden only more crowded. It is also a male-dominated fantasy: the just will enjoy abundant fruits, "sweet potions" and compliant maidens. But the greatest delight, the Prophet Muhammad stressed, is spiritual: seeing the Lord. Compared to that meeting, he taught the people of the desert, all the pleasures of the body [are] "as an ocean surpasses a drop of sweat."

Although the Hebrew Bible does not offer a detailed description of heaven, belief in an afterlife has been central to normative Judaism. The Babylonian Talmud describes a heavenly Yeshiva where the just will have Moses for a teacher. Another image is of a banquet in which the righteous will feed on the Leviatan (sea monster) and a third features a great festival in which the Messiah is the Lord of the dance. More important than these images, says Jacob Neusner, a Judaism scholar at Brown University, is the conviction that individuals will enjoy a communal life with God in the world to come. This belief, he says, "predominated among Jews until modern times and are still professed by the Orthodox and many Conservative Jews today" - including Neusner himself. On the other hand, hell is no longer a part of the Jewish afterlife. Sin, in the Jewish perspective, is atoned for in this life through repentance and the experience of death itself. "Jews have been through the Holocaust," adds Rabbi Daniel Landes of Temple Beth Jacob in Beverly Hills, Calif. "There's just no need to talk about hell."

The most vividly imagined heaven belongs to the Mormons. Indeed, as the first made-in-America vision of the afterlife, it provides everything that a busy, family-oriented, hellbent-for-progress society could possibly imagine. According to Mormon doctrine, God - who was once a man - is married to a "heavenly mother;" together they procreated "spirit children" who took bodies and inhabited the earth. Like their heavenly parents, Mormons are expected to marry "for time and eternity" in a Mormon temple, the first step (after baptism) toward becoming gods themselves. If they keep the commandments and ordinances of the church, Mormons can expect to enter a paradise death. This Mormon heaven is much like the others, complete with lakes, forests and cities with tall buildings - but it is no place to relax. There Mormons continue to work nonstop for the church, converting deceased nonbelievers and helping to "seal" their non-Mormon predecessors into the body of faithful. The more they do the greater their progress to ultimate exaltation as gods.

There's room for everyone in the Mormon heaven and only a handful of adamant reprobates who refuse conversion are expected to inhabit hell. But only the properly married can progress to full godhead. The wife reaches exaltation by participating in her husband's eternal priesthood. Eventually, everyone receives glorified bodies and the exalted couples spend all of eternity in painless - but presumably pleasurable - procreation. Their spirit children, in turn, take bodies, inhabit other planets and worship their parents as the Heavenly Father and Mother.

Compare to such robust accounts of the afterlife, the studied evasions emanating from most American pulpits leave a real void for laymen seeking some assurance that being human has more than transitory significance. "The idea of life after death is clearly an embarrassment to modern thinking - most major philosophers have ridiculed it - but it is just as clearly the touchstone of all religion," says Neusner. "Religion says that being human has eternal meaning. If religion announces that life is over at the grave, then it is not talking about what people expect religion to discuss."

In rejecting heaven and hell, the rationalistic modern consciousness also rejects the awesome seriousness of moral and immoral behavior. But for those who take God seriously, human freedom means the capacity to make moral decisions which have radical and enduring consequences. Hell, then, is not a place created by a God bent on getting even, but the alienation we choose for ourselves. Heaven, on the other hand, is for lovers - of others and of God. "Thous hast made us for Thyself," wrote Saint Augustine nearly 17 centuries ago, "and our hearts are restless, till rest in Thee." If most Americans imagine heaven as a family reunion, the reason, perhaps, is that that is all we know of love. The hell of thinking about heaven is that we cannot imagine - or trust - a love that surpasses our own understanding.

Kenneth L. Woodward
with Mark Starr,
Linda Buckley, and
Regina Elam
NEWSWEEK, 27 March 1989

VISIONS OF ETERNITY (the NEWSWEEK poll)

About Heaven:
77 percent believe there is a heaven
76 percent think they have a good or excellent chance of getting there

About Hell:
58 percent believe there is a hell
6 percent think they have a good or excellent chance of getting there
What it might be like in Heaven:
91 percent think it will be peaceful
83 percent think they will be with God
77 percent think they will see people they know
74 percent think there will be humor
32 percent think they will be the same age in heaven as when they die on earth.


AN AFTERLIFE ANTHOLOGY

No image of heaven is more conventional than John Bunyan's. In "The Pilgrims Progress" (1678), this is his last sight of the sojourners Christian and Hopeful:

"...And lo, as they entered, they were transfigured, and they had rainment put on that shone like gold...I looked in after them, and behold, the city shone like the sun; and the streets also were paved with gold, and in them walked many men, with crowns on their heads, palms in their hands, and golden harps...

"There were also of them [sic] that had wings, and they answered one another without intermission, saying, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord.' And after that, they shut up the gates; which when I had seen, I wished myself among them."

Harps and palms are describable. But what can you say about God's transcendent radiance except that it's transcendent and radiant? Dantes solution: the Beatific Vision which ends his "Paradiso" (c. 1320). As white light is made up of colors, God's perfect, changeless radiance reveals itself to Dante's imperfect sight in changing forms - the three circles of the Trinity, the human face of Christ:

"Not that the living light at which I gazed had more than a single aspect - for it is ever the same as it was before - but by my sight gaining strength as I looked, the one sole appearance...was transformed. In the profound and clear ground of the lofty light appeared to me three circles...The one seemed reflected by the other as rainbow by rainbow, and the third seemed fire breathed forth equally from the one and the other...That circling which...appeared...reflected light, when my eyes dwelt on it for a time, seemed to me...painted with our likeness..."

Dante's saints could gaze at this forever. And do. In "the Day of Doom" (1662), Massachusetts Puritan Michael Wigglesworth foretells a less rarefied pleasure of salvation: seeing the damned get what's coming to them:

"The saints behold with courage bold
and thankful wonderment
To see all those that were their foes
thus sent to the punishment
Then they do sing unto their King
a song of endless praise
They praise His name and do proclaim
that just are all His ways."

But this "song of endless praise," Satan argues in Mark Twain's "Letters from the Earth" (1908), could turn out to be an eternal headache:

"...Everybody sings! The man who did not sing on earth sings there; the man who could not sing on earth is able to do it there. This universal singing is not casual, not occasional, not relieved by intervals of quiet; it goes on, all day long, and every day...And everybody stays; whereas in the earth the place would be empty in two hours...

"Consider the deafening hurricane of sound - millions and millions of voices screaming at once...I ask you: is it hideous, is it odious, is it horrible?"

In Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "The Blessed Damozel" (1850), one "chorister" looks down for her still-living lover:

"It was the rampart of God's house
That she was standing on;
By God built over the sheer depth
The which is Space begun;
So high, that looking downward thence
She scarce could see the sun...
From the fixed place of Heaven she saw
Time like a pulse shake fierce
Through all the worlds..."

Like the Blessed Damozel, the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Transparent Things" (1972) has died and exists in some timeless state. But gazing down from here is trickier; if all earthly time is equally present in your sight, do you see your lover when he's 25, or 15, or 5, or...? Nabokov's fledgling spirits accidently "sink into the history" of things they look at. This pencil, for example:

"Going back a number of seasons...we see graphite, ground very fine, being mixed with moist clay...See it baked, see it boiled in fat (here a shot of the fleecy fat-giver being butchered, a shot of the butcher, a shot of the shepard, a shot of the shepard's father, a Mexican) and fitted into the wood.

"...Here's the tree!...We hear the whine of a...power saw, we see logs being dried and planed. Here's the board that will yield the integument of the pencil...We recognize its presence in the log as we recognized the log in the tree and the tree in the forest and the forest in the world that Jack built. We recognize that presence by something that is perfectly clear to us but nameless, and as impossible to describe as a smile to somebody who has never seen smiling eyes."

Nabokov's novices adjust to their new abilities; the post modern heavenly host is Donald Barthelme's story "On Angels" (1969) face a tougher adaptation. Because - as that old pre-postmodernist Nietzsche told us - God is dead:

"After the lamentation had gone on for hundreds and hundreds of whatever the angels use for time, an angel propsed tha lamentation be the function of angels eternally, as adoration was formerly. The mode of lamentation would be silence, in contrast to the unceasing chanting of Glorias...But it is not in the nature of angels to be silent.

"A counter-proposal was that the angels affirm chaos. There were to be five great proofs of the esixtence of chaos, of which the first was the absence of God. The other four could surely be located. The work of definition and explication could, if done nicely enough, occupy the angels forever as the contrary work has occupied human theologians. But there is not much enthusiasm for chaos among the angels.

"The most serious because the most radical proposal considered by the angels was refusal - that they would remove themselves from being, not be. The tremendous dignity that would accrue to the angels by this act was felt to be a manifestation of spiritual pride. Refusal was refused...

"I saw a famous angel on television: his garments glistened as if with light. He talked about the situation of angels now...The problem of adoration is felt to be central. He said that for a time the angels had tried adoring each other, as we do, but had found it, finally, "not enough." He said that they are continuing to search for a new principle."

David Gates, NEWSWEEK, 27 March 1989

Chapter Two

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