Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Heaven But Never Dreamed Of Asking Peter J. Kreeft Contents Introduction Part I: Heaven And Us 1 What Difference Does Heaven Make? 2 What Will We Do in Heaven? 3 Twenty Questions About Heaven 4 Is There Sex in Heaven? Part II: Heaven And Earth 5 Does Heaven Begin Now? 6 How Do We Experience Heaven Now? 7 Can We Know the Joy of Heaven Now? Part III: Heaven And Hell 8 Is There Really a Hell? 9 Is Hell Fire or Loneliness? 10 How Many Roads to Heaven? Appendix: How Can We Know What Heaven Is Like? Notes (Removed) Index (Removed) Introduction "Will my dead cat be alive in Heaven?" "Can I get to Heaven without being religious?" "Why won't Heaven get boring?" "What kind of body will I have in Heaven?" "Is there sex in Heaven?" "Why can't you get there in a rocket ship?" "Can you time travel in Heaven?" "Is Heaven here on earth?" Can anyone answer such questions? Is this book possible? Everyone asks such questions, consciously or unconsciously. For next to the idea of God, the idea of Heaven is the greatest idea that has ever entered into the heart of man, woman, or child. But wait. Right here at the beginning we run into a problem. My uncle put it this way: "I hear you're writing a book. What's it about?" "Heaven." "Heaven, eh? Do you have some thoughts about it?" "Of course I have some thoughts about it. How could I write a book about it if I didn't? Isn't that a silly question?" "No, I don't think so. Follow my thought for a minute these thoughts of yours: they've entered into your mind and heart, right?" "Of course. What are you driving at?" "Just this: according to the Bible, your book must be wrong." "What? How can you say that? You haven't even read it yet. In fact, I haven't even written it yet!" "Well, the Bible describes Heaven this way: `Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.' 1 And your thoughts have entered into the heart of man. Therefore your thoughts can't be the truth about Heaven." He had me there. I almost threw the manuscript away. But then I thought of the answer, weeks later. I thought of the other great idea, the idea of God. It too is the idea of something (or rather Someone) that "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man." "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts."2 Yet that fact has not stopped us from writing millions of books and billions of words about God. Many of those words are silly or stupid. Most of them are second-hand platitudes. But some are helpful and enlightening. And a few are even awesomely wise and wonderful. Perhaps the same is true of our words about Heaven. And perhaps all four kinds of words are found in this book. What's Different About This Book "Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh."(3) Why is this one necessary? Because there are only three kinds of books about Heaven, and this one is of a fourth kind. First and best, there are the classics, the great old books written by the saints and sages. Unfortunately, these are rarely read today, and many are out of print. Also, they require the understanding of some pre-modern philosophical and theological language and techniques of reading that many modern readers have lost (unless they have had teachers like Mortimer Adler or read books like his How to Read a Book). (4) By all means put this book down and read instead Saint Thomas Aquinas's treatise on the resurrection in the Summa Theologiae-if you can find it and if you can understand it. (5) The other two kinds of books available are current books, which are pretty sharply divided into the popular versus the scholarly, the inspirational versus the professional. This division can be unhealthy for both kinds, for it tends to reduce inspirational books to sentiment and cliché with little intellectual bite, and scholarly books to detached dullness and technicality with little existential bite. The first do not speak to our minds and the second do not speak to our hearts or our lives: a case of heat without light or light without heat. That is why I constantly turn back to the blazing sunlight of a Saint Augustine or a Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. (6) Very few orthodox Christians in this century have combined (1) the inspirational and the scholarly, (2) ancient wisdom and modern language, and (3) imagination and Christian orthodoxy. Among these few, C. S. Lewis stands out as unmistakably the prime example.' He has probably influenced more unbelievers to believe and deepened and toughened the faith and understanding of more believers than any other writer of the twentieth century. But Lewis never wrote a theological study of Heaven, although he did write (1) a great little poetic fantasy about it, The Great Divorce, a kind of twentieth- century miniature of The Divine Comedy; (2) an unutterably moving and unforgettable sermon about it, "The Weight of Glory"; and (3) two highly imaginative and intelligent chapters on it in his two most ambitious theological books, The Problem of Pain and Miracles! In the spirit of those writings, this book is an attempt to write the sort of book Lewis might have written about Heaven. (If you hear a softly satirical chuckle from far, far away yet very close, that is Lewis listening to such presumption: "He that sits in the heavens shall laugh." (9) But this is not a book about Lewis, a summary of his thoughts; it is about Heaven. It looks along Lewis, not at him (to use one of his own very useful distinctions). (10) It uses his eyes and mine in binocular vision. Rather, the vision is multi-ocular. Many other and greater explorers have discovered this "undiscovered country"" in the past. But their travellers tales are not well known today. The old maps are not read. If some of my discoveries, like Lewis's, are rediscoveries of Augustine's explorations, or Aquinas's, well and good; I have traveled in the company of giants. Like the medievals, we should remember that we are "dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. If we see farther than the ancients, it is only because we have their shoulders to stand on."" It is better to be right than to be original, and the surest way to be unoriginal is to care nothing about being right and to care only about being original, while "if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two pence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. (13) Good philosophy is piggyback thinking: you stand on my shoulders, I stand on Lewis's, Lewis stands on MacDonald (14) MacDonald stands on Augustine's, Augustine stands on Saint Paul's, Saint Paul stands on Christ's. That far up, you see far. We need a Great Chain of Thinking to see the Great Chain of Being. Here is one small link. Part I - Heaven and Us What Difference Does Heaven Make? If a thing makes no difference, it is a waste of time to think about it. We should begin, then, with the question, What difference does Heaven make to earth, to now, to our lives? Only the difference between hope and despair in the end, between two totally different visions of life; between "chance or the dance."' At death we find out which vision is true: does it all go down the drain in the end, or are all the loose threads finally tied together into a gloriously perfect tapestry? Do the tangled paths through the forest of life lead to the golden castle or over the cliff and into the abyss? Is death a door or a hole? To medieval Christendom, it was the world beyond the world that made all the difference in the world to this world. The Heaven beyond the sun made the earth "under the sun" something more than "vanity of vanities."2 Earth was Heaven's womb, Heaven's nursery, Heaven's dress rehearsal. Heaven was the meaning of the earth. Nietzsche had not yet popularized the serpent's tempting alternative: "You are the meaning of the earth."3 Kant had not yet disseminated "the poison of subjectivism"" by his "Copernican revolution in philosophy,"5 in which the human mind does not discover truth but makes it, like the divine mind. Descartes had not yet replaced the divine I AM with the human "I think, therefore I am" as the "Archimedean point," had not yet replaced Theo-centrism with anthropocentrism. (6) Medieval man was still his Father's child, however prodigal, and his world was meaningful because it was "my Father's world" and he believed his Father's promise to take him home after death. This confidence towards death gave him a confidence towards life, for life's road led somewhere. The heavenly mansion at the end of the earthly pilgrimage made a tremendous difference to the road itself. Signs and images of heavenly glory were strewn all over his earthly path. The "signs" were (1) nature and (2) Scripture, God's two books, (3) general providence, and (4) special miracles. (The word translated "miracle" in the New Testament (semeion) literally means "sign.")' The images surrounded him like the hills surrounding the Holy City.' They, too, pointed to Heaven. For instance, the images of saints in medieval statuary were seen not merely as material images of the human but as human images of the divine, windows onto God. They were not merely stone shaped into men and women but men and women shaped into gods and goddesses. Lesser images too were designed to reflect heavenly glory: kings and queens, heraldry and courtesy and ceremony, authority and obedience-these were not just practical socio-economic inventions but steps in the Cosmic Dance, links in the Great Chain of Being, rungs on Jacob's ladder, earthly reflections of Heaven. Distinctively pre-modern words like glory, majesty, splendor, triumph, awe, honor-these were more than words; they were lived experiences. More, they were experienced realities. The glory has departed. We moderns have lost much of medieval Christendom's faith in Heaven because we have lost its hope of Heaven, and we have lost its hope of Heaven because we have lost its love of Heaven. And we have lost its love of Heaven because we have lost its sense of heavenly glory. Medieval imagery (which is almost totally biblical imagery) of light, jewels, stars, candles, trumpets, and angels no longer fits our ranch-style, supermarket world. Pathetic modern substitutes of fluffy clouds, sexless cherubs, harps, and metal halos (not halos of light) presided over by a stuffy divine Chairman of the Bored are a joke, not a glory. Even more modern, more up-to-date substitutes- Heaven as a comfortable feeling of peace and kindness, sweetness and light, and God as a vague, grandfatherly benevolence, a senile philanthropist-are even more insipid. Our pictures of Heaven simply do not move us; they are not moving pictures. It is this aesthetic failure rather than intellectual or moral failures in our pictures of Heaven and of God that threatens faith most potently today.' Our pictures of Heaven are dull, platitudinous and syrupy; therefore, so is our faith, our hope, and our love of Heaven. It is surely a Satanic triumph of the first order to have taken the fascination out of a doctrine that must be either a fascinating lie or a fascinating fact. Even if people think of Heaven as a fascinating lie, they are at least fascinated with it, and that can spur further thinking, which can lead to belief. But if it's dull, it doesn't matter whether it's a dull lie or a dull truth. Dullness, not doubt, is the strongest enemy of faith, just as indifference, not hate, is the strongest enemy of love." It is Heaven and Hell that put bite into the Christian vision of life on earth, just as playing for high stakes puts bite into a game or a war or a courtship. Hell is part of the vision too: the height of the mountain is appreciated from the depth of the valley, and for winning to be high drama, losing must be possible. For salvation to be "Good news," there must be "bad news" to be saved from. If all of life's roads lead to the same place, it makes no ultimate difference which road we choose. But if they lead to opposite places, to infinite bliss or infinite misery, unimaginable glory or unimaginable tragedy, if the spirit has roads as really and objectively different as the body's roads and the mind's roads, and if these roads lead to destinations as really and objectively different as two different cities or two different mathematical conclusions-why, then life is a life-or-death affair, a razor's edge, and our choice of roads is infinitely important. We no longer live habitually in this medieval mental landscape. If we are typically modern, we live in ennui; we are bored, jaded, cynical, fiat, and burnt out. When the skies roll back like a scroll and the angelic trump sounds, many will simply yawn and say, "Pretty good special effects, but the plot's too traditional." If we were not so bored and empty we would not have to stimulate ourselves with increasing dosages of sex and violence-or just constant busyness." Here we are in the most fantastic fun and games factory ever invented-modern technological society-and we are bored, like a spoiled rich kid in a mansion surrounded by a thousand expensive toys. Medieval people by comparison were like peasants in toyless hovels-and they were fascinated. Occasions for awe and wonder seemed to abound: birth and death and love and light and darkness and wind and sea and fire and sunrise and star and tree and bird and human mind-and God and Heaven. But all these things have not changed, we have. The universe has not become empty and we, full; it has remained full and we have become empty, insensitive to its fullness, cold hearted." Yet even in this cold heart a strange fire kindles at times-something from another dimension, another kind of excitement-when we dare to open the issue of Heaven, the issue of meeting God, with the mind and heart together. Like Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones," we experience the shock of the dead coming to life. You have had a shock like that before, in connection with smaller matters-when the line pulls at your hand, when something breathes beside you in the darkness. So here; the shock comes at the precise moment when the thrill of life is