What and Where is Heaven?

Several weeks ago, I watched an interview on TV with N. T. Wright, from England, an New Testament scholar, Pauline theologian, and an Anglican bishop.  He has served in various academic positions, including at Oxford, where he is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall.  He has written over 70 books and is an excellent ambassador for the Kingdom of God.

I want to share the notes that I took as I watched, and rewatched, this interview, broadcast on Praise, a show that is featured on TBN Network.

As a Christian, the focus of our understanding, the focus of our living the Christian life should be the coming together of heaven and earth.  We are not to be merely passing the time, waiting for escape, waiting to be rescued, waiting for God’s Kingdom to come.  Rather, God wants us to be aware that when Jesus stepped forth from the tomb, He stepped forth into the “now” of the Kingdom of God.  This means that the time in which we are now living is His Kingdom and that He rules His Kingdom!

This means that we are not to be living our lives to simply hide out while waiting to go “up to heaven”.  We are not to be simply biding our time, staying “out of the way”, not ruffling anyone’s feathers, simply waiting to be rescued.  Rather, we are to be engaged, involved, charged with mission, speaking into our culture with our lives, our voices, our actions.  We are to be attacking, engaged in pushing back against the ever-encroaching darkness.

Our Christian life is not to be privately lived, a “just me and God” relationship, kept personal and private. The crucified, risen and ascended Lord Jesus Christ is our King! and we are in His Kingdom and of His Kingdom.  We are His ambassadors, His agents, His image bearers preparing for His arrival!

Why was this such an eye opener for me?  This was a light bulb illuminating something that has been in shadowy focus in my understanding of “what is heaven, when is heaven and where is heaven?”.    

            I knew, at least in my mind, that when a Christian dies, that person “goes to heaven”, that through the mysterious and omnipotent power of God, that when we die, as we surely will, we are somehow ushered into His presence, welcomed as a beloved child.  But beyond that point, I hadn’t really considered the reality of “what’s next?”. 

With eyes that were now opened by the thoughts infused by this interview, I decided to see what else I might learn from N. T. Wright.  The first book that I read was titled Following Jesus.  And from this book, I’m happy to share some of what I read.

The Christian hope is not, despite popular impressions, that we will simply ‘go to heaven when we die’.  As far as it goes, that statement is all right; after death those who love God will be with Him, will be in His dimension. But the final Christian hope is that the two dimensions, heaven and earth, which are presently separated by a veil, an invisibility caused by human rebellion, will be united together, so that there will be new heavens and a new earth. Heaven isn’t, therefore, an escapist dream, to be held out as a carrot to make people better behaved; just as God isn’t an absentee landlord who looks down from a great height to see what His tenants are doing and to tell them they mustn’t.

And here, I think, is a good place to interject something that I heard from Bishop Robert Barron, who was quoting Thomas Aquinas, a church father who lived, studied and wrote in the 13^th century: “God is the sheer act of Being itself.”  This means that God, the great I AM, grounds, undergirds and involves Himself in ALL acts of reality. He doesn’t just intervene from time to time. He is always and steadily present to all things.”  In other words, He is always working to accomplish His plans and purposes.

 But getting back to N. T. Wright -

Heaven is the extra dimension, the God-dimension, of all our present reality; and the God who lives there is present to us, with us and in us.  He is sharing our joys and our sorrows, longing, as we are longing, for the day when His entire creation, heaven and earth together, will perfectly reflect His love, His wisdom, His justice, and His peace. 

The ascension of Jesus, then, is His going - not way beyond the stars -but into this space, this dimension, the dimension that is presently veiled so that we can gain only a partial “view”.

Notice what this does to our notion of heaven. The Jesus who has gone there is the human Jesus. People sometimes talk as if Jesus started off just being divine, then stopped being divine and became human, then stopped being human and went back to being divine again. That is precisely what the ascension rules out. The Jesus who has gone now into God’s dimension, until the time when the veil is lifted and God’s multidimensional reality is brought together in all its glory, is the human Jesus. He bears human flesh, and the marks of the man-made nails and spear, to this day, marks that He showed to His disciples, marks that He had them touch. He lives within God’s dimension, not far away but as near to us as breath itself.

The risen Jesus was more human, not less, than He was before: His risen humanness is the affirmation of His previous humanness, only now without the frailty and the dying which before then He shared with the rest of us.

Followers of Jesus sometimes imagine that the victory of their cause is all that matters, whatever means they use to that end. But that is a travesty of the whole meaning of the ascension, and of the cross and resurrection which give to the ascension its depth and resonance. Jesus himself, no abstract principle but a human person, is now exalted as the still loving, still giving, still generous Lord, to whom one day every knee shall bow, and whom we are today summoned to follow.

St Paul writes to the Ephesians (1:20-23) and to us, that the power which raised the crucified Jesus from the dead, and which exalted him in triumph in God’s own space, ruling over every other authority and every human power — this same power is what God now wants to exercise through his people.

            What I write below is from a Facebook posting that appeared the day after I finished what I had written what you have just read above.  I copied it from what was posted by Highlight Truth Ministries, headed by Jordan Davis.  It is essentially a summary of the core points written by N. T. Wright in his book titled Simply Christian – Why Christianity Makes Sense, a book that I am presently reading, a book I highly recommend.

From the FB posting, quoted directly:

N. T. Wright teaches that western Christians have shrunk the gospel into a private fire-insurance policy:  “Be good, die, soul floats to heaven, done.”  Wright says that picture comes more from Greek philosophy and medieval hymns that from the Bible itself.

What the Bible promises, according to Wright, is far bigger and more solid:

God never intended to abandon the earth He made.  Instead, He plans to rescue and remake His entire creation.  When Jesus returns, believers will receive new physical bodies and live forever on a restored earth where heaven and earth finally become one place.  That future has already started because Jesus rose from the dead in a real body.  The church’s job right now is to live out that future in advance by working for justice, beauty, healing and reconciliation in the present world.

Wright believes every core Christian truth:  Jesus is Lord; He died a substitutionary death for sins; He arose bodily; faith alone saves; the creeds are right. Wright simply says the popular version most people hear on Sunday leaves out the best parts and turns Christianity into an escape hatch instead of a revolution it really is.

Wright is a proponent of “Kingdom now” principles meaning that Jesus already is King and His resurrection launched the new creation, that the church lives as the advance sign of God’s rule on earth today, through justice healing, forgiveness, and renewed human life.  The future kingdom has broken into the present and believers must embody it now, not just wait for later.  Salvation is lived out in this life.  It isn’t just a ticket to heaven.  End of quote.

All of this should give us a whole new perception of what resurrection means to us!  “Dear friends, we are already God’s children, but He has not yet shown us what we will be like when Christ appears.  But we will know that we will be like Him for we will see Him as He is really is.” First John 3:2. 

We will be like Him!  His resurrected body is fully human, evidenced by the scars that still mark His body.  And that when heaven and earth – a new earth – is fully joined and the veil removed, we will also have resurrected bodies!