In her marvelous 2010 book, Heaven, Lisa Miller weaves together contemporary reporting and historical scholarship to give us a comprehensive, engaging, and challenging study of what is one of the most fundamental issues in our lives. Following is my summary of the book.
A 2007 Gallup poll reported that 81 percent of Americans said they believe in heaven, up from 72 percent in 1997. However, it’s hard to know exactly what they meant beyond an automatic and understandable hope for something after death besides the bleak and for many terrifying end of everything.
Nearly all of us Americans, Miller says, carry visions of heaven around in our heads. Most are rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, in the Bible specifically, and in the images and interpretations of Scripture handed down through the centuries via art and culture. Our visions of heaven may also be based on our own transcendent experiences, moments in life when we see that the miracle of earthly existence is bigger and more perfect that we can conceive of in our day to day lives.
Most of us pretty much mean the same thing when we talk about heaven. It’s a perfect place, the home of God, and a reward for living the right kind of life where we live forever. This concept of heaven was originated in Judea around 200 BCE. From then on it underwent ongoing change beginning with Christ and again with Muhammad, followed by the scholars of the Middle Ages, the painters of the Renaissance, and the revolutionaries of the Reformation. The Puritans brought to America one kind of heaven that was austere and ominous, which changed during the Civil War when 620,000 American men died, leaving their daughters, wives, sisters, and mothers without fathers and husbands, brothers and sons. The rationalism of the early twentieth century brought another change as did the cataclysm of World War II. When thinking about heaven we are heirs to all these conceptions.
Certain people throughout history—prophets, visionaries, those who have had near-death experiences—have claimed to have seen heaven, which Miller treats as important or even inspired stories, not factual accounts. I do not believe, she wrote, that we know, in any empirical way, anything real about heaven. “Without such evidence, the story of heaven is as much about believers as it is about belief—for how people imagine heaven changes with who they are and how they live.”
At a peak of American prosperity in 1950 the evangelist Billy Graham envisaged heaven as a kind of bucolic, suburban dream where we’re going to sit around the fireplace and have parties drive and drive down the golden streets in a yellow Cadillac convertible. Muhammad offered his followers, who lived in a waterless place where summer temperatures regularly spiked past a hundred degrees, an overflowing paradise brimming with rivers, fountains, and ripe fruits.
The suicide bombers on the West Bank more than a thousand years later are putting their hopes in a heaven that includes not just water and couches for lounging but seventy-two dark-eyed virgins ready to perform sexual favors for each martyr.
The tragedy of September 11, 2001, brought religion and heaven to a permanent place on the front pages. We learned, with disbelief and horror that the men responsible imagined they were following instructions from God. They believed themselves to be martyrs who would be rewarded after the explosion with Paradise: A handwritten note in Mohammed Atta’s luggage shortly after he piloted American Airlines 11 into the Twin Towers read, “You will be entering the happiest life, everlasting life.” “Keep that in your mind if you are plagued with a problem.”
Religion on that day, Miller notes, left the provinces of American cultural priorities and took its place at the center. Because so much needless and inexplicable death caused by the attacks heaven was always nearby.
In the pulpit and the academy believers who were fed up with what they saw among their colleagues and students as a politically correct anything-goes approach to religion in general and heaven in particular attempted to show that Christianity—and Judaism and Islam—were meaningless without a real belief in a real heaven.
Miller flushes out what we pretty much agree on when we use the word, ‘heaven.’ It is where God and his angels live. At least since the days of the Hebrew Bible angels have been thought to live in heaven, sometimes sent to earth by God to convey His messages. The book of Revelation, written around 95 CE, introduced pearl gates, jeweled walls, and gold streets. The idea of Saint Peter standing at the gates checking off the names of the naughty and nice has its roots in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus tells his disciple Peter “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”
Almost every ancient religion in the West had a primary god, and that god lived high above the earth, in the sky or, as the ancient Greeks believed, on a mountain called Olympus. In the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, heaven is almost always just shamayim, the skies. The people of the Torah understood God to live both in and beyond the sky.
According to a 2002 Newsweek poll, 71 percent of those who say they believe in heaven think of it as an actual place. It’s where you go after you die. Most of us imagine it up, beyond the sky, though exactly where is a matter of much dispute. It’s the home of God and the faithful, and it’s perfect. Heaven looks like a garden, and perhaps also a city. And although it’s an actual place, it’s also eternal and infinite. Heaven exists after the world ends, even after time ends. While it’s a place, our earthly notions of time and space don’t apply there.
The word heaven for us means all these things and much more. The English language makes talking about heaven uniquely difficult. The word heaven in English carries all the agreed-upon meanings – the home of God, perfection, eternity, and so on—and in addition whatever else you dream of, minus anything you don’t believe. It’s the place where we live with our spirits or souls after death and the place we inhabit with our resurrected bodies. It’s a place that occurs at the end of the world and also a place that exists in real time, now.
When the biblical authors said “heaven,” they didn’t mean what we mean today. The whole first-century concept of heaven is completely different from post-enlightenment western assumptions.
No word in Hebrew or in English carries the strongest modern meaning of the word heaven: “a parallel universe that exists in real time, where God lives together with his angels and the souls of our beloved departed, and which occasionally and unexpectedly intersects with and affects our world.”
When we tell our children that Grandpa is with God in heaven, this is what we mean. It’s a real place where real action is going on somewhere else.
Almost every ancient religion in the West had a primary god, and that god lived high above the earth, in the sky or, as the ancient Greeks believed, on a mountain called Olympus. In the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, heaven is almost always just shamayim, the skies. The people of the Torah understood God to live both in and beyond the sky. For the authors of the Torah, heaven was the home of God and his angels, but it wasn’t the dwelling of humans or anything resembling humans.
According to traditional interpretations of the Bible, the patriarchs had no heaven. What they had was generations of family and tribal affiliations living under Abraham’s covenant with God. The best a Hebrew could hope for was to rest forever among the bones of his people.
There was, however, a place called Sheol that was a dark and murky underworld where people had some sort of ghostlike existence. These were people whose lives had been unfulfilled by displeasing God, or dying young or violently, or having no children. Sheol was entirely disconnected from God, and nobody wanted to go there. In the Bible, then, you may be gathered to your ancestors, or you may go down to Sheol and be forgotten about.
This biblical account of the afterlife is the official teaching, handed down by the rabbis and codified in the Torah, which reflected what the rabbis want people to think and practice. It isn’t an unbiased, historical account of what the people of the Bible actually believed. Although the Hebrew Bible does not speak about a distinct afterlife, Miller asks, why were people buried with all their stuff? Because, she says, they believed the dead needed it. If your dead weren’t taken care of they might wreak havoc on your life. The earliest Israelites believed dead spirits, good and bad, existed in another, Sheol-like realm, and that they communicated with the living. These ideas existed in the Jewish context long before Jews ever started to speak about heaven.
Scholars argue that the absence of afterlife in the Hebrew Bible could well have been an effort by the religious authorities to suppress the cult of the dead among the people. Their strongly held monotheism could not allow interactions with the dead, which looked dangerously like a violation of the First Commandment: I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me. A time-honored way to suppress unorthodox activity in any context is simply to pretend it doesn’t exist.
The religious authorities who wrote the Bible knew that ancestor worship was part of Hebrew culture because they wrote strict laws forbidding it. The fifth book of the Torah contains a list of dos and don’ts for the Jewish people. Among the don’ts are sorcery, magic, and the summoning of the dead. “No one, it says, shall be found among you…who practices divination, or is a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or one who casts spells, or who consults ghosts or spirits, or who seeks oracles from the dead.” The authorities promise in Leviticus that anyone who raises the dead shall be cut off from God forever and “stoned with stones.”
In 586 BCE Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar stormed Jerusalem, smashed the Temple, and droves Jews into exile. During this time they became exposed to a new religion that was gaining popularity: Zoroastrianism. This religion had originated in Central Asia about a thousand years earlier and was rooted in the teachings of a prophet named Zoroaster. According to its teachings all the good in the world came from the main deity, Ahura Mazda, who was associated with light, and the evil came from a demon named Agra Mainyu, associated with darkness.
Zarathustra taught about an afterlife in which souls were judged according to their deeds on earth. Each at the judgment would walk across a razor-thin bridge that stretching across a stinking pit. The good would pass safely across the bridge, and the evil would fall in. At the same time the armies of light were at war in another realm with the armies of darkness, which would bring about a cataclysm. A series of Messiah figures would come, and the earth would be renewed and even perfected. The bodies of the dead would rise and be reunited with their souls. Eventually in the end everybody would arrive in Paradise.
The Greeks, Miller tells us, had a very different view. They believed humans were made of two separate parts: a mortal body and an immortal soul. The soul or life force within each person was also the seat of individual personality and agency, and it resided inside the human head. They were convinced that the soul or spirit and the body were joined in life and that after death they separated. The body was dirty and corrupt, they thought, the source of all lower human activity including sex, eating, childbirth, and sickness. At death it was left in the ground to decay while the soul ascended, free of constraints, if worthy, to live with the gods. Plato taught that the highest human achievement was wisdom, and they should try to make their bodily desires submit to their intellect, that is, their soul. The more wisdom a person accumulated on earth at death the higher the soul would ascend toward God. Plato also believed in reincarnation and that those with insufficient wisdom would be sent back to the world for another try.
Within Jewish scripture the earliest explicit reference to anything like what we know now as heaven can be found in the book of Daniel. There, heaven presented as a reward for an individual, and it is specifically withheld from those who are not righteous. Before Daniel any concept of an afterlife was a vague idea that one, if righteous, would rest forever among the bones of his people. The afterlife was his children and his name. Daniel’s idea of heaven caught on fast, and within a hundred years many of the Jews of Jerusalem would have said they believed in heaven.
The concept of resurrection came to play a major role among ancient Jewish beliefs about an afterlife. There are examples in the Hebrew Bible, dating roughly to the ninth century BCE, of people being resurrected from the dead. During the period of the Second Temple, between 516 BCE and 70 CE there was a diversity of beliefs among the Jews concerning the resurrection.
The Jews of the first century expected a Messiah who would be a priest or a king, descended from the house of David. Jesus wasn’t from the house of David and wasn’t a king but a poor carpenter from Galilee. He was crucified, which was a humiliating, public, and inglorious death.
However, the Gospels tell us that when his followers rolled away the rock from the burial cave on the third day after his death, his body wasn’t there. They drew only one conclusion, that he had been resurrected. The Gospel writers had the task of convincing their audiences that the resurrection had really happened. It was one thing, Miller points out, to believe in a future resurrection and quite another to believe that it had been a historical truth. It wasn’t a metaphor; he was reborn physically. The history of Christianity, she says, can be seen as a two-thousand-year argument with those who disbelieve the literal truth of the resurrection.
Today the question as to what happens to our body in heaven remains of great importance to Christians. At the end of time will our body or some version of the one we have now be reunited with our spirit to live forever, looking recognizably as we did in life? This question, Miller notes, more than any other question about heaven, puts the modern believer to the test.
According to a 1997 Time/CNN poll only 26 percent of Americans believe they’ll have bodies in heaven. In fact, according to a 2003 Harris poll 21 percent of self-professed Christians said they believed in reincarnation. Reincarnation and resurrection have traditionally been seen as mutually exclusive. Orthodox Christians no doubt would find the thought that anyone among their number was privately harboring hopes of coming back to earth in someone else’s body to be not only illogical but heretical. Resurrection is central to the Christian story; it’s what Easter celebrates, after all.
How do you get to heaven? The question of salvation is the biggest wedge issue among the faithful. It’s really a double-barreled question: First, do you believe that the path you’re on—Christian, Muslim, or Jew—is the only path to heaven? And second, what kind of Christian, Muslim, or Jew do you have to be to get there?
Do you believe that “being a good person” will get you into heaven? Or do you believe that you get to heaven through God’s mysterious will, no matter what you’ve done—or not done—in life? Scholars call this the Works versus Grace debate, and all three monotheisms have their versions of it. The answers affect everything from relations between neighbors to the peace of the world; they have motivated crusaders, martyrs, ascetics, and social reformers through the ages; they are at the heart of the culture wars being waged in America today. Claiming to know what God wants can have devastating consequences. No answer seems fully satisfactory.
Pew polled directly on Grace versus Deeds, and the results clearly illustrate that the fundamental conflicts that produced the Protestant Reformation have yet to be resolved. About a third of American Christians believe “being a good person” gets you to heaven, and a third believe that “belief in Jesus” gets you there. About a fifth either don’t believe in heaven or don’t have a clue.
In the Middle Ages, baptism was just the first step on the path to heaven. Public penance had given way in most places to private confession, which was necessary for the expiation of sin. Cleansing the soul to prepare it for heaven became an obsession of lay Catholics, who learned in church that their deeds—and misdeeds—on earth would correlate to their place in heaven.
The scholastics, Catholic intellectuals in the great European universities who, inspired by the Greeks, aimed to develop a rational theology, refined the getting-to-heaven process by renovating a concept that had long existed in monotheistic tradition: purgatory. By 200 CE, the rabbis had already begun to formulate an idea of an “in between” place, where souls who were neither completely good nor completely bad would abide until they were pure enough to ascend to heaven to be with God.
Clearly, then, the idea of a waiting place—or perhaps it should be called a process—that occupied the space between death and heaven had existed for hundreds of years in monotheistic religion. By the twelfth century, interest and belief in a Christian purgatory had reached a peak.
Catholic salvation theology was not so very different then than it is now. Catholics believe that God’s mysterious grace—bestowed upon a sinner through a confession of faith—opens the door to heaven. But salvation comes from that plus a life of faithful action. The Church was—and is—seen as both the conduit for God’s love in the world and a kind of intermediary institution, like a bank, to which sinners make payments in the form of prayers and penance—and receive credit in the afterlife as indulgences.
Purgatory, then, can be said to have brought about the Protestant Reformation. It was the abuse of indulgences, as well as the mechanical way in which Catholics imagined they could affect their own salvation, that infuriated Luther and Calvin and moved them to reinvent the idea of what it meant to be a Christian. They threw away the idea of the institutional church as a banker that calculated an individual’s credits and debits in heaven. All a Christian needed to be saved, they said, was a belief in Jesus. But belief in purgatory endures. The Second Vatican Council of the 1960s supported it, and among Catholics—especially those nostalgic for old-school, Latin-mass, fish-on-Fridays Catholicism—prayers for the souls in purgatory remain vitally important.