Heaven

Christopher W. Morgan, Robert A. Peterson, Christopher W. Morgan, Robert A. Peterson

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781433527845
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Our culture has a lot to say about heaven. But too much of it is based more on imaginative speculation or "supernatural" experiences than on the Bible itself. In the latest addition to the Theology in Community series, Christopher Morgan and Robert Peterson have assembled an interdisciplinary team of evangelical scholars to explore the doctrine of heaven from a variety of angles. Among other contributors, Ray Ortlund examines the concept of heaven in the Old Testament, Gerald Bray explores the history of theological reflection about heaven, and Ajith Fernando looks at persecuted saints' special relationship to heaven in the New Testament. This team of first rate scholars offers modern readers a comprehensive overview of this often misunderstood topic—shedding biblical light on the eternal hope of all Christians.

Part of theTheology in Communityseries.

1

LEARNING ABOUT HEAVEN

ROBERT A. PETERSON

But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,

nor the heart of man imagined,

what God has prepared for those who love him”—

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.—1 Corinthians 2:9–10

Paul’s words are ironic. On one hand, he says that “what God has prepared for those who love him,” what Paul calls “our glory” (in 1 Cor. 2:7), is beyond human knowing (v. 9). It is inaccessible to human senses; we cannot find it out. Moreover, “the heart of man” cannot even imagine its greatness. On the other hand, in the very next verse, the apostle affirms, “these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit” (v. 10).

So which is it, Paul? Is heaven beyond human imagining? Or is it revealed through the apostles in Scripture? The answer is yes!—it is both. On our own, we have no access to the divine. But God has stooped to reveal himself supremely in the apostles’ preaching and writing of Scripture. Thus we can know what God has told us ahead of time about heaven.¹

The problem is that we human beings show an incorrigible tendency not to be satisfied with Holy Scripture. As a result we seek knowledge of “the other side” in the wrong places. This has been true throughout church history, as well as in our own day. We will briefly explore:

• Tondal, an Irish knight who, about 1150, was given a guided tour of heaven in a dream;
• The Adamites of the 1400s, who sought to bring heaven down to earth by their efforts;
• Betty Eadie, whose out-of-the body experience in 1973 launched a best-selling book; and
• The Heaven’s Gate cult of the 1990s, which tried to go to heaven in a flying saucer.

Tondal: A Visit to Heaven in a Dream in 1150

This is the story of Tondal, an Irish knight who visited hell and heaven in a dream in 1150. The tale, originating in an Irish Benedictine monastery, influenced medieval literature and art. Tondal’s guardian angel sought to sanctify the knight by leading his soul through hell’s punishments. He suffers the terrible, physical pains of hell, including gross torments.²

Tondal’s soul also experiences sensual delights when he is taken to an earthly paradise with three exquisite walls made of silver, gold, and precious stones, respectively. Passing through the first wall of gleaming silver, he sees godly laypeople in shining white clothes singing praises to God as they long for Christ’s return. The knight is overwhelmed by the delicious scents, sights, and sounds of heaven on earth. All pain and suffering are banished.³

Next, the angel leads our knight through a second wall—of glimmering gold—where resplendent people sing sweet praises. Dressed in silk, they sit in golden chairs and are adorned with gleaming crowns. A hint of the tale’s purpose is revealed: these people had sexual experience but were later purified through martyrdom or asceticism.⁴ The story extols monastic virginity.

Going deeper into the same beautiful land, Tondal sees people playing charming music amidst glorious surroundings. Who are they? They are the most obedient monks and nuns.

Tondal cannot enter, because the Holy Trinity is present and also because once a person has gone inside, he can no longer be separated from the communion of saints. Tondal is not dead and so must return to life and die in sanctity before he can enjoy the beatific vision. But the angel gives him a second reason: he cannot enter because he is not a virgin. Here in the inner monastic precincts of the golden land only perpetual virgins are allowed. . . . He must stay outside, but even so he rejoices with all of his senses.⁵

Tondal comes to a huge tree with singing birds in its branches and sweet fruit dangling from its limbs. “Here are the cloistered virgins of both sexes who have never ceased praising and blessing the Lord. Each wears a golden crown and bears a golden scepter.”⁶ The tree is the church; the virgins are its builders and defenders.

The angel leads the knight to the third and most glorious wall. This one is not made of silver or gold but is composed of gems, with gold for mortar! The precious stones are those of Revelation 21, including jasper, sapphire, emerald, onyx, beryl, and topaz (vv. 19–21). The tale’s glorification of monastic virginity reaches its apex when Tondal climbs the wall and beholds the perpetual virgins among the nine orders of angels. The knight hears ineffable words before waking up from his dream. As a result of his journey, Tondal is full of wisdom and is converted.⁷

Jeffrey Burton Russell is accurate: “In this vision of ascetic hierarchy, virgin monastic superiors are at the summit.”⁸ This tale of a knight’s journey to heaven on earth is propaganda for the monastic life in general and for monastic virginity in particular.

Sadly, our next specimen does not occur in a dream but in history. And its version of heaven on earth ends up being hellish, as we shall see.

The Adamites: Bringing Heaven Down to Earth in the 1420s and 1430s

Jan Hus (c. 1372–1415) was one of several Czech preachers who stirred up the people against the Bohemian higher clergy, which was largely German, very wealthy, and corrupt. Hus, a Roman Catholic priest and professor at the University of Prague, helped create a reform movement. He preached the Bible as the means to produce spiritual and moral change. He revised a Czech translation of the Scriptures to encourage the people to read the Word of God.⁹

Hus challenged the pope’s power and threatened the status quo in Bohemia. When Hus was ordered by the archbishop of Prague to stop preaching, he refused and left the city in 1412. Although he was given a promise of safe conduct to the Council of Constance in 1414, when he arrived he was arrested, tried for heresy, and burned at the stake.

“Hus was more dangerous dead than alive. A widespread movement named after him developed”¹⁰—the Hussites. Though all were more extreme than Hus himself, they had a radical wing, the Taborites. The latter took their name from Mount Tabor, where Christ predicted his second coming, they taught. When the millennium did not come in February 1420, as they had predicted, they became revolutionary, viewing themselves as God’s holy warriors. They gained many Bohemian adherents and fought their opponents with some success until suffering a devastating defeat in 1434.¹¹

But even the Taborites were not the most extreme Hussite group. That distinction belongs to the Adamites, also known as the Pikarts. This group taught many heresies.

The Pikarts vaguely embraced a pantheistic concept of God. Denying original sin and the existence of Satan, they believed that they were fully redeemed and good. The Adamites lived as if all prophecies had been fulfilled and the millennium had already begun. In the belief that they were like Christ, and as innocent as Adam and Eve in Paradise, they wore no clothes, even in cold weather. They engaged in sexual promiscuity, prohibiting marriage and holding that all men possessed all women in common. Owning no property themselves, they believed that they had the right to seize other people’s possessions. Thus they attacked neighboring villages, taking whatever they wanted and ruthlessly killing the inhabitants. The Adamites’ savage and lewd behavior proved so shocking that a Hussite army exterminated them.¹²

If Tondal in a dream visited an earthly heaven especially for monastic virgins, and the Adamites believed they themselves had brought heaven down to earth, our next figure maintains she went to heaven and came back with astounding revelations from Jesus.

Betty J. Eadie: To Heaven and Back in 1973

“To The Light, my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to whom I owe all that I have. He is the ‘staff’ that I lean on; without him I would fall.”¹³ So reads the dedication to Betty Eadie’s New York Times number-one best seller, Embraced by the Light, her first-person account of an extraordinary near-death experience. She has shared her message with countless people through television appearances and hundreds of talks.

So what was Betty’s remarkable experience? She had gone to the hospital on November 18, 1973, for a partial hysterectomy at her doctor’s advice. She had successful surgery in the morning and, as she tells the story, that night died and left her body for over four hours before returning to it. Wonderful things happened to her in the spirit world. Although she was prohibited from remembering all that happened in her out-of-the-body experience, she remembers it was so great she did not want to return to her body or beloved family.¹⁴

At death her spirit was pulled up and out of her body as if by a magnet. Her immediate feeling was one of great freedom, as her new body was weightless. She traveled great distances instantly and at will. She passed through a tunnel of dense blackness, aware that other people and animals were there. Though some lingered there, she went quickly until she saw a pinpoint of light in the distance. Racing toward the light, she saw the figure of a man standing in it, bathed in light more brilliant than any she had ever seen. She was literally embraced by the light, who was Jesus, “the Son of God, though he himself was also a God.”¹⁵ His presence overwhelmed her with unconditional love. Unlike what her childhood training by Roman Catholic nuns and Protestant Sunday school teachers had led her to believe, Jesus had no judgment for her but only great love, even as the purpose of his mission in coming into the world was to teach love.

While outside her body in heaven, Jesus taught her many things through direct impartation of knowledge. The result? She learned the equivalent of volumes instantly. She learned that all human beings had existed long before their births as spirit beings in heaven. She learned that all religions of the world are necessary so the preexistent souls who have been born into bodies might grow spiritually. She openly shares her conclusions:

Having received this knowledge, I knew that we have no right to criticize any church or religion in any way. They are all precious and important in his [God’s] sight. Very special people with important missions have been placed in all countries, in all religions, in every station of life, that they might touch others. There is a fullness of the gospel, but most people will not attain it here.¹⁶

She learned that all human beings have been endowed with free will by God, who would never override that freedom. She learned that God loves every human being with unconditional love and uses our experiences in life and after death to take away our fear. As a result, we will live with him forever as spirit beings with godlike qualities. All human beings are good and finally will be saved, though those who are too earthbound will have to linger in purgatory while they are healed by the light. “But eventually, they learn to move on to accept the greater warmth and security of God.”¹⁷

Though much of her heavenly knowledge was lost when she returned to her body, she distinctly remembered this:

I traveled to many other worlds—earths like our own but more glorious, and always filled with loving, intelligent people. We are all God’s children and he has filled the immensity of space for us. . . . I saw galaxies and traveled to them with ease and almost instantaneous speed, visiting their worlds and meeting more children of our God, all of them our spiritual brothers and sisters. And all this was a remembering, a reawakening. I knew that I had been to these places before.¹⁸

How was visiting these planets in other galaxies “a remembering, a reawakening”? And when had she “been to these places before”? The answer is, in her life as a preexistent soul, ages before she was born with a body. All of this, she claims, was directly communicated to her by Jesus in heaven. Who is Jesus, according to Betty Eadie’s revelations? He is “the Son of God, though he himself was also a God.”¹⁹ Contrary to h...