4 Last Things: Heaven

Photo by Arto Marttinen on Unsplash

This is the third instalment of a four-part series on the four last things, which builds upon an episode of The Episcopal Podcast on the topic of eschatology, which was mentioned in a previous post.

In last week’s post, we looked at the topic of judgement. This week, our focus shifts heavenward.

Before going further, however, we need to address some tendencies in taking about both Heaven and Hell. The most important of these is the tendency to begin and end the treatment of Heaven and Hell as simply places where souls go. Heaven is the place that is filled with light for good people, and Hell is the hot place for bad people. This tendency makes the judgement that a person goes to either Heaven or Hell seem somewhat arbitrary and thinned out. It also leaves out many threads of the rich Christian tradition which bear upon these two last things.

The first the centrality of Jesus in speaking of the last things. In theological speak, there is a term that is used called the eschaton, which generally speaking refers to the final thing. What we must note here is that the final thing is not so much an event as it is a person. In the Book of Revelation, it is a person that declares himself the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end (Rev 22:13). This person, of course, is Jesus Himself.

What is important here is that the whole Christian life is informed by the likeness to Christ. Therefore, at our own arrival of the last things, the defining characteristic of heaven is that we are in communion with Christ. This is summed up in one of St Augustine’s homilies in which he says that Christ is the place we are going to, and the way we are going by.

As such, Christ stands as the defining characteristic of Heaven and Hell. Put another way, Heaven and Hell are not so much places as they are states of being that are defined by their distance to Jesus Christ and by extension, the Triune God. 

We can take this a step further, and consider how virtue fits into our consideration of Heaven and Hell. When we talk about living a life of virtue, one of the key considerations is the end or telos to which our life is oriented. The content of this telos is our flourishing both individually and communally. Picking up from this, Thomas Aquinas said that we have both a natural and a supernatural telos. Like our natural telos, our supernatural telos is a life of flourishing both individually and communally, only this time the community is with God and the communion of saints.

This is essentially what Heaven is. We can then see an important overlap between the life of virtue and what the reading of the books in the Book of Revelation mentioned above. The books mentioned in chapter 20 recorded one’s love put into action. Similarly, the virtues are a record of habits of love put into action. The only difference to note is that it is God’s love, not just our love, which gets us to our supernatural telos of communion with God.

The path to Heaven is a path of love, and because our destination is a communion of persons, the defining characteristic of our destination is also love, an eternal exchange of love between God and His creatures. 

This love celebrated in Heaven is a love between persons. For an interpersonal love to be properly celebrated, the persons involved need to be whole in accordance with their nature. For the human person, our nature is one where we are composites or both soul and body. This is why Heaven cannot simply be a place for disembodied souls. And this is where the resurrection of the body, which we profess in the Apostle’s Creed, comes in. Aristotle and later Aquinas once said that the soul, stricken from its body, is not happy. It is only because of sin that our bodies experience death and decay. God, in his love, has not only saved us from sin. In his love, God has also restored our personhood as a union of body and soul. The expression of this reunion is that we do not simply reside in heaven as souls, but as composites of body and soul once again.

Support Awkward Asian Theologian on Patreon, and help make a change to the theological web.