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Andrew T. Lincoln

“This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through . . .

If heaven’s not my home, then, Lord, what will I do?”

It is safe to say that these lyrics from the well-known gospel song are not among Brian Walsh’s favorites.7 He is not alone in his disapproval. In the trend to downplay or decry the traditional Christian notion of going to heaven when one dies these lyrics are frequently excoriated. Within Christian circles the trend has received impetus from N. T. Wright’s emphasis on “life after life after death.”8 Some now want to banish heaven from discourse about the Christian’s hope and home altogether. Walsh’s friend and former co-author, Richard Middleton, produced the book, A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology, in which he suggested Wright’s proposals had not gone far enough, because Wright unnecessarily concedes that Second Temple Judaism and the New Testament assumed an intermediate state as a future destiny of the people of God. Instead Middleton concludes, “for reasons exegetical, theological, and ethical, I have come to repent of using the term ‘heaven’ to describe the future God has in store for the faithful. It is my hope that readers of this book would, after thoughtful consideration, join me in this repentance.”9 Walsh has been an enthusiastic participant in this trend.10 If Middleton thinks Wright has not gone far enough, Walsh, in a paper commending Middleton’s book, declares that Middleton has not gone far enough! Middleton could have specified more concretely the habits of discourse and practice that must now be abandoned and so Walsh provides some suggestions.11 This essay will suggest that this whole trend of marginalizing an afterlife in heaven has itself gone too far and in particular that there should be no problem with thinking about heaven as in some sense home.12

Joining the discussion at this point is not where one would choose to start in any adequate treatment of the role of heaven in Christian eschatology. The latter would require a broader conversation about how such an eschatology employs biblical resources. This is particularly pressing since the perspectives of the biblical writers are so dependent on ancient cosmologies that we can no longer accept. This applies as much to talk of earth as to that of heaven. Our view of the nature of the earth and its place in the cosmos is so different from that of the ancients that we cannot assume that, in ditching talk of heaven, we can simply reclaim their notion of a renewed earth and mean the same thing.13 Just as theological anthropology interacts with contemporary thinking about the human, so Christian eschatology needs to be in conversation with recent scientific discussion about the nature and future of the cosmos, including changing notions of space and time.14 When biblical materials are part of that conversation, employment of the sort of demythologizing that affirms the truth of myth is inevitable. That does not, however, appear to be a concern for the proponents of the recent trend who are content to speak of a biblical eschatology that can be reclaimed. But, even within this narrower framework, the notion of a biblical eschatology would need probing. Is there only one coherent canonical story about the future of God’s purposes or is there room for recognizing significant diversity in the ways biblical writers envisage the end-times? Is not any so-called biblical eschatology already a theological construal of disparate materials? Should not one be thinking instead of a Christian eschatology that is accountable to those materials but critically and imaginatively relates them to settings quite different from those of the biblical writings? But this is not the place for the broader hermeneutical and theological discussion. Instead, while assuming some form of retrieval for Christian eschatology, this essay simply attempts to show that, on its own terms, the account of the biblical resources and their implications by proponents of the trend is deficient. And, given this volume’s theme, its focus is on talk of heaven as home and why this need not and should not be abandoned.

We should clarify at the outset what is and is not being argued. There is no debate about whether a dominant notion in the biblical sources, and one that has sometimes been neglected, is that of a future hope of a new heaven and new earth, and that one way of depicting this is in terms of God making God’s home on a transformed earth, as in Revelation 21. What is at issue is whether this version of believers’ ultimate hope is incompatible with also expecting to be with Christ in heaven after death. Or, if not incompatible, does it require that the latter be marginalized to the extent that it should not be thought of in terms of home, a depiction of the future hope only applicable to the consummation of salvation in the new creation? “Heaven is not my home,” declares the recent rhetoric.15 One can sympathize with this as an overreaction to both skeptical jibes about “pie in the sky when you die” and a version of Christianity that has been so concerned with the salvation of individual souls that it has disparaged present earthly existence and had little concern for the cultural, social and ecological implications of the lordship of Christ over all of life. But what is at issue includes whether the belief in going to heaven when one dies, set in the context of Christian eschatology as a whole, necessarily has these undesirable consequences;16 whether abuse of such a belief requires that it be dismissed rather than corrected; and whether abandoning any notion of going to heaven is not itself a distortion of Christian eschatology with its own set of potentially negative side effects.

My use of the terms “heaven” and “home” will attempt to recognize their fluidity. Broadly speaking, in the biblical writings the terms translated as “heaven” or “the heavens” have three main referents. The reference can be simply to the sky in contrast to the ground, the upper celestial part of visible created reality in contrast to the earthly part below. In other uses, however, the sky was thought to point beyond itself to another level of created reality, so that heaven could be thought of as the invisible realm of angels and spirits. Just as the earthly realm could be seen as invaded by evil, so could this realm, and so one finds talk of war in heaven between good and evil spiritual powers. In Hebrew, the phrase “heaven and earth” became a way of denoting the cosmos as a whole, where the “heaven” aspect would include both the sky and the spirit realm beyond as the upper part of created reality. Of course, this part of created reality was also thought to point beyond itself to its transcendent Creator and so heaven was held to be God’s place or just God’s presence itself. So, for example, in Matthew’s Gospel the Lord’s Prayer addresses “Our Father in heaven” but also by use of metonymy—substituting a closely associated notion for the actual referent—the kingdom of heaven becomes another way of talking about the kingdom of God.17 To complicate matters further, just as heaven can refer to both aspects of created reality, the sky and the invisible realm beyond it, so sometimes heaven is used to refer to a combination of the second and third meanings—both the invisible spiritual realm and the divine abode to which it points. Despite the totally different cosmology of present-day science, heaven still sometimes functions as a symbol of transcendence and the way the notion of transcendence is used can have similarities to what we have seen of heaven’s usage. Transcendence can refer to what lies beyond the material within a secular immanent framework but can also refer to that which is totally beyond that framework, a framework that, as Christians would insist, is itself dependent on that more ultimate reality.

A key observation here is that the fluidity in the function of talk of heaven is not insignificant. We can empathize with Marilynne Robinson’s character, Rev. John Ames, when he muses, “This morning I have been trying to think about heaven, but without much success. I don’t know why I should expect to have any idea of heaven. I could never have imagined this world if I hadn’t spent almost eight decades walking around in it.”18 Discourse about transcendence and eschatology is inevitably inadequate and at its best involves recognition that we need metaphor, imagination, and images that are open-ended and point beyond themselves. Retaining talk of heaven should be an insistent reminder of the limits of what has been revealed about the future and of our earth-bound conceptuality. Hope requires imagination and a vision that goes beyond the normal.19 Poetry frequently provides that imaginative vision. If poetry is “a sort of homecoming,”20 then singing of heaven may be precisely what is needed to fuel a vision that goes beyond the normal and earth-bound. Even in the vision of a new creation, it is important to retain the notion of a beyond, of a new heaven, so that this vision is not simply reduced to a renewed or transformed earth and becomes geocentric. Heaven in the imaginary helps to ensure that God, participation in the life of God, and seeing God in the beatific vision remain central in any hope for the consummation of God’s purposes for humanity.

To clarify talk of home one need do little more than build on the phenomenology of home in the fine discussion by Bouma-Prediger and Walsh.21 When home is used as a metaphor, it stands for everything that makes home more than house or habitat. What turn the latter into home are the relationships, memories, and stories we associate with them or attribute to them. So, ideally, home stands for somewhere to abide or dwell. It’s where we belong, supplying affiliation and identity. Home provides orientation, giving a sense of order and direction. It’s a locus of hospitality and community. It’s where we find rest and safety. It’s where we are recognized and accepted for who we are, where we are loved and able to love. The only qualification that needs to be made is to the authors’ depiction of home as a place of permanence. In the light of their insistence on the new creation as humans’ permanent home, earthly homes in their literal and metaphorical variety are in any case going to be temporary in comparison. Clearly, regular shifting of place is unlikely to be helpful to a sense of home but the experience of moving home is a common one and it is not the same as moving house. Perhaps stability, that which can provide an anchor for daily living, is a better way of depicting the characteristic being sought. Even mobile homes need not be thought of simply as a symptom of the desire for freedom from the responsibilities of particular places and communal traditions,22 but, within a society that for better or worse is mobile, as still furnishing some of the essentials of what is meant by home. Interestingly, outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, stands J. C. Unit One, the bus of Johnny Cash that he considered his home away from home. “I have a home that takes me anywhere I need to go, that cradles me and comforts me . . .” said the Man In Black, “When I make it off another plane through another airport, the sight of that big black MCI waiting by the curb sends waves of relief through me—Aah!—safety, familiarity, solitude. Peace at last.”23 One does not need to have only one permanent, fixed place to have a home. Throughout a life a number of sites, and sometimes more than one at a time, may function in this way so that, paradoxically, any sense of permanence may be a temporary phenomenon. It will already be clear where this observation is heading. Even if one wishes to say that the new heavens and new earth are believers’ ultimate home, that should not, of course, be thought to rule out describing a prior or intermediate state in heaven as also home.

A key chapter in Beyond Homelessness sets out the authors’ spirituality of sojourning.24 Its positive insights are prefaced by the following denunciation:

. . . a God who is understood as living high above this temporal realm in a heavenly home to which he invites forgiven sinners is not a God of creational homemaking. If we embrace a theology rooted in neo-Platonism and with a stark dualism between earth and heaven, temporality and eternity, finite and infinite, body and soul, grace and nature, then homecoming can never be in this world . . . Homecoming in such a theology is always somewhere else. Indeed, if home is identified as living eternally with God in a heavenly realm divorced from finite, temporal, bodily, and creational life, then socioeconomic, ecological, and cultural homemaking is irrelevant.25

If this theology accurately describes the beliefs of some North American Christians, it is a caricature of any traditional belief in an intermediate state providing a homecoming as part of Christian eschatology. Such eschatology is rooted in a theology in which the high God of heaven is at the same time the God who is immanent in creation. Indeed, it is because God is the radically transcendent source of all being that this God is able to make a home within creation without that being thought to be in competition with being in heaven in one of its meanings. The authors themselves make this point well in their discussion of interrelationality within the triune God and between divine transcendence and immanence.26 But distinction within intimate relationship, without either confusion or divorce, is precisely the judgment that needs to be made also about earth and heaven, body and soul, and the other categories listed above. The dualities they involve are already part of the biblical materials, whether or not these interacted with or were influenced by Platonism! Further, there is absolutely no reason why going to heaven when you die as a way of describing part of Christian hope should entail giving up on one’s present responsibilities in what the above quotation designates as “this world.” There is, of course, a sense in which what it deems to be a damaging consequence—“homecoming can never be in this world”—is in fact the case. Even if one’s eschatology is limited to a new creation, homecoming will not be in this world but in one that has been completely transformed.

There is an ambivalence about this world being home that runs throughout the book’s spirituality of sojourning. Early on we are told that Christian faith is “not a faith about passing through this world, but a faith that declares this world—this blue green planet so battered and bruised, yet lovely—as our home.”27 Well, yes and no. This world was meant to be our home but there is a major strand of biblical material that indicates that it is not the place it was meant to be and is now the locus of “this age” or “this world,” the sphere that is dominated by evil and from which humans need to be rescued by God in Christ. For Paul “this age” was a period in which the created cosmos of heaven and earth had become tainted by death, dearth, and disease and, as a spatio-temporal complex, it was synonymous with “this world” (cf., e.g., 1 Cor 1:20; 2:6; 3:18, 19). Because of this world’s present alienation from its Creator, it can at best provide only a temporary home. At times the book appears to acknowledge this, though there is a tendency to treat the earth as neutral habitat and to downplay the intimate systemic relation of humans and the rest of created life. But the discussion of ecological homelessness states, “We feel homeless . . . alienated from our only home.”28 The explanation offered for this state of affairs is that we are becoming homeless. However, there is a real sense in which we are born into a world that is already no longer home. Is the exhortation “to live as redemptive homemakers in this world of ecological homelessness”29 a recognition that this is indeed the case? The danger of underestimating the effects of alienation from the Creator has the accompanying danger of underestimating the radicality of the redemption required. If we know from Paul anything about the bodies that will be part of believers’ home in the age to come, it is precisely that they will not be earthly. The earthly characterizes the descendants of the first man in this age, but it is the heavenly that characterizes the risen Christ as the last man and those who will share his resurrection life (1 Cor 15:47–49).30

What is surprising about the recent trend dismissing heaven as home in order to emphasize resurrected bodies on a renewed earth is the lack of attention to the significance of resurrection for Christ himself. Not only does Paul insist that the resurrected Christ has become heavenly but also the conviction runs throughout the New Testament that the resurrection entailed Christ’s exaltation, whether that was thought of as one complex or separated out into two separate events, as in Luke’s account of the ascension in Acts. To the question “where is the resurrected Christ now located?” the response of his early followers, supported by an appeal to Ps 110:1, would have been that he was in heaven at the right hand of God. And given that it was believed that the risen Christ retained a transformed creaturely body with its inherent social dimension, heaven would here have been thought of in terms of an overlapping of the second and third uses described earlier, a combination of the loci of the transcendent God and of glorified creatures. Whatever the mysteries of this conception, the main point here is that any attempt to provide an account of earth and heaven in the biblical materials and its implications for eschatology and present Christian existence needs to take seriously the vertical dimensions of Christology. The related convictions that believers participated in the events of Christ’s death and resurrection, that they had a relationship with the exalted Christ through the Spirit, that it made sense to talk of its intimacy as being in or with him, all meant that heaven as Christ’s present location was significant not just for him but also for them. In so far as salvation is thought of in terms of a cosmic drama, it could be said that its center of gravity had shifted from earth to heaven. Indeed, heaven could take on for Christ-followers many of what we have seen to be defining characteristics of home as a metaphor. Heaven became a locus of family associations, of orientation for living, of a belonging that provides identity, of stability, safety and rest.

It is worth providing a few examples. Heaven is home in terms of family relationships. For Matthew, Jesus’ disciples are children of God as their heavenly Father (cf., e.g., 5:45, 48; 6:9, 14; 23:9); in John 20:17 the risen Jesus tells the disciples, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father;” and for Ephesians this is the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name (3:14, 15).31 Hebrews urges its readers to fix their thoughts on Christ as the Son exalted to heaven, who thereby pioneered the way to glory for his brothers and sisters who now share in this heavenly calling (2:10–13; 3:1). They will become part of the heavenly Jerusalem, constituting “the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven” (12:23) as those who share the inheritance of the One who is the firstborn par excellence (1:6). Maternal associations are also appropriate. In Galatians Paul can tell his readers that the Jerusalem above, the heavenly Jerusalem, “is free and is our mother” (4:25, 26). In the face of allegations that he was in fact dependent on the mother church in Jerusalem with its Torah-centered approach and that he should fall back into line with its practices, Paul’s allegory claims that the present Jerusalem is in fact in bondage. As his citation of Isa 54:1 indicates, he takes up hope for a new Jerusalem at the center of the age to come and, as in some apocalypses and Hebrews, holds that the Jerusalem to come already exists in heaven. Because of Christ’s presence in heaven, it can stand for the eschatological benefits that believers share ahead of time. Here, as mother, it is the symbol of the source of life and liberation for the true people of God, both Jews and Gentiles who are “born according to the Spirit” (4:29). The heavenly realm has all the connotations of the family home.

If home also represents that which gives orientation and direction to our lives, then because Christ has been exalted to heaven, heaven has that function for his followers. In a passage in Philippians where he talks of believers’ ultimate hope in terms of Christ coming from heaven “to transform the body of our humiliation so that it may be conformed to the body of his glory,” Paul also strikingly states, “our citizenship is in heaven” (3:20). The term politeuma, translated as “citizenship,” is more accurately, but more awkwardly, rendered as “commonwealth,” “state,” or “constitutive government.”32 Octavian had conferred the Roman form of constitutional government on Philippi in 42 B.C.E. and its administration reflected that of Rome. Paul calls for his Philippian readers to see heaven rather than Rome as the state governing them. Because this is Christ’s locus, his rule and its values are to provide their orientation and be reflected in their aspirations and living.33 That is also one of the roles heaven plays in Colossians and Ephesians. Because resurrection life is also heavenly life and because believers have been raised with Christ, the audience of Colossians can be exhorted to seek and to set their minds on the things above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Indeed, their relationship to Christ in heaven is such that he can be described as their life. They take their identity from him, though that is at present hidden with him and in the life of God in the invisible heavenly realm until Christ’s final appearance (3:1–4). Not only is Christian existence here inseparable from the heavenly dimension but it is also explicitly contrasted with a concern for earthly things. Again, far from earth being seen as home, it is the primary setting of a fallen creation, of this present evil age. And far from this heavenly-mindedness with its focus on a transcendent realm leading to a disregard for ordinary life, it is expected to work itself out not only in love, peace, wisdom, and worship but also in the whole of life, including husband-wife, parent-child and master-slave relationships (3:5–4:1). “The heavenlies” in Ephesians are the equivalent of the things above or the heavenly realm and are where the exalted Christ is located at God’s right hand in a position of superiority in relation to any other cosmic forces (1:20, 21). Because of their union with Christ, it can even be said of believers that they have been seated in the heavenlies, thus sharing not only his exalted life but also his position of decisive victory over all other powers (2:6). Heaven, then, is a key feature in providing the locus of the identity and orientation to life for which home is a metaphor.

Central to Hebrews is the depiction of Christ as the exalted Son and High Priest in heaven (8:1) and what follows for those who confess this. One consequence is that they now have through his presence a sure and steadfast anchor for living and hoping (6:17–20). A distinguishing feature of this letter’s eschatology is this characterization of heaven as a realm of permanence because of Christ’s once for all saving achievement. In its spirituality of sojourning, those who share the faith of the patriarchs acknowledge that they are “strangers and foreigners on the earth” who “are seeking a homeland . . . a better country, that is, a heavenly one,” in which “God has prepared a city for them” (11:13–16). This future city is the heavenly Jerusalem, to which, as previously noted, believers already have access though Jesus as mediator (12:22–24). Heaven here is both a present and future homeland.34

If the response so far is a willingness to concede that in the New Testament heaven may function for present Christian existence in a way analogous to home but to insist that this is all pre-mortem and so has no real bearing on whether believers go to heaven at death, then this would be to miss the point. It would run against the whole of what has been said about believers’ relationship to their Lord in heaven, if that relationship simply came to an end at death. Their inseparable union with Christ in heaven will remain until its manifestation at the eschaton (Col 3:3, 4). Whether it is in Paul or John, there is an insistence that nothing, especially death, is able to separate believers from Christ and from the life, the eternal life of the age to come, in which they already participate through him (cf., e.g., Rom 6:23; 8:34–39; 14:7–9; 1 Cor 3:21–23; John 6:58; 10:28; 11:25, 26).

If heaven continues to be the locus of the exalted Christ until the eschaton, it also continues to be home for deceased believers who are united to him. This is, of course, spelled out explicitly in Paul’s discussion in 2 Cor 5:1–10. Earlier, in 1 Corinthians 15, the apostle reckons with the possibility that at the eschaton he might be among those still alive and thus experience resurrection as the transformation involved in this perishable body putting on immortality (15:51–55), But here, in the light of his recent experiences of deadly peril (1:8–10), he appears to have taken far more seriously the possibility of his own death before the parousia. He remains convinced that if this body, the earthly tent, is destroyed in death, then believers will have a resurrection body, the eternal heavenly house or dwelling. Mixing metaphors of building and clothing, he longs simply to have the heavenly dwelling put on as further clothing rather than having to undergo a period of being unclothed or naked (5:1–4). Yet Paul remains confident. Living by faith rather than sight, he knows that even if death reduces him to the nakedness of being without a body, the relationship with Christ holds and he will be with him. He employs the verbs for being at home (endēmein) and being away from home (ekdēmein) to depict this situation—“while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord . . . and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (5:6–8). Death before the end-time resurrection will involve being at home with Christ in heaven. Fear of finding anthropological dualism or Platonism in Paul has prevented some writers from seeing what is going on here and led to fanciful and implausible alternative readings.35 If, as some claim, belief in going to heaven at death is Platonic, then Platonism had already penetrated the thinking of other Second Temple Jewish writings to which early followers of Christ were heirs. So, for example, 1 Enoch 39:3, 4 talk of the dwelling-places of the holy and the resting-places of the righteous in heaven while in 1 Enoch 71:14–16 the seer ascends to heaven where the peace of the world to come is proclaimed to him and he sees the Son of man, with whom the dwelling-places and inheritance of the righteous will be and from whom they will never be separated. In 1 Enoch 103:34 the spirits of the righteous dead are said to have a lot that is abundantly better than the lot of the living. This is similar to the way in which Paul reiterates his perspective on life after death in Phil 1:20–23 where, not knowing whether he will survive imprisonment, he weighs the benefits of staying alive to continue his mission over against those of dying. He is clear about his personal preference. Though remaining in the flesh is more necessary for his churches, his desire is to depart and to be with Christ. Dying, therefore, is seen as “gain” and “far better.” To be with Christ in heaven will produce a fuller enjoyment of that relationship than can be experienced in this life. This view of heaven as home, because it means being with the One to whom one belongs, is, it should be noted, perfectly compatible with the expectation, expressed a little later in 3:20,21, of Christ coming from heaven to transform believers’ bodies.

The Gospel of John also combines both perspectives. Alongside the expectation of an end-time resurrection (5:28, 29; 11:25, 26), Jesus assures his disciples that after his departure he will prepare a place for them, since in his Father’s house, where he will be, there are many dwelling places (14:2, 3). Talk of dwelling places in heaven, viewed as God’s house, is again reminiscent of the imagery of 1 Enoch. The term employed here is monē, abode, a cognate of the characteristically Johannine verb menein, to abide. Notions of a temporary stopping place have to be read into the term from elsewhere. The same term is used later in the passage for God and Christ taking up their dwelling place (NRSV “home”) in believers (14:23). Since this takes place through the Spirit, who will be with them for ever (14:16), any connotations of impermanence are far from the usage of dwelling place in this part of the farewell discourse. What is intriguing is that Jesus goes on to say that he will come again to take his followers to be with him in the place prepared for them. This appears to have originally been a reference to the parousia, the consequence of which will be going to be with Christ in heaven. The evangelist has no problems about passing on this tradition as an aspect of Christian hope.

While the aim of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19–31 is not to teach about the circumstances of the afterlife, the parable does depend for its plausibility and effectiveness on a general belief in conscious existence in a post-mortem state, where the bosom of Abraham represents the place of consolation for the departed righteous in heaven. Luke endorses a version of such belief more directly in 23:39–43, where he has Jesus say to one of the criminals crucified with him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” In the writings of second temple Judaism, Paradise is typically seen as Eden restored, an ideal home, and located in heaven. Paul in 2 Cor 12:4 places it in the third heaven, as do Apocalypse of Moses 37:5 and 2 Enoch 8:1. So Luke clearly conveys the expectation of being with Christ in heaven immediately upon death. In Revelation 6:9–10 the seer has a vision of the souls of the martyrs who are in heaven and consciously awaiting the end-time judgment and in 7:9–17 sees a great multitude in heaven worshipping before the throne of God and the Lamb. Worship in heaven in the afterlife is also important in Hebrews. In 12:18–24 the writer contrasts the old and new covenants by comparing what happened at Sinai to believers’ access now to Mount Zion and the heavenly Jerusalem. In addition to God, the judge of all, and Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, those whom believers are now able to approach in the heavenly city include myriads of angels in festal gathering. They also meet the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, that is, as noted earlier, believers in Christ who have died, and the spirits of the righteous made perfect, that is, most likely, the figures of faith from Israel’s history, of whom it is said that “they would not, apart from us, be made perfect” (11:40). New covenant worship brings believers into the heavenly realm where Christ is and therefore also into the presence of those who have gone before, the spirits of their ancestors in the faith.

This highlights a further reason why heaven remained important as part of Christian hope. It helped to explain the relation between living and deceased believers. Early followers of Christ saw themselves as integral to a corporate group, members of the body of Christ, as Paul put it. But what happened to that relationship once some of them died? This was an issue that arose from the start of the Christian movement, and which Paul addresses as a legitimate concern in 1 Thess 4:13–18, “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.” His response is primarily to link present and past believers together in the imminent scenario of Christ’s coming to raise the dead. Expecting still to be alive himself, he says that those who are alive will not experience that coming and its transformation separately from the already dead. Indeed, the latter will be raised from the dead first and then meet up together with the living to accompany Christ on his coming to earth. But once this scenario did not occur within the early generations of believers, it was not of much comfort to suggest that the only contact with dead loved ones would come at the resurrection at the end of history, whenever that might be. A more appropriate pastoral response was required in order to provide assurance that death need not sever the links between believers. A basis for that different response is found already in the passage from Hebrews 12 just discussed which suggests not only a reunion of the faithful in heaven but also a mutuality of relationship in the new covenant community between those on earth and those already in heaven, as the former have access to the latter in the context of worship. This is, of course, the perspective that developed into the creedal confession—“I believe . . . in the communion of saints.”36

Early Christians’ main expectation for the future was a return of Christ that would usher in new heavens and earth (Rev 21:1) or, expressed differently, reconcile or sum up all things in heaven and on earth in Christ (Col 1:20; Eph 1:10). It should be clear by now that they also held that, because they were in a relationship to Christ in heaven, when they died that relationship would continue with him where he was until the completion of God’s purposes. It should hardly be surprising that this latter perspective on the future would become increasingly important in the Christian tradition once it was recognized that the coming of the new heavens and earth and the reception of heavenly bodies had not occurred as soon as expected. Increasingly these had to be seen as a hope for a more distant future. So, when those who are dying talk of “going home” and have in view the hope of going to heaven to be with Christ, this may well need to be supplemented in a full Christian eschatology by further perspectives but should not be caricatured and labelled as a Platonic or Gnostic deviation. The increased focus, after the first century, on death as enabling a heavenly homecoming is not so much a development to be lamented but one for which to be thankful. Of course, for present-day Christians it raises contested issues about what it is to be human, the relationship of matter and consciousness, and the possibility of continued existence in some disembodied form. But there are similar issues for those who stress belief in a future resurrection of the body. There has to be some element of continuity between the deceased person and any future embodiment for the new form of life to be identifiable as that particular person. Any so-called holistic eschatology has to come to terms with some element of anthropological duality.

Repentance brings joy in heaven, but we should not want to join Middleton or Walsh in repenting of the use of the term “heaven” itself to describe the future God has in store for the faithful. “No more songs about going to heaven,” declares Walsh.37 There goes not only This World Is Not My Home but also Amazing Grace and its now forbidden lyrics—“I shall possess, within the veil (the phrase echoes Hebrews’ language for heaven), A life of joy and peace.”38 That would be a loss, not least because its other lines—“’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home”—are a fitting articulation of Christian hope. If the notion of heaven evokes all that God has in store beyond our ability to imagine, grace will lead us home, this essay suggests, not just to resurrection bodies in the new creation but also to being with Christ after death and to participation in the life of the triune God.

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Bouma-Prediger, Steven, and Brian J. Walsh. Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.

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“JC Unit One: On the Road In Johnny Cash’s Custom Tour Bus.” Opposite Lock. January 9, 2014. https://oppositelock.kinja.com/jc-unit-one-on-the-road-in-johnny-cashs -custom-tour-b-1498195896.

Lincoln, Andrew T. Hebrews: A Guide. London: T. & T. Clark, 2006.

Lincoln, Andrew T. Paradise Now and Not Yet: Studies in the Role of the Heavenly Dimension in Paul’s Thought with Special Reference to His Eschatology. SNTSMS 43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Marshall, Paul, with Lela Gilbert. Heaven Is not My Home: Learning to Live in God’s Creation. Nashville: Word, 1998.

Middleton, J. Richard. A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014.

Parry, Robin A. The Biblical Cosmos: A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Weird and Wonderful World of the Bible. Eugene, OR.: Cascade Books, 2014.

Polkinghorne, John, and Michael Welker, eds., The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 2000.

Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. London: Virago, 2005.

Russell, Robert J. “Cosmology and Eschatology.” In The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, edited by Jerry L. Walls, 563–80. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Walsh, Brian J. “Repenting of Heaven.” Empire Remixed. June 14, 2015. http://empireremixed.com/2015/06/04/repenting-of-heaven.

Wright, N. T. “Heaven Is not Our Home.” Christianity Today, March 24, 2008.

———. Surprised by Hope. London: SPCK, 2007.

7. See Bouma-Prediger and Walsh, Beyond Homelessness, 185n63, where, in an explicit contrast to these lyrics, we are told that “the earth is and always will be our home.”

8. Many of his writings are relevant to this topic, but Wright, Surprised by Hope, esp. 160–64, provides a convenient summary discussion of resurrection as life after life after death, including his view that talk of going to heaven is distorting and misleading.

9. Middleton, A New Heaven, 236n53, 237.

10. This attempt to push back against the trend is offered as part of the celebration of Brian’s life and ministry with deep gratitude for all I have learned from him, for his and Sylvia’s hospitality in their home, and for their friendship. It is offered in the belief that expressing disagreement can be the highest form of respect for a friend and colleague and that, if the stimulating discussions I frequently had with Brian in his basement office at Wycliffe College are any guide, he will not be short of suitably robust comebacks!

11. Walsh, “Repenting of Heaven.”

12. For the sake of full disclosure, I should declare my own interest as someone whose PhD was published as Paradise Now and Not Yet: Studies in the Role of the Heavenly Dimension in Paul’s Thought with Special Reference to His Eschatology.

13. For a good recent reminder of this, see Parry, The Biblical Cosmos.

14. See, e.g., Polkinghorne and Welker, eds., The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology; Russell, “Cosmology and Eschatology”; Imfeld and Losch, eds., Our Common Cosmos.

15. See also, e.g., Marshall, Heaven Is Not My Home; Wright, “Heaven Is Not Our Home.”

16. There is no reason, for instance, that the initiatives on actual homelessness that in part led to the book and have also been inspired by its discussion need be affected at all by the inclusion of heaven in one’s eschatology.

17. All scripture references are from the NRSV.

18. Robinson, Gilead, 77.

19. A point well made in Bouma-Prediger and Walsh, Beyond Homelessness, 315–17.

20. The U2 song, of course, took its inspiration from Paul Celan’s The Meridian speech. In it Celan can talk of art in terms of “flight to Paradise” and of the poem’s participation in the mysterious encounter with the Other, possibly the Wholly Other, as “a kind of homecoming” (39) cf. Celan and Glenn, “The Meridian,” 29–40. The title of the speech is intriguing; one sense of meridian being the axis of heaven as the celestial dome and thus the site of possible opening to what is beyond.

21. Bouma-Prediger and Walsh, Beyond Homelessness, 56–66.

22. Bouma-Prediger and Walsh, Beyond Homelessness, 258–59.

23. See “JC Unit One” (website listed in bibliography).

24. Bouma-Prediger and Walsh, Beyond Homelessness, 271–304.

25. Bouma-Prediger and Walsh, Beyond Homelessness, 274.

26. Bouma-Prediger and Walsh, Beyond Homelessness, 280–84.

27. Bouma-Prediger and Walsh, Beyond Homelessness, xii.

28. Bouma-Prediger and Walsh, Beyond Homelessness, 186. Ironically, this echoes the lyrics “I can’t feel at home in this world anymore” from “This world is not my home.” Elsewhere, 291, it is recognized that humans at present “are alienated from the earth,” but it is as if the alienation had not affected the whole of created reality, including earth, and only humanity is in need of redemption.

29. Bouma-Prediger and Walsh, Beyond Homelessness, 224.

30. See Lincoln, Paradise, 45–54.

31. All biblical quotations are taken from the NRSV.

32. See Lincoln, Paradise, 97–101 for fuller discussion and justification.

33. See also Bockmuehl, “Did St. Paul Go to Heaven When He Died?,” 221: “The image really does seem to concern where believers ultimately belong and have their identity (‘Heaven is Home,’ indeed), not what they have left behind for good.”

34. On the eschatology of Hebrews, see Lincoln, Hebrews, 92–105.

35. E.g., Middleton, A New Heaven, 227–37, who rules out the most obvious interpretation of this passage and those that follow below on the basis of what he has already determined is “the biblical worldview.”

36. For an excellent discussion of the communion of the saints in the biblical writings and in its later development, cf. Esler, New Testament Theology, esp. 191–212.

37. See n5 above.

38. Middleton, A New Heaven, 27–30, had already decried a variety of hymns, including objecting to Newton’s original last stanza of Amazing Grace because of its words “The earth will soon dissolve like snow, The sun forbear to shine,” perfectly appropriate “biblical” metaphorical language for the discontinuity entailed by the notion of a new creation.