HEAVEN HELP US
Jerry Harkins

If you want to get to heaven, let me tell you what to do,
You gotta grease your feet in a little mutton stew.
Slide right out of the devil's hand,
And ease over to the Promised Land.
Take it easy! Go greasy!
—Woody Guthrie, Talking Blues


We are all children of God and heirs of heaven. But the journey is long and the path rocky that leads to salvation. For many are called but few are chosen. Narrow is the gate and hard is the way which leads to life, and there are few who will find it.

Of course it helps to have a map. Or know someone who does.

Sunday, May 1, 2011 was a sad day in the long and depressing history of the Roman Catholic church. In an elaborate spectacle of pomp and pageantry, the Pope kissed a vial of blood entwined in a filigreed reliquary. The blood had been taken from his immediate predecessor Karol Józef Wojtyła, John Paul II, and the kiss was part of his beatification ritual. The church was proclaiming that the late Pope is certainly in heaven and was encouraging the faithful to pray to him to intercede with God for their intentions. It had already certified that John Paul was responsible for at least one miracle, the cure of a French nun from Parkinson’s Disease of which the late Pope had himself been a victim.

According to an ABC News poll conducted in 2005, 90% of Americans said they believe in heaven. Amazon.com currently lists 4,410 books on the subject including several with the title Heaven Is Real or some close variation thereof. One, currently No. 6 on Amazon’s list of bestsellers, tells the story of a four-year old boy, Colton Burpo, who visited heaven while under anesthesia.[1] He returned with descriptions of what he encountered and with the message that the end times are near.

In fact, in almost all religious traditions, an afterlife of one sort or another is the very purpose of earthly life. In Christianity, the New Testament is almost entirely an instruction manual on how to avoid hell and get to heaven. In the words of the old Baltimore Catechism, “God made us to know, love and serve him on this earth and to be happy with him forever in heaven.” Jesus repeatedly stressed heaven as the goal of life and taught his listeners how they must live in order to achieve it. He went so far as to instruct them not to worry about their earthly needs but to seek first the father’s kingdom and his righteousness (Matthew 6:33). [2] The instructions varied over the three years of his ministry but the simplest was merely to believe in him. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved” (Acts 16:31).

Christians have always taken an expansive view of “believe,” maintaining that it includes absolute obedience to a long list of moral precepts, only a handful of which were ever endorsed by the founder. Jesus, for example, never addressed such major taboos as abortion, birth control or in vitro fertilization, and never bothered with such lesser (Protestant) offenses as card playing, dancing and coffee drinking. The Catholic Church claimed the right to expand on Jesus’ teaching and said it was the exclusive gatekeeper of heaven. The Protestant reformers saw this as a gambit for gathering power and riches for a corrupt hierarchy and they preached a return to the doctrine of sola fide—salvation or “justification” by faith alone. We are all sinners and none of us can earn salvation merely through good works.

In the Smalcald Articles, Martin Luther wrote, “All have sinned and are justified freely, without their own works and merits, by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, in His blood (Romans 3:23–25). This is necessary to believe. This cannot be otherwise acquired or grasped by any work, law, or merit. Therefore, it is clear and certain that this faith alone justifies us.” This implies that salvation is easy, that in fact everyone is saved, but it was not Luther’s last word on the subject. He and the others also contrived to believe the teaching of St. Augustine that very few human beings actually go to heaven and, in fact, that God has predestined every person from the beginning of time to heaven or hell. Luther himself understood that predestination raises many uncomfortable questions about the nature of God but he accepted these as mysteries and basically ignored them. John Calvin, on the other hand, embraced the notion that the vast majority of people had been doomed to eternal damnation before the creation of the universe.

If all this reminds you of the Mega Millions Lottery, it is because the psychology is similar. You buy a ticket which costs you relatively nothing but gives you a preposterously long shot at winning indescribable riches. You are buying into a dream and deriving pleasure from anticipating what you will do with the jackpot. There are, however, a number of differences. In one of these games, the house knows who the winners will be before the first ticket is sold. (In the other game, such knowledge would put the sponsor in jail.) In one, the losers are not left free to try and try again but are immediately and permanently banished to hell. Of course you are still free to purchase indulgences promising forgiveness of your sins but indulgences apply only to earthly punishments imposed by the church and purgatorial punishments imposed by God. They will not keep you or get you out of hell which is, in all probability, your destination.

The church has long been aware that its teachings regarding heaven and hell are inconsistent, illogical and embarrassing. On the one hand, it cannot avoid promoting the good news that God loves even sinners. On the other hand, it is obvious that an omniscient God must foresee all things and will their existence. Thus, God must will that some, perhaps the vast majority, of his beloved creatures suffer eternal damnation. Similarly, a creature without free will cannot sin but one with free will is independent of God’s will and, presumably, of God’s foreknowledge. Finally, a church with total power to bind and loose things on heaven and earth must also be a monopoly. And in fact, the church teaches that outside itself there is no salvation. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. In the words of the 1993 Catholic Catechism, “…all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body.” The metaphor of something passing from the head through the body need not detain us. Apologists try desperately to suggest that non-Catholics who would want to be part of the church if only they knew about it can somehow gain heaven. Which is the opposite of what John (3:5) says Jesus said: “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” But the gospels are full of ambiguity on this as on many other subjects.

The early fathers and doctors who decided which books constituted the New Testament left out some interesting candidates and included others that are really strange. By the early years of the fourth century, they had pretty much agreed on the twenty-seven books found in modern bibles. What emerged were three versions of the new faith. The first of these, the original orthodoxy, came out of Jerusalem and was recorded in the synoptic gospels and Acts. If current scholarship is correct, Mark is a rendering of certain sermons of Peter delivered perhaps in Rome. Mark founded the church of Alexandria which is today’s Coptic church. It may be that some of his followers encountered the Gnosticism of Marcion of Sinope which inspired those who established the important library found at Nag Hamadi in 1946.

Matthew and Luke are derivatives of Mark, both presenting somewhat more rigorous interpretations of Jesus’ ministry. The church likes to ignore the differences and treat these “synoptic” gospels as the foundation of all its teaching. The second version includes works of John, a gospel, three epistles and Revelation. John, whether he was one writer or two or three or more was both a mystic and a philosopher. Revelation paints a vivid and horrific picture of the end times and clearly implies that few will be saved. The third and most radical version is that presented in the epistles attributed to Paul. This is the legalistic, rule bound Roman Catholic faith we know today, built on a gospel foundation to be sure but much more ascetic in morality and much less dependent on Jewish thought and practice. Pauline theology assimilated the old orthodoxy following the first Council of Nicaea in 325 and the spread of Augustinian pessimism shortly thereafter. (Interestingly, the Nag Hamadi library suggests that the Christian Gnostics considered Paul one of their own or at least a sympathizer. There is no doubt he hit upon some of the same paradoxes that concerned them but it seems highly unlikely that he had ever encountered Gnosticism at first hand.)

The synoptic gospels are said to be in agreement but, aside from a few passages that read like plagiarisms of each other, they differ in many important respects. They actually seem to be second or third hand recollections recorded by people who weren’t there—descriptions of an elephant by the proverbial blind philosophers. For example, Jesus famously spoke in parables. But of the thirty-six or so (depending on how you count) recorded in the New Testament, only thirteen are reported by more than a single evangelist. The gospels are only roughly consistent and each writer had his own agenda which is why the church fought vigorously for fifteen hundred years to keep the Bible out of the hands of lay people. But bear in mind that the church was selling redemption and salvation so it is not surprising that its understanding of the basic gospel message is that this life is merely a rehearsal for the life to come. For fifteen hundred years, princes and prelates fought furiously for control of the lives of the mass of people who lived in poverty and subjugation. Heaven was the church’s trump card. Do as we say. Be humble and docile. And your reward will be infinite joy after you die. To make this promise as credible as possible, the church had to employ the most tortuous logic against what were already ambiguous texts. This required a degree of casuistry that would make the Red Queen blush.

We do not know for certain who any of the evangelists were. Only the fourth gospel claims to have been written by a named author, John the beloved disciple (John 21:24). In any event, the synoptic gospels describe the origins and beliefs of a new (but not radically new) version of the Jewish faith. Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17). Some of these “fulfillments” seem major. An eye for an eye (Deuteronomy 19:21) becomes turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39, Luke 6:39) and hate your enemy is transformed into love your enemy (Matthew 5:43). [3] Here and elsewhere, if you focus on the changes Jesus is calling for, it is easy to think of the good news as the gospel of love. If, on the other hand, you focus on what you have to do to lead a meritorious life, the news is not so good. It is far more difficult to love your enemy than to hate him. It is relatively easy to avoid adultery but much harder to avoid looking at a woman lustfully and harder still to pay the price of ogling Jesus demands, “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away” (Matthew 5:29).

Jesus is not so clear as to what we must do to enter heaven. On the one hand, he says, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:29-30). But then he also says that very few will merit heaven. He tells the apostles, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!” (Mark 4:10-12). Not that the message is a secret. According to Matthew (28:19), he tells the disciples to “…go forth and teach all nations.” It seems he expects that few will understand and follow him, few will pick up that light burden.

Maybe Jesus himself did not intend to give us a blueprint. He used fourteen metaphors to describe heaven, all of them poetic but not one of which makes a great deal of sense. [4] “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough” (Matthew 13:33). Say what? Several times Jesus compared heaven to a mustard plant or a mustard seed. For example, heaven, “…is like to a grain of mustard, which a man having taken, did cast into his garden, and it increased, and came to a great tree, and the fowls of the heavens did rest in its branches.” (Luke 13:18). There are some 3,700 members of the mustard family but only a handful are woody and only one might be considered a tree—a very small tree—in which birds could perch. Assuming that is the species Jesus had in mind, why is heaven like a small seed that grows into a tree?

The answer may be that Jesus thought of heaven itself as a metaphor for God and God, of course, is love. It is not a place to which you go but something—something ineffable—of which you ultimately become a part. It may be similar to the state of enlightenment that is the goal of Buddhism in which the individual seeks to escape the path of reincarnation and reache Nirvana, a state of being free of craving, anger and other stresses. Alternatively, it may be like the reunion of the spark of gnosis with the godhead. In either event, perhaps the good news is that life does have a purpose which is to become one with love. Admittedly, Jesus does not really “listen” as a mystic of any kind but he is often as obscure as any of them. This obscurity, I believe, is why Paul and the apostles misunderstood him in anticipating the imminent arrival of the second coming. More importantly, it may be the solution to Paul’s lament, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12).

The idea of heaven as the universal storehouse of love does not have to be true any more than any other vision of an afterlife or any other myth is true. The value of narrative lies in its ability to engage the higher powers of the mind: empathy, imagination, creativity and, most importantly, our moral sense. It will never appeal to those religionists seeking dominion over others, those to whom power is the greatest good. But the idea that love is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Point Omega,” the supreme consciousness toward which our lives seem somehow directed can inspire us and give us great delight.

Notes

1. The book by the boy’s father, Todd Burpo, published by Thomas Nelson, is No. 1 on the New York Times paperback and e-books non-fiction lists for June 11, 2011.

2. Biblical quotations are from the New International Version®. Copyright © 1984 by the International Bible Society and available online at biblegateway.com.

3. Matthew 5:43 quotes Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount as saying, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’” However, nowhere in the Old Testament are the Jews explicitly instructed to hate their enemies and nowhere are they told to love them. But it seems reasonable to infer the former from the Lex Talionis of Leviticus 24:19-20: “Anyone who injures their neighbor is to be injured in the same manner: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” God often intervened to help the Israelis in battle (e.g., Joshua 10) and the custom was to leave no enemy alive even after the battle was won.

4. In fact, most of these are technically similes beginning with such phrases as “The kingdom of heaven is like…”