A Renewed Vision for Daily Living
By Nathan L.K. Bierma
By Nathan L.K. Bierma
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Lewis Smedes once asked a room full of people how many of them wanted to go to heaven. Everyone raised their hands. Then he asked how many of them wanted to go to heaven that very day. A couple of people cautiously raised their hands, nervously looking around to see if they were alone. They were. Would you have raised your hand the second time? Would you want to go to heaven today, to experience heavenly existence before the sun sets? And would you want to stay? Heaven is an odd element of the Christian faith. We profess it to be eternally important and then live as though it doesn’t exist. We are runners who fear the finish line. We go through life with little sense of what heaven will be like, and less sense of why we would want to live there. We carry on with our lives, fixated on the here and now, oblivious to the there and then. The possibility of thinking about heaven on a daily basis, much less hoping for it to come, is washed away in the torrent of the details of daily life. When you step back for a second and think about it, this is strange way to live. Heaven is so vast, so bright, so boundlessly beautiful, it is a wonder we do not let our mind wander into its mysteries more often, and let its promise flood into the most mundane moments of our lives. It is as though we live by an ocean, always wondering what it would be like to swim but settling for a dip in the bathtub. Why are we so shy? Think of it, says Philip Yancey, as a math problem. “Although percentages don’t apply to heaven, assume for the sake of argument that 99 percent of our existence will take place in heaven,” he writes. “Isn’t it bizarre that we simply ignore heaven, acting as if it doesn’t matter?” We are indeed one percent people. In fact, the heaven percentage is higher, since the afterlife is infinite and our current world is an infinitesimal blip on the cosmic timeline. Isn’t it backwards, then, how much we concentrate on our tiny little one percent? The other 99 may as well be a dream. Each morning on the streets of Chicago, I see people on a silent march from here to there, keeping pace with the ticking of an unseen clock. A steady stream of people fills the subway—old bankers with briefcases, young women in business suits, weary students clutching bookbags, glazed-eyed teenagers with headphones ramming noise through their heads. I mix among them all and we march up the stairs of the subway station in silence, our feet pounding a rhythm on the stone stairs. Each of us is following some small destiny—the personal drama of a job to be done, classes to take, people to meet, accomplishments to achieve, failures to endure, all wrapped into the space of today. As we step together, none of us marchers knows the destiny of the next, and that’s how we keep it, continuing on in silence. We acknowledge each other without warmth, march without passion, and proceed to live without inspiration. Something seems to be missing. “You can tell,” wrote the Chicago Tribune, “by the glum faces of the folks gobbling lunch at their desks, the ones morosely leaning against the coffee machine wondering how to get everything done by tonight, the walking workplace wounded, the folks who sit strangely hushed as they ride home, bone-tired, soul deflated, job not done, more of the same on the horizon.” Our society whirs on the motor of a small dream: infinite technological progress that will bring about earthly bliss. But our march continues in despond, this bliss ever delayed, the purpose of our march ever fuzzier. Our bargain with the promise of a technological society, writes Juliet Schor, was a bust. Our commitment to capitalism was supposed to buy us time, buy us leisure, buy us balance, and most of all, buy us happiness. But we are empty. We march so hard for this small promise, we have forgotten the happier life it was supposed to bring about. Indeed, while American society’s productivity—its marketed goods and services—has more than doubled in the last 50 years, Schor writes, our workload only gets heavier; each year, we work an additional nine hours. With every new technological advance, it seems we need more time to use it. With every innovation in communications, it’s harder to actually communicate with people. Leisure, writes Schor, is a “conspicuous casualty of prosperity.” But if prosperity is no longer our goal,
and leisure is not our ultimate destiny, why do we keep marching? What
is the engine that drives us day after day?
The promise of heaven exists to give us hope, to place our lives in a larger context, to fix us to a firmer foundation than the thin promises of modern society. So why is hope for the afterlife not a heartfelt reality in our daily walk? Isn’t it fundamentally inappropriate to ignore eternity, to live as though it isn’t coming anytime soon—or if even if it does, that it doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re doing now? In North America today, we have a crisis, a crisis that reaches to all the areas of our lives and undermines our ability to be satisfied and inspired beyond superficial and sentimental ways. We have a crisis of hope. We live without a deep sense of ultimate meaning, broader purpose or eternal destiny. We proceed with our daily duties without a vision for why we’re doing them. We go to school, start a business, grow a family, buy a house, take a job, go to church. All compose our personal narrative. But rarely do we stop to consider the role of our activities in a larger story. We have a shortage of hope. We may have desires and cravings for food, sex, and other pleasures. We have allegiances to sports teams or political causes and would like to see their success. We may have optimism about our future at school or the office. We live with anticipation of future milestones in our lives—graduations, weddings, births, anniversaries. But rarely do we know hope in the richest sense of the word– the combination of the assurance of God’s ultimate triumph over evil, the comfort of an eventual eternal misery-free existence, and the longing for Christ to come again to bring this about. We are not filled with a visceral, vital hope for heaven that transforms our daily living and seeps into every crevice of our existence. “If it is hope that maintains and upholds faith and keeps it moving on, if it is hope that draws the believer into the life of love,” writes Jurgen Moltmann in Theology of Hope, “then it will also be hope that is the mobilizing and driving force of faith’s thinking, of its knowledge of, and reflections on, human nature, history, and society.” The lack of hope, Moltmann says, a sin—an evil rejection of the abundance God’s promise, a timidity to live with his passion, purpose and direction. Or, as Lewis Smedes once said more bluntly, “The person without hope is inwardly dead.” But in our crisis of hope, we focus only on what is immediately in front of us. Sunday morning may jolt us into a larger awareness about heaven once in a while, but have little trouble retreating to our ordinary routines. We do not live with a constant sense of anticipation, with the fascinating idea that this world is only a brief prologue to the one to come. Hope is not our constant context. Part of the problem is that we associate
going to heaven with death. Heaven happens to old people when they wither
and die, we think, or to younger people when their lives are tragically
cut short. In a society that worships youth and fears aging, death is defeat,
and heaven is meager compensation.
The truth is, we cannot know what heaven will be like, and we cannot know when it will come. But if we are to live with inspiration, we must know what heaven has to do with the lives we live, the natural world we encounter, the society we help compose, and the timeline human existence follows like a ribbon into eternity. We must rediscover what heaven is and how it is relevant to every area of life—every square inch of the world, as Abraham Kuyper put it. Without this connection, our empty march will continue, our crisis of hope will go on without end. I write to Western Christians, those who find themselves in a peculiar place in history. We live under the most powerful government in the world in an era of unprecedented prosperity, with a quality of life that makes medieval kings look like peasants. And yet we are empty—numbed, perhaps, by the wealth and comfort around us, but depressed as well, no strangers to the despair of personal failure, spiritual disorientation, and the evil done to us by others. And so, in the midst of the proudest modern society humankind has ever brought about, we have an alarming deficit of hope. We have a hope crisis, as others have a food crisis. We are so spiritually empty that the impoverished nations we sent missionaries to for centuries, in Asia and Africa, have caught spiritual fire and are now sending their own missionaries back to North America. What does it mean to live as a Christian in such surroundings? What does it mean for an institution like the church to exist and to bless a continent blighted by this crisis of hope? How do we rediscover what hope is, and begin to hope again? How do we tether ourselves to hope’s anchor, the promise of eternal heaven? How do we lose our shyness about talking about heaven and gain the confidence to know enough about it to actually want it? How do we rediscover what the earth we inhabit and the things we produce in its midst have to do with a larger cosmic story, of which God pens every stroke? How can we come to the point where we begin to sketch a basic framework that encompasses our lives, our Earth and society, history and the future, and from this new framework find broader meaning and hope for heaven in the smallest moments of our lives? These questions have consumed me since, after being raised in a religious home and church-laced community, I first encountered the truth of the biblical picture of heaven in high school, in a book called When the Kings Come Marching In by Richard Mouw. His interpretation of the prophet Isaiah’s vision of the heavenly city so altered my assumptions and ignited my thinking that I lost some of my shyness about the subject. I have since come to believe Christians are missing out on a sense of purpose by having too small and distant a view of heaven. Although it would be foolish to either try to improve on Dr. Mouw’s work or demand he defend my digressions from it, I do hope to call Christians to take a new look at Dr. Mouw’s ideas by tying them more directly to John’s vision of heaven in Revelation 21, and do so from the standpoint of a journalist in a major metropolis. For many Christians, adjusting our view of heaven means undoing some heavily enforced learning. But any small measure of success opens the possibility of living with a new sense of hope and meaning. Ultimately, heaven remains a mystery, a foreign realm that has no natives save for the angels and the consuming presence of God. In fact, our crisis of hope makes a lot of sense for the reasons I will go on to describe. But for all the good reasons we don’t hope for heaven, there are even better reasons why we should. Most of the people marching out of the Chicago subway tunnel beside me carry with them a daily planner, a written record of the events, people, and appointments that will compose the day in front of them, each square containing its own writings, page after page filled with squares. The result is a terse journal of daily life, a serial composition of a segmented personal narrative. But what is the larger story these narratives compose? "The vision of the last square on our date books,” writes Lewis Smedes, “sheds its light on all the squares in between. We live in hope and hope lights up our lives. We see each square differently because we see that last one as the entrée to a new earth. In a way, I know it is all right with me, now, when everything may be wrong, because I hope that everything is going to be all right for all of us in God’s new earth of the future.” In the series finale of the ABC sit-com “SportsNight,” Dana, a television producer, takes her worries to a Manhattan bar, where she encounters a friendly stranger. The stranger listens to Dana spill her fears, and then he says: “Dana, I’m what the world considers to be a phenomenally successful man, and I’ve failed much more than I’ve succeeded. But each time I fail I get my people together, and I say, ‘Where are we going?’ And it starts to get better, and that’s what you should do.” His company, she learns, is called Quo Vadimus, which is Latin for “Where are we going?” If we are to see a new vision and find hope in the midst of all the squares of our datebooks, we need to take a new look at what exactly the last square will bring, at where we are going. To give meaning to the current drama of history, we need a healthy new look at how history ends; to rediscover the meaning of the present, we need to unlock the secrets of the future. Somehow, some way, we need to find a way to hope for heaven. Heads In The Clouds
Each year, thousands of people make this
pilgrimage to the farm of Don Lansing, where the movie Field of Dreams
was filmed. Lansing maintains the field for the crowds who double Dyersville’s
population on a daily basis. Many of them run around the bases and snap
photographs of his famous house.
When Shoeless Joe first appears in the movie, his eyes widen as he surveys the pristine scene of the emerald field, the sand pulsing through it like a vein, the lightposts overhead shining down with the force of the sun. “Hey,” Jackson shouts to Ray after running back to the corn stalks. “Is this heaven?” “No,” Ray chuckles. “It’s Iowa.” Ray’s reprimand aside, the idyllic setting of this magical baseball field contributes to our imagination of what heaven will be like. The scene of baseball players playing their beloved game on their own field, apart from time, without a care in the world amid the peace of the tranquil Iowan plain, makes Shoeless Joe’s question eerily resonant for the thousands of tourists who travel to the field each summer. They seem to be moved by an encounter with an unknown world—even though the place is only, after all, a movie set. But the trip can be transfixing for some visitors. “It was real sentimental to walk onto that field,” one told sportswriter Steve Rushin. “I did what everyone does … and stepped out of the corn.” Because we know so little about what heaven will be like, we seize upon poignant images and icons like the Field of Dreams farm in Dyersville to give us a hint. We may not think about heaven that much, but when we do, we take our cues from familiar scenes from paintings, movies, and hymns. The scenes that emerge are powerful, giving us a hint of a peaceful but distant place. Our images of heaven are some of the most beautiful dreams known to human beings. One of the most vivid portrayals of heaven on film is another movie about heavenly dreams: What Dreams May Come. When the character played by Robin Williams is killed, his first vision of the afterlife is the living world of the paintings of his wife, an artist. He walks into a picturesque setting that resembles her paintings of glorious landscapes and awesome vistas. He dives off a steep cliff, tracing a ribbon of waterfall down thousands of feet of sheer rock, and lands comfortably in a flower bed. As he walks, the grass and flowers beneath him squish and smear; they are made of his wife’s paint. He laughs as he turns and surveys a world that stretches as far as the eye can see, to an elusive horizon beyond canyons and lakes, as the sun streams down all around him. Our own visions of heaven tend to resemble these glorious scenes of nature. Another way we imagine heaven is more flippant: we wish for a place where we get everything we want. Like the ballplayer in Field of Dreams, we envision heaven as the perfect fulfillment of our greatest earthly indulgences. “In the peaceful, prosperous West, visions of heaven are increasingly individualistic,” wrote Newsweek. “Most people continue to think of heaven in terms of what they want.” We may call a Carribean vacation spot a “tropical paradise.” We suppose that if we could play golf all day long, or eat ceaseless supplies of chocolate without a care, or go on vacation and never come back, we would be in “7th heaven,” or on “Cloud Nine.” What may shape our imaginations the most are the most are the sparse portrayals of heaven that come from the Bible. The most common heavenly scene portrayed in art and popular culture is the sight of Saint Peter standing in front of the Pearly Gates, admitting people into heaven. In the comic strip “Frank & Earnest,” the two characters are perched on a puffy cloud before a kindly old Peter, his wings jutting out the back of his white robe and a halo hovering over his forehead. He stands before a podium that bears a thick book while light rays pulse from a grand gate behind him. A sign by the gate reads: “New Arrivals Stop Here For Admissions Processing.” In the comic strip’s punch line, one of the characters pleads, “Don’t ask me any tough questions—I left my brain to Harvard.” In a commercial for a candy bar, people wait in line to pass through a similar checkpoint on an endless cloud against a background of white. One would-be entrant is taking a while with Saint Peter, which prompts a man farther back in the line to shout that they should hurry things along. In an instant the man plunges through the cloud, presumably on his way to hell. (The moral of the ad was to eat a candy bar when you have a long wait.) Sacred hymns spin out our fantastic visions even further. ”By the sea of crystal saints in glory stand, myriads in number drawn from every land. Robed in white apparel, washed in Jesus’ blood, they now reign in heaven with the Lamb of God.” And: “In mansions of glory and endless delight, I’ll ever adore thee in heaven so bright. I’ll sing with a glittering crown on my brow, if ever I loved thee, my Jesus, ‘tis now.” All of these fantasies may leave us with a heartwarming but rather vague sense of the afterlife. Heaven, we gather, is an airy and serene existence among clouds and meadows, where we wear robes and strum harps. It is peaceful and quiet. Maybe too quiet. So mesmerizing are these images that we ignore the flaws in the ways we incorporate them. The first problem is that the biblical images we use are actually metaphors for beauty, happiness, and wholeness that can be distracting when taken too literally. The clouds, the meadows, the harps—all of these are meant only to hint at and begin to convey the perfect gladness of being with God in heaven. Although we have every reason to believe that heaven will contain natural beauty and music, our images are not actual polaroids of heavenly locations. So we should not get carried away. The idea of “pearly gates,” for example, comes from the book of Revelation, where heaven is portrayed as having twelve gates, one for each of the twelve apostles. Each base of the gate is made of a different kind of precious stone, and the gate itself is made of pearls. Many of the other fixtures—such as angels, robes and harps—also come from the last chapter of the Bible. But we must be careful how much we embellish these heavenly metaphors in our movies, cartoons, hymns, and our own imaginations. We must realize that, by themselves, our pictures cannot convey such a perfect existence, as C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity: Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. … Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs. The second problem with the way these images dominate our imaginations is that they are not much to hope for. The heaven they foreshadow may seem like a nice vacation—who wouldn’t want to lounge around in a tropical paradise after a hard week at the office?—but they do not give us a heavenly promise we can seize and implant in our hearts, changing our lives. They may not be all that welcoming as a vision of the unending realm of our permanent residence. Is heaven just a nice place to visit, or would we really want to live there? The result is our current crisis of hope: we don’t hope for heaven because we don’t know what heaven will be like, or why we would want to go there. The heavenly pictures of clouds and harps are benign and remote. They sap the power of heaven and lead us to abandon any attempt to derive daily meaning from it for our current lives. But heaven is not a never-never land skirted by clouds. When we realize this, and when we re-imagine what heaven will actually be like, we can begin to truly hope for heaven rather than keep our anxious distance from it. Revising our heavenly visions by trying to dig into what those biblical metaphors mean can allow us to live with a vivid, meaningful glimpse of the afterlife that is relevant to our present lives and inspires us on a daily basis. Replacing our old portraits of pearly gates, and forming a new framework for this life and the next, can lead us to hope for heaven. False Alarms
“RAPTURE,” read the flyer across the top in bold black capital letters. “OCTOBER 28, 1992 JESUS IS COMING IN THE AIR.” Beneath this banner headline was a Bible verse: “Fear God, and give Him glory, because the hour of His judgment has come. (Rev. 14:7).” The banner’s “TIMETABLE OF RAPTURE” pinned down the minute of doomsday by time zone. Above it, a chaotic picture of a cityscape portrayed the expected scene. Cars lay askew along the side of freeways, their drivers, looking like white tadpoles swimming upstream, floated heavenward with their arms outstretched. The shimmering figure of Jesus appeared above it all as a magnet drawing the raptured souls to the sky. The flyer was distributed by the Mission for the Coming Days in Flushing, N.Y, and bore the organization’s logo and phone number. But on October 29, 1992, the world kept spinning. People went about their business as they had on the 28th, and the 27th before that. The Rapture warning was a false alarm. Life on earth went on. It’s hard to hope for heaven because we don’t know when heaven will come. It could come in a second, it could come in an hour, it could come in a millennium or three. So heaven is a mystery simply for its time of arrival. The trumpet could blast at any minute, or it could be silent for another century. Jesus could return before you finish this chapter, before the week is out, or long after you’re cold in the grave. What an awkward way to live. Our eternal destiny, the Bible tells us, will come “like a thief in the night,” which sounds more like a threat than a promise. In a soccer match, the clock ticks steadily until it reaches 90 minutes. At that point the referee takes out his own personal stopwatch and counts the minutes he estimates were lost at non-competitive moments in the match. It may be two minutes; it may be four or more. The players proceed to play with no precise notion of when they will finish. Unlike basketball players, who keep an eye on the ticking clock as the final seconds wind down so that they can try a winning shot at the final buzzer, the soccer players play in a strange state of limbo. Then, all of the sudden, the referee blows the whistle, and the match is over, just like that. Now imagine that the entire match is played by the referee’s watch. Imagine that the players have no concept of temporal dimensions for the entirety of their playing time. The referee could blow the whistle seven minutes after kickoff, or midway through the second half. No possibility is more likely than any other. What would it be like to play such an uneasy game? Would you run faster throughout the second half, as your anticipation of the end grew more acute? Or would you run as fast as you could the entire time, unwilling to let the whistle blow during anything but your fiercest effort? This is the puzzle that surrounds us as we live. We have no concept of when time will run out, when the world will halt, when Jesus will return and interrupt life like a clap of thunder. We conceive of terms like “history” and “the future” while trying to ignore the larger book in which they are defined—a story that has been churning for thousands of years but will surely stop on a dime. We keep clocks, watches, and timepieces all around us, but remain oblivious to the apocalyptic nature of time itself. We find ourselves, in other words, in the same situation as the ten bridal attendants in Jesus’ parable. They went out to wait for the arrival of the bride and groom on the way to their wedding banquet, and each took an oil-burning lamp to help them keep watch. The five wise ones brought extra oil with them to keep handy in case the wait was long. The five foolish ones did not, and ran out of fuel before the bride and groom arrived. But while they were away, getting more oil, the couple came and the banquet began. The five latecomers tried to enter, but they were turned away. “Keep your lamps trimmed and burning,” intones the spiritual. “The time is drawing nigh.” Instead, we are content to live short-sightedly. We choose the most comfortable way to adjust to this odd reality that existence could be suspended at any second—the path of least resistance. We lapse into complacency. We keep it out of our minds. We live without a sense that the Second Coming is near. We live our lives from day to day, following our routines from sunrise to sunset. “’Thy Kingdom come,’ we pray,” says Neal Plantinga, “’but not right away.’” We make plans days and years in advance, without giving the impending trumpet a second thought. After all, “it’s so full of emergency,” Plantinga says. So we try to reach a point of greater stability. And who can blame us? Who can walk around with their heads in the clouds? Who can maintain the pose of the apostles who watched Christ ascend, and were told to wait for him to descend in the same fashion—their heads arched toward the sky? Realistically, if we amble around with our eyes fixed to the heavens, we’ll get sore necks, and we’ll bump into things. As William Willimon put it: “It’s hard to stand on tiptoe for two thousand years.” As we lose our sensations of the coming eternity, says Plantinga, “people settle into a kind of ‘everydayness’ in their faith, and they quit scanning the horizon.” It’s a functional way to maintain our religion, he says, even if it’s not a very powerful one: We don’t deny the big, booming events such as the Second Coming, but we don’t think about them very much either. We’ve still got church and sacraments, after all; we’ve got Scripture and prayer; we’ve still got the golden rule and the Ten Commandments. We’ve got Christian pop music to make us feel right at home in the world. And every week we faithfully spend some of our money and time on kingdom causes. That’s ground-level Christianity, and it’s just enough religion to keep us going The problem is that we’re supposed to not only expect this earth-shattering suddenness, we’re supposed to hope for it. But how can we desire something so impossible to predict? It’s one thing to hope for, say, the birth of a baby, which will happen in roughly nine months, or for graduation, whose month and day are settled upon enrollment, giving relatives enough time to book plane tickets. Even when you suddenly take another job, you don’t vanish from your desk; you give your boss two weeks notice. So if the issue is making heaven a reality in every moment of our daily lives, and avoiding “ground-level Christianity,” we have to wonder: how can we naturally and meaningfully hope for something that will come so suddenly, and yet hasn’t come for hundreds of years? Too many people have
tried to solve this problem by trying to actually crack the case of when
Christ will return. They have produced careful calculations, with impressive
scientific evidence, and formed a timetable for the Second Coming.
In 1836, William Miller published a book that forecasted a Second Coming for 1843. He developed quite a following of people, who are known today as the Seventh Day Adventists. Miller’s followers didn’t lose hope when 1843 came to an end; they set a new date: October 22, 1844. October 23 came to be known as “The Great Disappointment.” Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah’s Witnesses, first predicted an apocalypse for 1873 or 1874. Then he said 1878, and then 1914, then 1918. In 1981, Bill Maupin of Tucson, Arizona, predicted the end of the world would come on June 28, 1982. A reporter asked him what would happen on June 29 if his forecast proved false. “I can’t even answer a question like that,” Maupin said. “Come back and see us on June 29 and we’ll talk about it.” June 28 came and went. A few years later Edward Whisenant sold two million copies of his book, 88 Reasons Why The Rapture Could Be In 1988. He predicted a Second Coming for September 11-13 of that year. One publishing company in Raleigh, North Carolina, was so taken by the book that it closed for the day on the 13th. The 13th came and went. Then a pamphlet prounounced, “In Autumn 1992, Jesus is Coming! In 1999, Human History Will End!” The Mission for the Coming Days poster, with the raptured drivers floating to heaven, was more specific, setting the time as October 28 at 10 in the morning. But of course, 10 a.m., and the rest of the day, came and went. This didn’t deter religious broadcaster Harold Camping, who wrote 1994 and Are You Ready. But New Year’s Eve confetti sprung like Old Faithful in 1995. The Y2K computer scare brought another massive wave of apocalyptic panic. Wrote a Jerusalem reporter in 1999, “Among those who are preparing for the Second Coming are about 100 evangelical North Americans who have moved to apartments on the Mount of Olives, for a close-up view of the prophesied return of Jesus.” New Year’s Day 2000 came and went. Now a new movement is emerging: Exit 2007. All these self-anointed prophets seem to boldly ignore Christ’s own words that the time of his arrival is a bona fide unsolved mystery. “Even the Son of Man does not know the day or the hour” (Mathew 24:36). These prophets are trying to win at a game in which Christ himself has agreed not to play. Of course, they may claim that although we can’t know the day or the hour, we can know the month and the week, but this violates the spirit, if not the letter, of Christ’s words. These prophets have somehow found a greater emphasis in the Bible on the need to decipher prophecy than to wait in mystery. After a while we become mindful of the story of the boy crying wolf. As they story goes, the town appointed a boy to keep watch for wolf attacks on the town’s flocks of sheep. One night, out of boredom, he awoke everyone with a desperate cry of “Wolf!” And the townspeople ran around in a panic, scrambling to protect their sheep. But there was no wolf. The second night, bored again, the boy did the same thing. But there was no wolf. The third night, a wolf actually came. But when the boy cried out “Wolf!” the townspeople were wise to what they thought was another game, and so they ignored the boy and stayed in bed. The wolf had its fill of lamb chops. Although we must give end-time prophets the benefit of the doubt about their intentions, and not automatically assume that they are making a ruckus and getting people panicked simply for their own amusement or profit, we must also acknowledge the cumulative effect of their serial errors. Every time a rapture alert comes and goes, we pay less attention the next time. It’s why few people are holding their breath for Exit 2007. After so many false alarms, we are no longer alarmed at all. Plantinga says the majority of Christians respond to such fantastic guessing games by piously distancing themselves from any mention of the book of Revelation. So embarrassed are we by those who “turn apocalyptic speculation into a billion-dollar industry,” that we begin to neglect the apocalypse altogether. After all, this talk of the future is so exotic, but religion can be more predictable. “We’ve got eschatological chastity,” says Plantinga. “We’ve got restraint.” And we’re proud of it. But we lose hope. We let time go by and push the surprise ending out of our minds. We don’t know when heaven will come, so we let it go. Our crisis of hope gets worse. The truth is, we can do nothing to eliminate the crisis’ two major causes—that we don’t know what heaven will be like and we don’t know when it will come. Although this book is about heaven, it will not—cannot—disclose what exactly heavenly living will be like, or when it will begin. Christ said it himself: it’s unknown. But even though we need not play such guessing games, it is a grievous mistake to become callous to Christ’s return altogether. “Let me ask,” says Plantinga, “Is it better to ignore the Lord’s return? Is it better to live with a low ceiling over our lives, and no room there for the incoming Lord?” As many great preachers have said, the signs of the times do not tell us when Jesus is coming back, but they tell us that he is coming back. And they do so with a forcefulness that condemns the complacent act of simply pushing the promise of Christ’s return out of our minds. “Ground-level Christianity” won’t cut it. We need to lose some of our “eschatological chastity” and trade it in for some eschatological curiosity—some healthy imagination about the coming of heaven and what it means for life now. Until we take our ancient pictures of heaven down from the shelf and dust them off, we will not have the chance to recapture them as inspiring glimpses of a world towards which this one is building. We will not correct our crisis of hope. But by re-examining what the biblical message about heaven really is, and painting a new picture of what it means for daily life, hope can be reborn. |
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