I think it goes without saying that the idea of going to heaven when we die is one of the most common beliefs among Christians today. The belief in heaven has comforted so many Christians over time. It offers hope that when a loved one dies that person will be with God in heaven forever. The idea certainly has provided preachers with adequate fodder for funeral sermons for sure.
The belief in a heaven, a place detached from earth awaiting those who are saved, is so engrained in our Protestant belief system that to question its Biblical validity would be considered heretical because it has become our Christian hope.
For most of my Christian life I never thought it necessary to question the existence of such a heavenly place reserved for Christians only once they die. I never thought to ask whether such a place was Biblical or whether Jesus himself believed in such a place.
Well I finally learned that the belief in a heaven detached from earth is more a pagan idea than it is Biblical. Allow me to explain:
First, the idea that there is some such heavenly dwelling place for departed spirits was inspired more by Plato than Jesus. It was the brilliant Greek Philosopher Plato who lived about four hundred years before Jesus who taught that human souls once released from their physical bodies (prisons) floated off to heaven as it were, a place that was separate from all earthly and bodily reality.
Later a younger contemporary of St. Paul, the philosopher and biographer Plutarch, was influenced by Plato and helped inspire Plato’s ideas about this disembodied heavenly place into early Christian thought. St. Augustine for example, the brilliant 4th century theologian who was also influenced by Platonic ideas helped spread this notion of a spiritualized (disembodied) version of heaven. A version of heaven we have come to believe as soundly Biblical.
Second, but when we read the Gospels and the New Testament letters, especially those written by St. Paul, we get an entirely different version of heaven, one that is organically connected to earth by virtue of resurrection. In other words, according to much of the New Testament witness and Old Testament hope, heaven is not where we go when we die, but what has already been revealed in principle as God’s reign among us (kingdom of God or kingdom of heaven).
So the point I am making is that Jesus never talked about “going to heaven” when we die but he did talk quite a lot about God’s kingdom coming to us in the here and now. For Jesus heaven is the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven in our midst.
I realize that this is a big pill for some to swallow but before you declare me a heretic please keep reading. The real Biblical version of heaven is much more than we could ever imagine and more to hope for than we would have ever thought.
Growing up and well into my adult life as a Christian heaven was this place where the disembodied me would go when I die. It was a place populated with departed spirits (souls) from human bodies. I would be floating around up there somewhere among my family and friends who departed before me.
Unfortunately this was Plato’s heaven rather than Jesus’s kingdom.
The Bible is fairly clear and once you see it, that heaven is what comes to us and not where we go when we die, it is impossible to unsee it. It was the belief of the New Testament writers, such as Paul, that Jesus inaugurated God’s kingdom (heaven) with his life, death, and resurrection. In other words, Jesus actually brought heaven to us and continues to be a reality we already experience, though not in all its completeness or fullness.
In his letter to the Ephesians St. Paul writes:
In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth (also check out Romans 8:18-25).
For the Apostle Paul the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus set in motion God’s plan to untie and transform all things in heaven and on earth. Resurrection would be his method of choice. In other words, our hope is not in Plato’s heaven but in Jesus’s resurrection.
Our hope is in the "Age to Come" which is how the Biblical writers referred to heaven. Someday God is going to unite this Age with the Age to Come, a vision captured in Isaiah 11 and other Old Testament prophets.
Finally in John’s Revelation it all comes to fruition:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”
Plato envisioned humans drifting off in disembodied forms to some heavenly location far removed from earth and human life, as we know it today. Jesus and Paul and other Biblical writers envisioned heaven as the place where God unites all things in what the Bible refers to as the "kingdom of God or heaven" or the "Age to Come."
Our hope is not to go to heaven when we die, rather our hope is resurrection, which includes the transformation of all of God’s creation. So what happens when we die? Paul says we will be "absent from the body and present with the Lord." Which is to say that God will care for us in the meantime between death and resurrection, but not in Plato's heaven.
Now we can sing the old hymn with a better understanding:
“Heaven came down and glory filled my soul . . . ”
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