So, I admit it, I was distracted by "The Hunger Games" for a few days and just got back to "Love Wins" and Rob's chapter on heaven. His chapter on heaven is progressive but certainly not heretical (it is also long). Rob Bell states that "Jesus affirmed heaven as a real place, space, and dimension of God’s creation, where God’s will and only God’s will is done. On earth, lots of wills are done…and so heaven and earth at present are not one. Jesus taught that someday, heaven and earth would be one. The day when God’s will would be done on earth as it is in heaven" (42-43). This is a Revelation 21 picture of the New Jerusalem coming down and being on the earth made new. Nothing new or heretical here – pretty traditional actually.
Rob does challenge some of the prevailing myths about heaven. He says there will not be any mansions (at least in the way we on earth view mansions) or streets of gold or star-studded golden crowns that we wear forever (43-44). He suggests that these man-made images of heaven are sort of like Beverly Hills without the smog – very static – and prone to getting old. The heaven that Rob is suggesting Jesus is talking about is dynamic and changing and beyond our comprehension. I’m o.k. with all of that. I’d like God to be able to blow my mind. If God’s heaven is just what I imagine, even at my best, then it is a pretty searing indictment of what God is capable of at his best or probably of how I limit God and place him in such a human box.
Rob says heaven isn't limited to the dimensions we currently experience and therefore it is beyond our pathetic attempts to control. Rob also suggests that beyond our attempts to control what heaven is like, we also attempt to control who gets in, or what the criteria for getting in will be. He suggests that we never really stop to think about what is really important: How intimately the life we live on this earth is connected with the life we will live in the "age to come" as Rob refers to eternity. Rather than endless dabates about "who" or "how" we need to focus on what is really important - how to live our lives down here in such a way that we are prepared to experience the next reality - the age to come.
Rob writes "when Jesus tells the rich man that if he sells everything and gives to the poor he will have rewards, Jesus is promising that man that receiving the peace of God now, finding gratitude for what he does have, and sharing it with those who need it will create in him all the more capacity for joy in the world to come" (44). Wow.
Rob continues "it often appears that those who talk the most about going to heaven when you die talk the least about bringing heaven to earth right now. At the same time, it often appears that those who talk the most about relieving suffering now talk the least about heaven when we die" (45).
Rob is pretty insistent on making the point that heaven is not some place far away, a place disconnected from anything we know or experience now, but rather that heaven on earth (both now and in the future) is the point of Jesus' life and teaching.
As if to make this point even stronger, Rob writes "it is very common to hear talk about heaven framed in terms of who “gets in” or how to “get in.” What we find Jesus teaching, over and over and over again, is that he’s interested in our hearts being transformed, so that we can actually handle heaven. To paint heaven as bliss, peace, and endless joy is nice, but it raises the question: how many of us could handle it as we are today" (50)? This makes me want to have my heart transformed so that I can handle heaven. This is about far more than just going to heaven. This is about understanding heaven. How can we want to go somewhere we can't understand? Now, to be fair, traditional teaching, and the Bible too, do suggest that "no eye has seen and no ear has heard the glory that God has prepared for us." Yet, Rob seems to think that this refers to the fact that we don't experience everything God has for us to experience NOW. That if we simply lived the way God wants us to live now, we would be able to see and hear and understand (at least in part) the glory that God has planned for us in the age to come.
It also makes me realize why so many people think heaven will be boring…because they can't wrap their heads around a concept of heaven that isn't harps and clouds and endless choirs - which does sound really boring.
This is as great quote from Rob. "Eternal life is less about a kind of time that starts when we die, and more about a quality and vitality of life lived now in connection to God. Eternal life doesn’t start when we die: it starts now. It’s not about a life that begins at death; it’s about experiencing the kind of life now that can endure and survive even death" (59). I think this is the kind of stuff that makes conservatives and traditionalists (and republicans) cringe because it sounds like some sort of new-age hippy love fest where we love the planet so much we end up making it a communist utopia and then (in their thinking) we don’t need a traditional type of heaven. I don't think this is what Rob is implying at all. I think Rob is simply trying to open our minds to a bigger (and better) understanding of all the limitless possibilities that heaven can entail. This isn't a traditional heaven - it's a bigger one.
This is how Rob ends this chapter. "How would I summarize all that Jesus teaches about heaven? There’s a heaven now, somewhere else. There’s a heaven here, sometime else. And then there’s Jesus’ invitation to heaven here and now, in this moment, in this place" (62).
Not at all heretical – certainly nothing to be afraid of or to make people go on talk shows and denounce Rob as a heretic (ala Franklin Graham). At the end of this chapter, Rob simply challenges traditional views of heaven with a viewpoint that is both Biblical and progressive - exactly what Jesus was in his day - Biblical and progressive.
Tomorrow I start Rob's chapter on hell. In the mean time, I'm going to spend some time meditating on a heaven that defies all my earthly expectations, and yet, at the same time, embraces and expands on them and turns them into a perfect reality that can begin today. Experiencing a taste of heaven on earth today sounds good to me.
