‘It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!’
C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle
When religion is discussed in the modern world, one of the features that is rarely mentioned is heaven. Heaven has little room in the public debates between atheists and the religions, and is rarely even a part of Christian apologetics. Occasionally, at nonreligious funerals phrases like “they’re looking down on us” or “they’re with the angels” are said in passing, but these seem not to represent sincere or meaningful belief. We seem to find the idea of heaven too silly, too cliched, too beyond our imagination. Instant gratification is an ordinary part of modern life, and the idea that heaven is what we want has long since come to be ridiculous, since besides the disatisfaction of time and ageing and the burden of mundane life, want can easily be temporarily sated. Heaven that is just gratification without end sounds pretty uninteresting, if not terrifying.
Then there is the idea of heaven often somewhat accidentally instilled in the religious. I remember growing up in church and imagining the idea of heaven to be something like an eternal Christian worship festival or church service, full of cloying music, that irritating hand waving and the general feeling of wondering how long before it’s over and you can go home to all the other stuff you’d rather be doing.
Then there is the fact that in an age of cynicism, believing anything you might actually want or desire to be true immediately disqualifies it. If you want it to be true then you must be deluding yourself, and such is the domain of the childish and the credulous, something we in the materialist modern world believe ourselves to have thoroughly grown out of.
But since heaven must be one of the motivating principles in Christian faith, this is a sorry state. The jewel of Christian hope in our time is nothing more than a tawdry cliche, something we can barely imagine; and what we can imagine is pretty uninspiring, dull.
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