Here and Now - a Review of Chapter two of Love Wins

Love Wins – Chapter Two – Here and Now

In heaven everything is fine.
In heaven everything is fine.
In heaven everything is fine.
You got your good things,
And I got mine.

- The Lady in the Radiator

This strange song from David Lynch’s 1977 surreal horror movie Eraserhead is one of my favorite little songs – especially as recorded by the Pixies.  And, though I don’t think many of my Christian friends would endorse this movie or this song, I think it accurately describes what many Christians believe about heaven.

The dominant cultural associations and
misunderstandings about heaven has been at work for
so long, it’s almost automatic for many to think of heaven
as ethereal, intangible, esoteric, and immaterial.

Floaty, dreamy, hazy,
Somewhere else.
People in white robes with perfect hair floating by on
clouds, singing in perfect pitch. ( Love Wins pg. 56 -7)

Heaven is – or will be – that perfect place of perfect rest and perfect peace.  Everything is perfect. And everything is wonderful.  And nothing ever happens.

I think that it’s strange that so much of the outcry and outrage surrounding Rob Bell’s newest book, Love Wins, is about his alleged denial of hell as place of eternal conscious torment.  I haven’t read as far as the chapter on hell yet (It’s the next one) but the chapter on heaven should have provoked some outrage as well, I think.

A lot of what passes for Christian teaching and evangelism is about “going to heaven when we die,” and as Bell points out, the bible says nothing (or very little) about us “going to heaven.”  That’s not what it’s all about. Not at all.

In fact.  It’s just the reverse. Heaven has come to us.

Heaven is in the here and now… or it is if we make it so.  The founder of the Salvation Army, General William Booth, once said that “making heaven on earth is our business.”  (You can actually hear him say it here.)  But if that’s the case, why are always talking about going to heaven “some glad morning when this life is over”?

Heaven is the presence of God. Heaven is the presence of Christ and where two or three are gathered in his name, he’s there with them, with us.  This is heaven. When we share the love of God with each other it’s heaven.  When we share the compassion of Christ with the poor it’s heaven.  Heaven here and now.

So why, you will assuredly ask, does it not look very much like heaven?  Why do we still hurt and cry and suffer?  There should be no tears in heaven, right? Doesn’t it say that God will wipe away our tears?

And you’re right. It doesn’t look very much like heaven around here sometimes.  And I think that part of the reason for that is that so many Christians are still thinking of heaven as somewhere else eventually.  They’re still hoping for God to push the EJECT button and for us to be raptured away from this dung heap.  Too many people have a Christianity of escapism. 

But even if we accept the idea of a transformative heaven in the here and now, there is still going to be hurt and tears.  Yep.  And the wonderful thing – WONDERFUL thing  - is that God is here with us to comfort us and to wipe those tears away, each time.

There is more to heaven, of course, especially in the life after this life (which is better than saying life after death…) but if we fail to recognize the heaven that is here and now – if we fail to create heaven on earth in the here and now, how ready will we be for that heaven?