Truth Unites - Is Heaven BORING and WEIRD? Response to Mindshift

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

Gavin Ortlund responds to Brandon from the channel Mindshift about whether the Christian doctrine of heaven is boring and weird. Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

Brandon from the channel Mind Shift has a video out critiquing the Christian idea of heaven, and he argues that heaven is problematic, potentially even immoral, and incoherent. But then let's talk about heaven. Is heaven so great? Is heaven moral? What are the problems with this paradise? And there are many. And then what does it mean? What does it mean? It means nothing. I'm blown away that there are not more people constantly, constantly deconverting because of the very concept of heaven. Never mind hell. And I want to work through five misunderstandings of heaven that I think are reflected in his critique. The goal, though, is not really to single out Brandon.

These are representative of how many people think about heaven, including many Christians. We Christians have a lot of blame for misunderstandings out there about heaven because we've often taught or spoke about heaven inaccurately. The first is over literalism. So the Bible is full of non-literal language to describe heaven. But at the start of his video, Brandon seems to take some of this language literally, for example, the language about streets of gold. Most people think that they will be in heaven, in some physical sense. That we will be able to recognize other people, that there will be food,

that there will be places, that there are streets made of gold, that these are physical, tangible realities. We are not just floating in a cloud in perfect bliss. We are actually doing things, mainly worshiping God. But there are feasts where we will eat. Supposedly we will have mansions, we will have our crowns, all of these other very materialist things. materialist things, like how unimportant would gold be in heaven, right? What would give it its value?

It wouldn't be rare. Everything is made of gold there. Are we supposed to remember from our earthly experience on this one particular planet, even though there's probably life on other planets, that gold was a limited resource here for a period of time that made it valuable? Like how man-made is this concept? Now, I think it's right that heaven will be physical, but we need to be careful about taking the specific physical descriptions like streets of gold in a literal way. C.S. Lewis addressed this concern in mere Christianity. Quote, there is no need to be worried about facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of heaven ridiculous by saying they do not want to spend eternity playing harps.

The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grownups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery, harps, crowns, gold, etc., is of course a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. And then Lewis goes on to explain some of the particular meaning of some of this particular imagery. 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. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity

share his splendor and power and joy. 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 we are to lay eggs. Now, Brandon, Lewis's rhetoric there is very sharp. I don't, I don't mean to apply that to Brandon. I'm sure Brandon is probably well aware of that. I'm not trying to pick out little snippets of his video to pick on him. I'm just trying to pick out some comments that he made that are representative of common ideas out there, and so they're worth addressing to get clarification. A second misunderstanding of heaven is related, and that's, will heaven be like an

eternal worship service? Many of us were told about the worship part, that we would endlessly eternally be worshiping God. Now, maybe some of that are correlating worship incorrectly, and we thought of the praise and worship parts of service at church, and we thought, oh, I don't want to do that forever. Maybe worshiping God is just living perfectly. Maybe that brings glory to him. But the actual descriptions we get of worship are closer to the first one. They are about songs that are saying, instruments that are played, our bodily position of being bent over and bowed down, etc. Now, it's true that we have descriptions of singing in heaven, like Revelation 5, 9 through 10, but Brandon seems to be asserting that our entire existence in heaven is only singing or shouting

praise. And your entire existence is simply to shout over and over, holy, holy is the name? Is that something you would willingly sign up for? Now, again, perhaps Brandon is just thinking in one way that heaven can be conceptualized here. Let's not hold him to that one statement. But again, this is how a lot of people think. In fact, I watched his video, and I'm responding because I enjoyed watching it. I think he's giving a thoughtful case, and I love thinking about the doctrine of heaven, so I hope this helps people out there. I'm really not, I'm really speaking to people out there who have these misconceptions. For example, I watched this video, I scrolled down, I read the first comment. And it said, at the time of watching, it said this, as an introvert with

ADHD, the thought of being somewhere surrounded by other inhabitants of the afterlife for eternity is actually my idea of hell. Now, I think this is really unfortunate when people limit heaven to this, or they think of it as a kind of eternal corporate singing event. In a previous video I've done on heaven, I argued that heaven is basically the resurrection of creation. So what happened to Jesus' body on Easter morning, that's going to happen to the universe. that's heaven. Easter is the first fruits or the anticipation of that. In this book, about heaven, really interesting and helpful book, very thorough and biblical. Randy Alcorn argues that in heaven we will have friendship, we will have laughter, we will have culture, we will have books,

we will have technology, we will have trade, we will have sports, we will have dancing, we will have music and drama, there will be storytelling, even argues there will be space travel in heaven. If that sounds ridiculous to you, read the book. His arguments are actually very biblical. But there's also this logical appeal that he's making from what he calls the principle of continuity, and it's basically, why would creation be more interesting and more generous than heaven? Why would reality contract from Genesis 1 to Revelation 21? And what I want to argue is that in support of what he's saying there, this conception of heaven as resurrected creation is consistent with the historic Christian Doctrine of Heaven. This is the burden behind this video. A lot of people have these ideas of

heaven, but they've not really studied like classical Christian theology on this topic. And so, for example, I put out a video on Easter where you can see a little bit more of this, but I'll just give one example here. So Ansel, my favorite theologian back in the 11th century, talks about the joys of heaven, including things like swiftness and freedom of body, as well as things like music, pleasures, wisdom, and friendship. So in heaven, according to Anselm, you can probably run really fast, and you can probably throw a great curveball and so forth. But that leads to a third concern, and this will enable us to develop that a little bit more, and that's the concern of a stagnant heaven. So the concern here is heaven is boring and stagnant because there's no learning or growth

or change there. So if the previous concern, the second one we did, has to do with the nature of worship in heaven. This one has to do with our nature as the worshippers in heaven. And so here's a previous comment from Brandon expanded just a little bit. Really think about if held in and exist at all and someone just told you at the end of your life, here's what happens. You go, you get a new body, you don't feel pain anymore, you don't feel sorrow anymore. You're perfect. You're a perfect being. You can't grow. You can't get better at things. You can't develop a new skill or hobby. You can't improve. And your entire existence is simply to shout over and over. Holy, holy is the name. Is that something you would willingly sign up for?

So you can hear there the claim that to be perfect means no new hobbies or no improvement of skills and so forth. And he uses the image of stagnant water as opposed to dynamic water as a metaphor for this. But on the other hand, we should need small amounts of things not working out or going wrong to be able to enjoy anything. I just imagine heaven being a place of pure stagnation. Think about how gross water. becomes when it sits versus when it flows in the river. You've probably heard the old

adage if you're not growing, you're dying kind of a thing. What is it like to be the exact same level of anything forever? It terrifies me. That sounds like true torture. So I meant to say stagnant water as opposed to like a flowing river or something like that. But I would disagree here. Christianity does deny that there is suffering or sin in heaven, but it doesn't deny that there there's learning and development and change and growth and so forth in heaven. The doctrine of glorification, meaning when we are made perfect, does not confer omniscience onto us, meaning that we become all knowing. When we're united to the divine nature, we see the divine essence, the beatific vision, all the glorious things that Christian theology describes about heaven. It doesn't

mean we're no longer finite, and therefore we are still capable of learning and growing and developing and so forth in heaven. So, you know, think of it like this. In your first five seconds in heaven, after you've been in heaven for five seconds, you should not assume that you'll understand every complicated mathematical theorem, that you will understand the perspectives and experiences of every other person there perfectly, that you'll be intimately familiar with every place that is out there. And therefore, in heaven, that implies you can learn about math. You can get to know someone better. You can travel to a new place and so forth. And that's actually been a historic way of conceptualizing heaven. So, for example, Jonathan Edwards argued that both our knowledge and

our happiness in heaven will be progressive. We will grow in happiness and we will grow in knowledge. And sometimes theologians have spoken about this happy paradox. This is my favorite doctrine to think about. That's why I love to make videos on this. It's absolutely enthralling to consider. The paradox is that the joy of heaven is both full and growing. That's the paradox. It's never lacking, and yet somehow it's improving over time. How can that be? You might wonder, right? This is a totally understandable concern that Brandon brings up about the nature of infinity, because you might wonder, won't we run out of growth eventually? You know, if we're finite, but we're there forever, won't eventually we learn all the math and get to know every person and have seen every place.

And let's just say I'm wrong about so many of these facets that I don't think really I can be wrong about and we do get to grow in heaven and we do actually excel and there are layers to this. Well, that's going to lead to some unfairness problems, which I'm going to cover here in a few points. But before that, still, to what end? We're talking about eternity. I can only do so many hobbies. Like, do you understand everything that you can ever imagine is finite? We have a finite amount of things we can be interested in or do.

We have a finite amount of times we can do them before we lose interest. We have a finite amount of growth that we can do in any particular subject. This simply doesn't work. Eternity is never going to be a good thing no matter how you spin it. I don't want to live forever. I honestly do not believe there is any good version of heaven. My, if it's a choice and I get to talk to some creator at the end of all of this, I don't care who the creator is or what his plan or her plan or its plan is.

for an afterlife, I would honestly prefer at some point, maybe I want to check it out for 500 years, but at some point, I want the option to not exist, to not be conscious. And earlier, here's how he puts it. And the further down the road you go towards the concept of infinity, the more you realize there's no good version of it. There can't be. Nothing can go on forever and be a good thing. You'll live every possible occurrence of anything that can be done in heaven, a billion,

trillion, Google times a billion times over forever, and it will be just the beginning, just the blink of an eye of how many more times you'll do it again. Now, these are understandable concerns, but I think there is an answer to them, I think, and the basic answer is the infinity of God. So in my videos, I'm trying to be more on point and just make the point simply not drawn on. The main point is this. We are finite, but God is infinite, and between any finite object and an infinite thing, there's always an infinite chasm. So 10 trillion years into the future, there will still be an infinite

amount more to discover within the being of God. And so therefore, I don't think this sense of monotony or repetition that Brandon is describing in his video is necessary. If you make creatures in a finite world eternal, that will eventually become stagnant and monotonous. You know, eventually it'll feel like Bill Murray and Groundhog Day. But if you make creatures in an infinite world eternal, that may well be the best thing for them. It may well be endless expanding joy forever. Why can't happiness be forever and increasing if its source is forever? If God can't be exhausted and God is the foundation of happiness, why can't happiness be inexhaustible? But a fourth concern he brings up is this concern about a loss of identity in heaven. So Brandon argues that

in heaven, there will be the loss of certain features of our human identity, things like our free will, our individuality, and even maybe our memory. Here's a question. Will you still have your memories from this time on earth in heaven? I doubt it. And here's why. Once again, that verse in Revelation provides us with so much ammunition. There are no tears, death, sorrow, or sin. How much sorrow do you have when you think about your life? You might have the best life ever. You might have every single thing that provides you with meaning and purpose and beauty in your life. And I bet when you think through your memories, you are filled with sorrow. So in the title of this video, I use the words boring and weird, boring more for the last

concern, weird for this concern. These are my terms because I think it would be kind of weird if we made it to heaven and then we had no memory of our previous life and we were a completely different person. You simply cannot be able to have these memories, this same conscious continuum. So what is your identity in heaven? And how are you recognizing people? How are you holding on to your past? Because to hold on to your past at all, to be the same person,

like this is a really fun kind of ship a Theseus kind of philosophical thought experiment here. To what degree are you still you if God has to rob you of some part of yourself, some part of your desires, some part of your will, some part of your nature, some part of your memory, some part of your previous existence, right? To really be able to ensure no tears, death, sorrow, or sin, you are being manipulated into some newer creation. And to what extent can you have that done until you are no longer yourself? I believe it would happen almost immediately it would break down.

You would almost immediately have to be considered something entirely new. And for God to work all these things out, I think he's going to have to rob you of entirely who you were. Now, I won't address all the points he brings up in his video. There's lots of other points in the video that we're not going into here. Again, not an exhaustive response, trying to hit some ideas that I think are commonly held out there. So on the free will concern, you can see my other video on heaven, where I discussed the idea of confirmation and obedience, which is what some Christians think happen to the good angels when they chose not to revolt against God, and there's a lot there to unpack.

Here, let's just hit these two points about memory and identity. So first, memory, I don't think there's any reason to assume that people in heaven don't have memories from life on earth. That's certainly not what Revelation 6 depicts, where you have martyrs in heaven pleading to God about their martyrdom. and in Revelation 21, you have the wiping away of tears from our eyes, but that doesn't seem to require a simultaneous wiping away of memories from our brains. The memory of suffering doesn't always or necessarily further the suffering.

Sometimes it can, but most suffering, especially more simple forms of suffering, don't actually cause suffering to remember them. So, you know, for most things like I remember in sixth grade at football practice, I broke my hand and that hurt at the time. But when I think about it now, I still, I can remember that. It doesn't cause suffering now. Some suffering causes further suffering to remember it in the case of trauma, for example. So, but even there, we can recognize that over time, that can be reduced.

There can be healing that comes where traumatic memories can be less painful after 20 years, you know. So surely an omnipotent God, if he does exist at all, is capable of bringing healing to the suffering in our lives on earth without wiping our entire memory clean. In fact, I think that's one of the most wonderful things about heaven. I won't go on to this. I stay on script here and not go into preacher mode here, but I just have to say this is one of my favorite things about heaven. Revelation 21, the imagery, the tender imagery of wiping away tears from our eyes. It's not just saying there's no tears in heaven. It's wiping away the tears. It's not a promise just of the cessation of suffering, but of consolation for suffering.

This is one of the best things about heaven. I mean, when you get there, it won't just end your pain. It will mend it. The Lord God himself will summon you. Think of this. Wipe away every tear from your eye. He will draw up the deepest wounds in your life and by his own divine omnipotent love, heal every corner of your heart.

Again, you can see why I love to think about this doctrine so much. Okay, but what about personal identity? Well, I can't see why we couldn't have a consistent identity from earth to heaven even while undergoing other huge changes. When Jesus rose from the dead, he obviously changed, but he was able to reassure his disciples of his identity. He's saying, look, touch my hands and my feet, it's me. So he had the same identity despite the resurrection body, and it's the same with us. When the Bible speaks of the book of life, for example, it talks about a place where our own personal names are written. Think about that. If you trust in Jesus, your name is written in heaven.

Jesus talked about going to prepare a room for his disciples. So having your name written in heaven, having a room prepared for you that's very personal, it would be very pointless to have that. You know, the particularity of what makes you, your name, particular preparations for you, and then you get there and your identity completely changes so someone else enjoys it. The Bible seems to be saying, heaven is where you belong. Some people have even argued that heaven is where you will arrive upon your truest identity and your most stable identity. And I can think of ways that that makes a lot of sense because our identity in this earth, in this world, is actually very much in flux.

25-year-old Gavin is very different from 35-year-old Gavin. And so you can say, well, which is the real Gavin? Or when someone has a brain injury that changes their personality, you know, this kind of stuff happens. But in heaven, you're going to have a more stable identity. Now, what Christians have often said about this is just to cut to the chase is, when we make it to heaven, what we will feel is this is where I belong. This is what I was made for. Here's another Lewis quote.

I know I always quote C.S. Lewis a lot on this topic because he's so helpful. In the problem of pain, he's explaining why God made individuals. He says, your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions, for it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you, your place in heaven, will seem to be made for you and you alone because you were made for it, made for it stitch by stitch, as a glove is made for a hand.

I'll resist the temptation to go into preacher mode and dwell on how wonderful that is. See my video on heaven. Here's the last concern, though, divine narcissism. This is a concern of, you know, why would God want us or need us to worship him forever in heaven? That means that God's intention, his design for all time, is just to have his robotic slaves worshiping him. Why would he need this?

Why would he want this? I'm serious. Like, if you really zoom out, it makes no sense. And it sounds absolutely awful. But if God is the source of all goodness, then inviting us to worship and praise him is the same thing as inviting us to be happy. Here's Lewis again. He's talking about how he used to struggle with this question until he realized what praise is. The world rings with praise. Lovers praising their mistresses, readers praising their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game, praise of weather, wine, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. And then he says, my whole more general difficulty about the praise of God

depended upon my absurdly denying to us as regards the supremely valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can't help doing about everything else we value. So summing it up here, we could just ask the question of, is, is heaven ultimately a good thing? Brandon seems to think that believing in heaven means our life here is wasted. The problem of paradise is that it is not real and it is a true thief, a murderer of anything potentially good in this lifetime. I am quite passionate about this topic and I believe for good reason. People are just losing their lives, the only lives they're ever going to have. But believing in a future good doesn't necessarily rob us of a present good. It could, but it depends upon how it plays out, right? I might enjoy

breakfast even while anticipating that I'll enjoy lunch and dinner and that doesn't take away from breakfast. So could it work like this with the relationship between our life here and heaven? Well, again, Lewis argues that anticipating heaven actually makes our lives both more valuable and more enjoyable here. And he's got this famous statement, aim at earth, aim at heaven and you'll get earth thrown in, aim at earth and you'll get neither. How might this work? Well, here's the happy thought to finish off with. These are my favorite two things about heaven. Not only the healing of suffering, but also the answering and recalling and fulfilling of all earthly happiness. This is so wonderful and so glorious that my only great regret right now is my inadequacy to articulate it. But just to do my best here,

for those walking with Jesus, our happy moments on this earth are never lost to us. Once they are in our past, once they are in our memory, they're not gone forever. They will return to us in some deeper form as part of that final settled happiness of which they were, even at their very best, an anticipation. In other words, all happiness for a Christian imagination is anticipatory. It's a little whisper telling us of the greater thing that is to come. So all the suffering will somehow be turned to glory, but all the good will also somehow come into its true form there. This is why one of the characters in the Chronicles of Narnia makes it to heaven and says, this is the land I've been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason we

loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. I want to be careful with how we talk about this, but I think it's totally valid to say everything that we love about this life will somehow in some greater, deeper form be true of the new earth and the new heavens. And so I I often pray this prayer. When I'm really happy, when I'm really suffering, I say, heaven is a ballast and you say, Lord, help me to remember that that is coming and that that will solve this. But when you're really happy, you can also pray, Lord, store this up until heaven.

I think that's a valid prayer. Now, there's a lot more, Brandon said. It is video that we have not covered. This is not a thorough refutation or something like that. I'm just trying to highlight a couple of points that came up because I think there are common ideas out there that Christians have about heaven. I hope this video will help bring some clarification and just be the start to further reflection about this topic because I think one of the most edifying things you can possibly do is study

this doctrine. If you're a Christian, I challenge you, you know, take a period of time and study this doctrine. And I'll be doing, I'm actually going to make the doctrine of heaven a major focus of truth unites in 2025. So I'm really looking forward to getting more on that. Hopefully that could be a help to you out there. Hey, thanks for watching everybody.