What in hell became of heaven?

When I was 25, I assured myself that, at the very least, I could expect to live for another 50 or 60 years. Death was an old people problem.

But the can of death is getting harder to kick down the road. A couple of weeks ago, I had my first serious encounter with death, the final enemy. I was halfway across the Atlantic Ocean, sailing with my family between Manhattan and Southampton. Around 3 in the morning, I woke with a start. The prospect of my inevitable demise was frighteningly real. I felt the end of my days rushing toward me like a runaway freight train. I could feel the walls of our tiny cabin pressing in on me.

This close encounter didn’t last more than 5 minutes. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t the last time Old Man Death would interrupt my peaceful slumbers.

Most Americans, even in our secular age, continue to embrace some conception of heaven and hell. In 2024, 86% of Americans believed humans have a soul, 79% believed in an afterlife, 67% professed a belief in heaven and 55% believed in some conception of hell. Although rates of church attendance have plummeted in recent decades, Americans are just as likely to affirm the reality of heaven and hell today as they were 20 years ago.

“Heaven and hell maintain popular appeal because we fear death and we like our revenge served hot.”

The fact that most Americans believe in heaven and hell doesn’t mean we give the afterlife a great deal of thought. When Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick predicted James Talarico was going to hell for interpreting the Bible differently than evangelicals, he was just scoring cheap political points with the Republican base, 75% of whom profess a belief in hell.

But even the Republican afterlife is growing fuzzy. For instance, only 40% of Republicans say belief in God is a necessary prerequisite for admittance to heaven (among Democrats, it’s just 20%). For most Americans, heaven is a default destination while hell is reserved for the baddies, and hardly anyone places themselves in that category.

Heaven and hell maintain popular appeal because we fear death and we like our revenge served hot. We want to believe the horrible people who escape the consequences of their actions in this world eventually will get what they deserve. So even those who don’t identify as Christian often cling to wispy vestiges of redemption and damnation.

We like the thought of reconnecting with loved ones (65%) and pets (48%). In fact, 43% of Americans believe we become angels when we die even though there is no biblical basis for this belief.

We also are inclined to believe we will all get the sort of heaven we desire.

What’s the default?

More than 50 years ago, as I was preparing to preside at my first funeral, an elderly woman marched up to me. “I suppose,” she stated imperiously, “that you are one of these young pastors who say, ‘In my father’s house there are many rooms.’ Well, I don’t want a room. I want my mansion!”

With that, she turned on her heel and marched off.

Not so long ago, most Christians viewed hell, not heaven, as the default destination. When my father was a boy in the 1920s, he heard a Baptist pastor begin a funeral like this: “Well, he’s in hell. What about you?” I can’t imagine the current crop of preachers even hinting in that direction.

Before he was unceremoniously canceled by CBS, Stephen Colbert frequently grilled celebrities with his “Colbert Questionert,” a series of questions that never varied in content or order. Asked to explain what happens when we die, most of his guests resorted to an evasive non-answer such as, “we live on in the memories of our loved ones.”

After an awkward pause, Gaffigan countered, “What you’re saying is we become Febreze.”

In the dying days of The Late Show, comic Jim Gaffigan turned the “what-happens-when-we-die” question back on the host.

“It’s more like a feeling,” Colbert began. “And the feeling is that when we die, I think there’s some continuance of some kind, but it’s like a dispersion of the self into some other greater being. And I don’t have any other feelings beyond that.”

After an awkward pause, Gaffigan countered, “What you’re saying is we become Febreze.”

I found it interesting that, although Colbert (like Gaffigan) is a devout Catholic, he made no appeal to traditional Catholic teaching about heaven, hell and purgatory. Like most of us, he went with his feelings.

The biblical witness

The biblical understanding of ultimate redemption is rooted in Isaiah’s vision of cosmic restoration: “For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before me, says the Lord, so shall your descendants and your name remain.”

The promise was that, because God was restoring all things to their original glory, God’s chosen people would be remembered by their children’s children. It wasn’t about individuals surviving death; it was about the survival of God’s covenant people.

The Christian take on “the restoration of all things” (Acts 3:21) flows directly from the resurrection of Jesus. “As in Adam all die,” Paul told the Corinthians, “even so, in Christ, shall all be made alive.”

Paul doesn’t limit this victory over death to “all who believe in Jesus” or even “all who have lived worthy lives.” The vision is universal: All creation will be transformed. The great enemy, in Paul’s thinking, is death. Apart from the resurrection of Jesus, we die in our sins.

Brett Younger preaching at Broadway Baptist Church. (screencap)

On a recent Sunday, Brett Younger returned to the pulpit of Broadway Baptist Church after an absence of almost 20 years. Before he went to preaching, he led the congregation in a litany of 10 New Testament texts proclaiming the universality of salvation. The cumulative effect was powerful.

You probably didn’t grow up listening to sermons on the restoration of all things. Instead, you were taught the fall of Adam and Eve consigned humanity to damnation and the sacrificial death of Jesus offers a way out — but only to those who believe on his name.

Jesus spoke of hell all the time, but always as a consequence of abusing the poor and vulnerable. The Revelation of John speaks of hell as God’s judgment on human sin. But in the final vision, the New Jerusalem descends to earth as a loud voice proclaims: “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them;he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”

The point is always that Christ died for all. And all means all.

“He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins,” we read in 1 John, “and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”

In 1 Timothy, we are told that “the living God” is “the Savior of all people, especially those who believe.”

“The creation itself,” Paul asserts in Romans 8, “will be set free from its enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”

What we hear in church

That is the gospel. That is the good news. But it’s not a message you are likely to hear in church. Why not?

For many liberal Christians, the restoration of all things sounds too much like Margaret Atwood’s Gilead. Would this new reality be forced on everyone by coercive fiat whether we like it or not? Wouldn’t it be better for everyone to find God in their own way and on their own terms?

If liberals associate the restoration of all things with Gilead, conservatives fear it would look more like Sodom and Gomorrah. What’s the point of preaching the gospel, they ask, if atheists, agnostics and adherents of non-Christian faiths are welcome at the heavenly banquet? Doesn’t the Bible teach that these folks will be consigned to the eternal fires of hell?

Actually, the Bible teaches no such thing.

In the synoptic Gospels, hellfire is reserved for the cruel, the spiritual charlatans and the uncompassionate. In Revelation, the Lake of Fire is prepared for cowards, liars, idolators, wizards and fornicators regardless of religious affiliation. Throughout the New Testament, visions of universal redemption appear alongside warnings of judgment, and there is no simple way of combining the two into one coherent vision.

To recapture the biblical vision of restoration, we must immerse ourselves in the most tragic elements of the biblical story. The imagery of restoration comes to us, of sheer necessity, in the language of poetry. We have God’s Holy Mountain where no one will be able to hurt or destroy. We have Ezekiel’s vision of resurrection in the Valley of Dry Bones. We have the vision of a new heaven and a new earth where righteousness dwells. We have the New Jerusalem coming down to earth.

But this mythical-mystical language is rooted in the grief and desolation of history. In particular, the terror of Babylonian captivity and the horror of Good Friday. Only as we stand with Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones, with Mary Magdalene at the tomb, with Paul in a Roman prison or with John the Revelator on the bleak rock of Patmos can we begin to grasp the deep despair that lies at the roots of biblical hope. For if we lose touch with the triumph and tragedy of the biblical story, little of value remains.

“Either way, the poetry of divine restoration is lost to us, and we are of all people most to be pitied.”

Evangelicals are left with the politics of exclusion and the sort of pseudo-scientific literalism that can be reduced to a wall chart.

Liberals, intimidated by scientific materialism and repelled by evangelical credulity, settle for the politics of inclusion supplemented by Febreze eschatology.

Either way, the poetry of divine restoration is lost to us, and we are of all people most to be pitied. It takes more than a sentimental yearning for a family reunion in the sky or some featureless form of roll-your-own eschatology to fire our hearts.

Face-to-face with the last enemy, all we can do is repeat the ancient story of cosmic restoration within the womb of Christian community. The groans of creation grow louder with each passing year. Death intrudes into our pampered world at the most inconvenient moments, without the slightest concern for our precious feelings. We can’t sort through the biblical accounts, ignoring what we don’t like and combining diverse texts, heedless of context, to create an unbiblical bricolage.

The resurrection of Jesus and the transformation of the cosmos are not facts we can confirm with the tools of science. We are given the language of poetry — the only language suitable to the purpose. We mustn’t waste time wondering if these things could possibly be true; we must simply live as if God’s project of cosmic redemption is well under way and we are at the heart of the action.