definition essay on heaven

What Is Heaven? A Complete Guide

Heaven is a very common term in the Bible, used for the sky; for the space beyond our atmosphere; and for God’s dwelling place. Jesus frequently talks about the Kingdom of Heaven as a present reality with a future final fulfillment. 

Table of Contents

Definition of Heaven

• Biblical Three-Level View of Heaven

Heaven as the Dwelling of God

• The Kingdom of Heaven: Present Day Reality

Heaven in the Bible

Heaven as the new earth for believers, common misconceptions about heaven.

• What is Heaven? A Summary

What is heaven? And what is heaven like? These are common questions. With many different answers. But what does the Bible itself have to say about heaven?

In the Old Testament the Hebrew word šāmayim is the primary word translated as heaven. The NIV Word Study Dictionary defines this word as “region above the earth: the heavens: place of the stars, sky, air; heaven: the invisible realm of God.” As you can see, it has a variety of usages.

In the New Testament, the Greek word ouranos is the primary word translated as heaven. This word is defined as “sky, air, firmament , any area above the earth; heaven(s), the place of sun, moon, and stars; heaven, in which God dwells.” Like šāmayim , this word is used in a variety of ways.

Both of these words refer to the physical realm that we live in. But they also refer to the supernatural realm of God. I suspect that is because there was not a clear distinction between the two in the Hebrew mind. The sky is ‘up there.’ But God’s throne is also ‘up there,’ beyond the stars ( Job 22:12 ). In ancient Hebrew thought, the heavens consist of everything that is ‘up there.’

The Biblical Three-Level View of Heaven

There is no description of how the Hebrews viewed the heaven in the Scripture. But from the way the term is used, it appears like they divided heaven into three regions. The air the birds flew in; the realm of the sun, moon, and stars; and God’s dwelling place.

In Matthew 5:26 Jesus tells his disciples to “look at the birds of the air.” The word ‘air’ here is ouranos , or heaven. Here, as in a few other places, it is referring to the earth’s atmosphere. It is a physical place, a part of the natural world.

In Psalm 19:1-6 , David’s psalm begins by expressing the glory of God revealed in the heavens. This passage is referring to the celestial bodies, especially the sun. These heavens were visible to humans, but beyond the reach of the birds that flew through the sky.

For the ancients, the third level of heaven was the dwelling place of God, or the gods. This third level of heaven is beyond the sun, moon, and stars. While eventually it came to be thought of as a spiritual place, it was still ‘up there,’ higher than the other heavens.

In Psalm 11:4 , Psalm 103:19 , and Isaiah 66:1 we read that God’s throne is in heaven. In Isaiah 6:1 , Isaiah has a vision of God sitting on his throne, high and exalted. In 1 Kings 8:27-53 , Solomon identifies heaven as God’s dwelling place. At the beginning of this passage Solomon acknowledges that even the highest heaven cannot contain God.

In 2 Corinthians 12:1-10 Paul shares an experience of being caught up to the third heaven, the dwelling of God. He identifies this place as being synonymous with Paradise, the Paradise that Jesus promised to share with the repentant thief on the cross.

The Kingdom of Heaven : Present Day Reality

Jesus came proclaiming the coming of the kingdom. Matthew calls it the Kingdom of Heaven . It is a spiritual kingdom that Christ rules over. A kingdom that includes all the redeemed. While this kingdom has eschatological ramifications, it is a kingdom with present day reality.

This kingdom that Jesus proclaims reflects a dramatic shift in thought. The coming kingdom had been envisioned as a physical earthly kingdom centered on Jerusalem. But the kingdom Jesus proclaims was a spiritual kingdom without an earthly center.

In Matthew 13 there are a series of parables. Most of these parables start with the expression “the kingdom of heaven is like.” But for the most part, they are not what we might expect. Rather than describing a future abode of believers, they describe heaven as a present reality. A kingdom that is growing; one that is worth all we have; and impacted by unbelievers.

Even though heaven is in some sense a present reality that we are experiencing, there is more to come. As believers we look forward to life beyond this earth and in the fragile tents in which we currently dwell ( 2 Corinthians 5:1-5 ). But what is that heaven like?

Unfortunately, the Scripture does not give us a lot of information about what awaits us. But there are a few things we know about heaven.

3 Ways God's Rainbow Represents His Loving Grace

• We know that we will experience it with transformed bodies ( 1 Corinthians 15:35-57 ), not as disembodied spirits.
• That we will in some way be like Christ ( 1 John 3:2-3 ), and in some way we will be like the angels ( Matthew 22:30 ).
• The pains of this life will be left behind ( Revelation 21:4 ).
• Believers from every nation will praise God together ( Revelation 7:9 ).
• We will be with the Lord forever ( 1 Thessalonians 4:17 ), and we will share in the glory of Christ ( Rom. 8:17 ).

But what heaven itself is like is unknown. 1 Corinthians 2:9 does give us a clue though, “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived – the things God has prepared for those who love him.” What God has prepared for us is beyond our ability to grasp now. It is indescribable to our human minds. So, while we may not know what heaven is like, we can look forward to it with expectation and joy.

Revelation 21:1-5 paints a picture of our future. In it the heaven and earth we inhabit pass away. In their place are a new heaven and earth. And then the New Jerusalem, later described as the bride of Christ ( Revelation 21:9 ) descends from heaven to earth. Finally, the announcement from the throne of God is that he will now dwell among us.

This chapter in Revelation is similar in many ways to the description of Eden, the initial home of humanity. It seems like our end is a return to our beginnings, to what we were created to be in the first place.

If this view of Revelation 21:1-5 is correct, then it would appear that our abode in heaven is temporary. And that our permanent home is on a newly recreated earth.

1. Many Mansions

There are a couple of passages that are, at least in popular thought, considered to be descriptive of heaven. In John 14:2 the KJV tells us that there in the Father’s house there are many mansions. Most modern translations use rooms or dwelling places rather than mansions. But it is still common to heard older people talk about their mansion in heaven. I suspect there will be no mansions.

2. Streets of Gold and Gates of Pearls

Another passage frequently used to describe heaven comes from the 21st and 22nd chapters of Revelation. These chapters describe an immense city with streets of gold and gates of pearls. But if you look at Revelation 21:9-10 , you will find that this chapter is describing the bride of Christ, the church, rather than heaven. It is a symbolic description of the glory of Christ’s bride, and God’s presence within.

The Pearly Gates would also seem come out of this passage in Revelation. The New Jerusalem, the bride of Christ, is described as having gates of pearls with the names of the 12 tribes written on them. But, again, this is descriptive of the bride of Christ rather than heaven.

What Is Heaven?

Heaven is a very common term in the Bible. You will find it used for the sky; for the space beyond our atmosphere; and for God’s dwelling place. Jesus frequently talks about the Kingdom of Heaven as a present reality with a future final fulfillment. And heaven is frequently associated with the home of believers when we leave this life. A home in Christ, in the presence of God.

But that ‘home in heaven’ that we look forward to is not described in the pages of Scripture. It is beyond our ability to grasp. But whether our ultimate destiny is in heaven, or in a recreated heaven and earth, it will be glorious beyond the ability of words to describe.

Ed Jarrett  is a long time follower of Jesus and a member of Sylvan Way Baptist Church. He has been a Bible teacher for over 40 years and regularly blogs at A Clay Jar . You can also follow him on Twitter or Facebook . Ed is married, the father of two, and grandfather of two lovely girls. He is retired and currently enjoys his gardens and backpacking.

Photo Credit: Unsplash/Chetan Menaria

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Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought

Behind the various Christian ideas about heaven and hell lies the more basic belief that our lives extend beyond the grave (see the entry on afterlife ). For suppose that our lives do not extend beyond the grave. In addition to excluding a variety of ideas about reincarnation and karma, this would also preclude the very possibility of future compensation of any kind for those who experience horrendous evil during their earthly lives. Indeed, despite their profound differences, many Christians (though perhaps not all) and many atheists can presumably agree on one thing at least. If a young girl should be brutally raped and murdered and this should be the end of the story for the child, then a supremely powerful, benevolent, and just God would not exist. An atheist may seriously doubt whether any future compensation would suffice to justify a supreme being’s decision to permit such an evil in the first place. But the point is that even many Christians would concede that, apart from an afterlife, such an evil would constitute overwhelming evidence against the existence of God; some might even concede that such an evil would be logically (or metaphysically) inconsistent with God’s existence as well.

It is hardly surprising, then, that a belief in an afterlife should be an important part of the Christian tradition. Even if our lives do extend beyond the grave, however, the question remains concerning the nature of the future in store for us on the other side, and the various Christian views about heaven and hell are proposed answers to this question. According to a relatively common view in the wider Christian culture, heaven and hell are essentially deserved compensations for the kind of earthly lives we live. Good people go to heaven as a deserved reward for a virtuous life, and bad people go to hell as a just punishment for an immoral life; in that way, the scales of justice are sometimes thought to balance. But virtually all Christian theologians regard such a view, however common it may be in the popular culture, as overly simplistic and unsophisticated; the biblical perspective, as they see it, is far more subtly nuanced than that.

When we turn to the theological and philosophical literature in the Christian tradition, we encounter, as we would in any of the other great religious traditions as well, a bewildering variety of different (and often inconsistent) theological views. The views about hell in particular include very different conceptions of divine love, divine justice, and divine grace, very different ideas about free will and its role (if any) in determining a person’s ultimate destiny, very different understandings of moral evil and the purpose of punishment, and very different views about the nature of moral responsibility and the possibility of inherited guilt. There is also this further complication: in the Abrahamic family of monotheistic religions to which Christianity belongs (along with Judaism and Islam), theological reflection often includes an interpretation of various texts thought to be both sacred and authoritative. But the meaning of these texts, particularly when read in their original languages, is rarely transparent to all reasonable interpreters; that is, not even all who regard a relevant text as authoritative seem able to agree on its correct interpretation. Still, despite this bewildering diversity of theological opinion, there may be a relatively easy way to identify three primary eschatological views within the Christian religion and thus to organize the various ideas about heaven and hell around these three primary views.

1.1 Postulating a Final and Irreversible Division within the Human Race

1.2 restricting the scope of god’s love, 2.1 retributivist objections, 2.2 challenging the retributive theory itself, 3.1 moral freedom and rationality, 3.2 moral freedom and irreparable harm, 4.1 divine grace and the inclusive nature of love, 4.2 universalism and human freedom, 4.3 the limits of god’s power to preserve human freedom, 5.1 freedom in heaven, 5.2 concerning the misery of loved ones in hell, 5.3 concerning the supposed tedium of immortality, other internet resources, related entries, 1. three primary eschatological views.

Let theism in general be the belief that a supremely powerful, supremely wise, and supremely good (loving, just, merciful) personal being exists as the Creator of the universe. Christian theism is, of course, more specific than that, and Christian theists typically make the following two-fold assumption: first, that the highest possible good for created persons (true blessedness, if you will) requires that they enter into a proper relationship (or even a kind of union) with their Creator, and second, that a complete severance from the divine nature, without even an implicit experience of God (see note 11 ) would be a terrifying evil. As C. S. Lewis once put it, union with the divine “Nature is bliss and separation from it [an objective] horror” (1955, 232). Although most Christians would probably agree with this, some may want additional clarity on the nature of the union and the separation in question here. But in any case, whereas heaven is in general thought of as a realm in which people experience the bliss of perfect fellowship and harmony with God and with each other, hell is in general thought of as a realm in which people experience the greatest possible estrangement from God, the greatest possible sense of alienation, and perhaps also an intense hatred of everyone including themselves.

The ideas of heaven and hell are also closely associated with the religious idea of salvation , which in turn rests upon a theological interpretation of the human condition. Even the non-religious can perhaps agree that, for whatever reason, we humans begin our earthly lives with many imperfections and with no (conscious) awareness of God. We also emerge and begin making choices in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and misperception, and behind our earliest choices lie a host of genetically determined inclinations and environmental (including social and cultural) influences. As young children, moreover, we initially pursue our own needs and interests as we perceive (or misperceive) them. So the context in which we humans emerge with a first person perspective and then begin developing into minimally rational agents virtually guarantees, it seems, that we would repeatedly misconstrue our own interests and pursue them in misguided ways; it also includes many sources of misery, at least some of which—the horror of war, horrifying examples of inhumanity to children, people striving to benefit themselves at the expense of others, etc.—are the product of misguided human choices. But other sources include such non-moral evils as natural disasters, sickness, and especially physical death itself.

Clearly, then, we all encounter in our natural environment many threats to our immediate welfare and many obstacles, some of our own making and some not, to enduring happiness. The Christian interpretation of this human condition thus postulates an initial estrangement from God, and the Christian religion then offers a prescription for how we can be saved from such estrangement; it teaches in particular that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself” (2 Cor. 5:19a—KJV). But Christians also disagree among themselves concerning the extent and ultimate success of God’s saving activity among human beings. Some believe that God will positively reject unrepentant sinners after a given deadline, typically thought of as the moment of physical death, and actively punish them forever after; others believe that God would never reject any of God’s own loved ones even though some of them may freely reject God forever, thereby placing themselves in a kind of self-created hell; and still others believe that God’s redemptive love will triumph in the end and will successfully bring reconciliation to all of those whom God has loved into existence in the first place. So one way to organize our thinking here is against the backdrop of the following inconsistent set of three propositions:

• All human sinners are equal objects of God’s redemptive love in the sense that God wills or aims to win over each one of them over time and thereby to prepare each one of them for the bliss of union with the divine nature.
• God’s redemptive love will triumph in the end and successfully win over each and every object of that love, thereby preparing each one of them for the bliss of union with the divine nature.
• Some human sinners will never be reconciled to God and will therefore remain separated from the divine nature forever.

If this set of propositions is logically inconsistent, as it surely is, then at least one proposition in the set is false. In no way does it follow, of course, that only one proposition in the set is false, and neither does it follow that at least two of them are true. But if someone does accept any two of these propositions, as virtually every mainline Christian theologian does, then such a person has no choice but to reject the third. [ 1 ] It is typically rather easy, moreover, to determine which proposition a given theologian ultimately rejects, and we can therefore classify theologians according to which of these propositions they do reject. So that leaves exactly three primary eschatological views. Because the Augustinians, named after St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), believe both that God’s redemptive (or electing) love will triumph in the end (proposition (2)) and that some human sinners will never be reconciled to God (proposition (3)), they finally reject the idea that God’s redemptive love extends to all human sinners equally (proposition (1)); because the Arminians, named after Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609) for his opposition to the Augustinian understanding of limited election, believe both that God’s redemptive love extends to all human sinners equally (proposition (1)) and that some of these sinners will never be reconciled to God (proposition (3)), they finally reject the idea that God’s redemptive love will triumph in the end (proposition (2)); and finally, because the Christian universalists believe both that God’s redemptive love extends to all human sinners equally (proposition (1)) and that this love will triumph in the end (proposition (2)), they finally reject altogether the idea that some human sinners will never be reconciled to God (proposition (3)).

So here, then, are three quite different systems of theology. According to Augustinian theology, God’s redemptive love cannot be thwarted forever, but the scope of that love is restricted to a limited elect. According to Arminian theology, God’s redemptive love extends to all human sinners equally, but that love can be thwarted by factors, such as certain human choices, over which God has no direct causal control. And according to the theology of Christian universalism, God’s redemptive love extends to all human sinners equally and God’s will to save each one of them cannot be thwarted forever. Accordingly, a question that may now arise is, “Which system of theology best preserves the praiseworthy character and the glory of God?”

Some may already have observed that the third proposition in our inconsistent triad, namely

• Some humans will never be reconciled to God and will therefore remain separated from the divine nature forever,

is fairly unspecific concerning the fate of the wicked and the import of separation from God. For if we think of such separation as a state of being estranged or alienated from God, or if we think of it as simply the absence of a loving union with God, then (3) is equally consistent with many different conceptions of hell, some arguably milder than others. It is equally consistent, for example, with the idea that hell is a realm where the wicked receive retribution in the form of everlasting torment, with the idea that they will simply be annihilated in the end, with the idea that they create their own hell by rejecting God, and with the idea that God will simply make them as comfortable as possible in hell even as God graciously limits the harm they can do to each other (see Stump 1986). This lack of specificity is by design. For however one understands the fate of those who supposedly remain separated from God forever , such a fate will entail something like (3). Alternatively, anyone who rejects (3) will likewise reject the idea of everlasting torment as well as any of the supposedly milder conceptions of an everlasting separation from God.

Now when the Fifth General Council of the Christian church condemned the doctrine of universal reconciliation in 553 CE, it did not, strictly speaking, commit the institutional church of that day to a doctrine of everlasting conscious torment in hell. But it did commit the church to a final and irreversible division within the human race between those who will be saved, on the one hand, and those who will be hopelessly lost forever, on the other. So anyone who accepted the Council’s decision on this point, as most major theologians over the subsequent thousand years did, inevitably confronted an obvious question. If there is to be such a final and irreversible division within the human race, just what accounts for it? According to the Augustinians, the explanation lies in the mystery of God’s freedom to extend the divine love and mercy to a limited elect and to withhold it from the rest of humanity; but according to the Arminians, the explanation lies in our human free choices. Thanks to God’s grace, we ultimately determine our own destiny in heaven or hell.

These two very different explanations for a final and irrevocable division within the human race, where some end up in heaven and others in hell, also reflect profound disagreements over the nature of divine grace. Because the Augustinians hold that, in our present condition at least, God owes us nothing, they also believe that the grace God confers upon a limited elect is utterly gratuitous and supererogatory. As John Calvin put it, “For as Jacob, deserving nothing by good works, is taken into grace, Esau, as yet undefiled by any crime, is hated” (Calvin 1960, Bk. III, Ch. XXIII, sec. 12). But the Arminians reject such a doctrine as inherently unjust; it is simply unjust, they insist, for God to do for some, namely the elect, what God refuses to do for others, particularly since the elect have done nothing to deserve their special treatment. The Arminians therefore hold that God offers his grace to all human beings, though many are those who freely reject it and eventually seal their fate in hell forever. But for their part, the Augustinians counter that this Arminian explanation in terms of human free will contradicts St. Paul’s clear teaching that salvation is wholly a matter of grace: “For by grace you have been saved through faith,” Paul declared, “and this [the faith] is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph. 2:8–9). The Augustinians also challenge the Arminians with the following question: if the ultimate difference between the saved and the lost lies in the superior free choices that the saved have made during their earthly lives, then why shouldn’t they take credit for this difference or even boast about it? Why shouldn’t they say, “Well, at least I’m not as bad as those miserable people in hell who were so stupid as to have freely rejected the grace that God offers to all.”

A Christian universalist, of course, might insist that the Augustinians and the Arminians are both right in their respective criticisms of each other.

We have seen so far that the Augustinians in effect reason as follows: God’s saving grace is irresistible in the end, and yet everlasting torment in hell will nonetheless be the terrible fate for some; therefore, God does not love all created persons equally and his (electing) love is thus limited in its scope. Augustine’s own interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:4 provides a nice illustration. He wrote: “the word concerning God, ‘who will have all men to be saved,’ does not mean that there is no one whose salvation he [God] doth not will … but by ‘all men’ we are to understand the whole of mankind, in every single group into which it can be divided … For from which of these groups doth not God will that some men from every nation should be saved through his only-begotten Son our Lord?” ( Enchiridion , 103—italics added).

So it is not God’s will, Augustine claimed, to save every individual from every group and every nation; it is merely God’s will to save all kinds of people, that is, some individuals from every group and every nation. Augustine’s exegetical arguments for such an interpretation, however fantastic they may appear to non-Augustinians, need not concern us here. More important for our purposes is his pattern of argument, as illustrated in the following comment: “We could interpret it [1 Tim. 2:4] in any other fashion, as long as we are not compelled to believe that the Omnipotent hath willed something to be done which was not done”—and as long as we are not compelled to believe, he no doubt took for granted, that no one will be eternally damned. For if propositions (2) and (3) are both true, then proposition (1) is false and the scope of God’s love is restricted to a limited elect. It is as simple as that.

Nor should one suppose that this Augustinian understanding of limited election is totally bereft of contemporary defenders. One such contemporary defender, the Christian philosopher Paul Helm, has argued that God’s loving nature no more necessitates that God extend a redemptive love equally to all humans than it necessitates that God create them all with the same human characteristics. For why is it, Helm asks, “that some are strong, some weak, some male, some female, some healthy, some diseased, and so forth?” He then makes the following claim: “if it is possible for there to be differentiations in the created universe that are consistent with the attributes of God then it is presumably possible for there to be differentiations with regard to God’s redemptive purposes which are entirely consistent with the divine attributes” (Helm 1985, 53). How one evaluates such a claim will no doubt depend, at least in part, upon how one answers such questions as these: Would God’s willing that one person have black hair and another brown hair be compatible with loving both of them equally and with acting justly toward both of them? Would God’s willing that one person should come to a glorious end and another to a horrific end be compatible with loving both of them equally and with acting justly toward both of them?

In response to similar questions, Jeff Jordan has challenged the whole idea, which he acknowledges to be widely accepted among theistic philosophers, that “God’s love must be maximally extended and equally intense” (Jordan 2012, 53). According to Jordan, such maximally extended love would be a deficiency in any human who manifested it; hence, it should not be numbered among God’s perfections or great-making properties. Neither is it possible, he appears to argue, that God should love equally each and every created person. For “if God has deep attachments [with some of them], it follows that he does not love all [of them] equally. And being a perfect being, God would have loves of the deepest kind” (Jordan 2012, 67). Jordan thus asks in a later article, “What if ... it is not possible in-principle [even for God] to love every person uniformly to the same degree?” And in support of his contention that this is indeed impossible, Jordan argues, first, that people in fact have incompatible interests, second, that two “interests are incompatible just in case attempts to bring about one of them require that the other be impeded,” and third, that love of the deepest kind “has as a necessary constituent identifying with the interests of one’s beloved” (Jordan 2015, 184).

Two critical problems arise at this point. First, why suppose that the deepest love for others (in the sense of willing the very best for them) always requires identifying with their own interests? According to Jordan, a person’s interest is merely “a desire or goal had by that person—something that a person cares about” (Jordan 2012, 62, n. 26; see also Jordan 2020, 83). But in that sense of “interest,” God’s deepest love for a person surely requires that God actually oppose or impede some of that person’s interests. Why else would Christians believe, as the author of Hebrews put it, that God often “disciplines those whom he loves and chastises every child whom he accepts”? (Heb. 12:6). And second, why suppose that God cannot identify with incompatible interests anyway? Indeed, why cannot a single individual identify with incompatible interests (or conflicting desires) of his or her own? Jordan himself offers the following explanation of what it means to identify with an interest: “Identifying with an interest we might understand as, roughly, caring about what one’s beloved cares about because one’s beloved cares about it” (Jordan 2015, 184). But why, then, cannot a loving mother, for example, care deeply about the incompatible interests (or immediate desires) of her two small children as they squabble over a toy and care about these incompatible interests, however trivial they might otherwise have seemed to her, precisely because her beloved children care about them? The impossibility of her satisfying such incompatible interests hardly entails the impossibility of her identifying with them in the sense of caring deeply about them. [ 2 ] Accordingly, what a proponent of limited election needs at this point is to specify a clear sense of “to identify with” such that (a) it is impossible for God to identify with incompatible interests and (b) an equally deep love for all created persons would nonetheless require that God be able to identify with at least some of their incompatible interests.

In any case, the vast majority of Christian philosophers who have addressed the topic of hell in recent decades and have published at least some of their work in the standard philosophical journals do accept proposition (1) and also reject, therefore, any hint of Augustinian limited election. However ephemeral and changeable such a consensus may be, the contemporary consensus does seem to be that God’s redemptive love extends to all humans equally (see, for example, Buckareff and Plug 2005, Knight 1997, Kronen and Reitan 2011, Kvanvig 1993, Murray 1998, Seymour 2000b, Stump 1983, Swinburne 1983, and Walls 1998). For a more thorough examination and critique of Jordan’s specific arguments, see Parker 2013, and Talbott 2020; and for Jordan’s reply to some of this criticism, see Jordan 2015 and Jordan 2020, Ch. 5.

2. The Augustinian Understanding of Hell

Behind the Augustinian understanding of hell lies a commitment to a retributive theory of punishment, according to which the primary purpose of punishment is to satisfy the demands of justice or, as some might say, to balance the scales of justice. And the Augustinian commitment to such a theory is hardly surprising. For based upon his interpretation of various New Testament texts, Augustine insisted that hell is a literal lake of fire in which the damned will experience the horror of everlasting torment; they will experience, that is, the unbearable physical pain of literally being burned forever. The primary purpose of such unending torment, according to Augustine, is not correction, or deterrence, or even the protection of the innocent; nor did he make any claim for it except that it is fully deserved and therefore just. As for how such torment could be even physically possible, Augustine insisted further that “by a miracle of their most omnipotent Creator, they [living creatures who are damned] can burn without being consumed, and suffer without dying” ( City of God , Bk. 21, Ch. 9). Such is the metaphysics of hell, as Augustine understood it.

It would be unfair, however, to imply that all Augustinians, as classified above, accept Augustine’s own understanding of an eternal torture chamber. For many Augustinians view the agony of hell as essentially psychological and spiritual in nature, consisting of the knowledge that every possibility for joy and happiness has been lost forever. Hell, as they see it, is thus a condition in which self-loathing, hatred of others, hopelessness, and infinite despair consumes the soul like a metaphorical fire. Still, virtually all Augustinians agree with Jonathan Edwards concerning this: whatever the precise nature of the suffering, “In hell God manifests his being and perfections only in hatred and wrath, and hatred without love” (Edwards 1738, 390). In fact, according to Edwards, the damned never were an object of God’s electing love in the first place: “The saints in glory will know concerning the damned in hell, that God never loved them, but that he hates them, and [that they] will be for ever hated of God” (Edwards 1834, sec. III). So why are Christians required to love even those whom God has always hated? Because, says Edwards, we have no way of knowing in this life who is, and who is not, an object of God’s eternal hatred. “We ought now to love all, and even wicked men” because “we know not but that God loves them” (sec. III). In the next life, however, “the heavenly inhabitants will know that [the damned] … are the objects of God’s eternal hatred” (sec. II). Edwards and other Augustinians thus hold that the damned differ from the saved in one respect only: even before the damned were born, God had already freely chosen to exclude them from the grace and the redemptive love that God lavishes upon on the elect.

So why, one may wonder at this point, do the Augustinians believe that anyone—whether it be Judas Iscariot, Saul of Tarsus, or Adolph Hitler—actually deserves unending torment as a just recompense for their sins? The typical Augustinian answer appeals to the seriousness or the heinous character of even the most minor offense against God. In Cur Deus Homo (or Why God Became Man ), a classic statement of the substitution theory of atonement, St. Anselm illustrated such an appeal with the following example. Suppose that God were to forbid you to look in a certain direction, even though it seemed to you that by doing so you could preserve the entire creation from destruction. If you were to disobey God and to look in that forbidden direction, you would sin so gravely, Anselm declared, that you could never do anything to pay for that sin adequately. As a proponent of the retributive theory, Anselm first insisted that “God demands satisfaction in proportion to the extent of the sin.” He then went on to insist that “you do not make satisfaction [for any sin] unless you pay something greater than is that for whose sake [namely God’s] you ought not to have sinned” ( Cur Deus Homo I, Ch. 21). Anselm’s argument, then, appears to run as follows: Because God is infinitely great, the slightest offense against God is also infinitely serious; and if an offense is infinitely serious, then no suffering the sinner might endure over a finite period of time could possibly pay for it. So either the sinner does not pay for the sin at all, or the sinner must pay for it by enduring everlasting suffering (or at least a permanent loss of happiness).

But what about those who never commit any offense against God at all, such as those who die in infancy or those who, because of severe brain damage or some other factor, never develop into minimally rational agents? These too, according to Augustine, deserve to be condemned along with the human race as a whole. “For … the whole human race,” he insisted, “was condemned in its apostate head by a divine judgment so just that even if not a single member of the race [including, therefore, those who die in infancy] were ever saved from it, no one could rail against God’s justice” ( Enchiridion , 99). [ 3 ] Registering his agreement with Augustine, Calvin likewise wrote: “Hence, as Augustine says, whether a man is a guilty unbeliever or an innocent believer, he begets not innocent but guilty children, for he begets them from a corrupted nature” (Calvin 1536, Bk. II, Ch. I, sec. 7 —italics added). Augustine and Calvin both believed, then, that God justly condemns some who die in infancy; indeed, if their innocence required that God unite with them, then the ground of their salvation would lie in themselves rather than, as Augustine saw it, in God’s own free decision to save them from their inherited guilt. [ 4 ] With respect to the unborn twins Jacob and Esau, Augustine thus wrote: “both the twins were ‘by nature children of wrath,’ not because of any works of their own, but because they were both bound in the fetters of damnation originally forged by Adam” ( Enchiridion , 98).

As these remarks illustrate, the Augustinian understanding of original sin implies that we are all born guilty of a heinous sin against God, and this inherited guilt relieves God of any responsibility for our spiritual welfare. In Augustine’s own words, “Now it is clear that the one sin originally inherited, even if it were the only one involved , makes men liable to condemnation” ( Enchiridion , 50—italics added). Augustine thus concluded that God can freely decide whom to save and whom to damn without committing any injustice at all. “Now, who but a fool,” he declared, “would think God unfair either when he imposes penal judgment on the deserving or when he shows mercy to the undeserving” (Enchiridion, 98). For the Augustinians, then, the bottom line is that, even as our Creator, God owes us nothing in our present condition because, thanks to original sin, we come into this earthly life already deserving nothing but everlasting punishment in hell as a just recompense for original sin.

Although this Augustinian rationale for the justice of hell has had a profound influence on the Western theological tradition, particularly in the past, critics of Augustinian theology, both ancient and contemporary, have raised a number of powerful objections to it.

One set of objections arises from within the retributive theory itself, and here are three such objections that critics have raised. First, why should the greatness of the one against whom an offense occurs determine the degree of one’s personal guilt anyway? According to most proponents of the retributive theory, the personal guilt of those who act wrongly must depend, at least in part, upon certain facts about them . A schizophrenic young man who tragically kills his loving mother, believing her to be a sinister space alien who has devoured his real mother, may need treatment, they would say, but a just punishment seems out of the question. Similarly, the personal guilt of those who disobey God or violate the divine commands must likewise depend upon the answer to such questions as these: Have they knowingly violated a divine command?—and if so, to what extent are they responsible for their own rebellious impulses? To what extent do they possess not only an implicit knowledge of God and the divine commands, but a clear vision of the nature of God? To what extent do they see clearly the choice of roads, the consequences of their actions, or the true nature of evil? Even many Augustinians admit the relevance of such questions when they insist that Adam’s sin was especially heinous because he supposedly had special advantages, such as great happiness and the beatific vision, that his descendants do not enjoy. If Adam’s sin was especially heinous because he had special advantages, then the sins of those who lack his special advantages must be less heinous; and if that is true, if some sins against God are less heinous than others, then the greatness of God cannot be the only, or even the decisive, factor in determining the degree of one’s personal guilt or the seriousness of a given sin (see Adams 1975, 442 and Kvanvig 1993, 40–50).

Second, virtually all retributivists, with the notable exception of the Augustinian theologians, reject as absurd the whole idea of inherited guilt. So why, one may ask, do so many Augustinians, despite their commitment to a retributive theory of punishment, insist that God could justly condemn even infants on account of their supposedly inherited guilt? Part of the explanation, according to Philip Quinn, may lie “in a homuncular view of human nature itself” (Quinn 1988, 99) or in what some philosophers might label as a simple category mistake. A good illustration of the homuncular view, as Quinn calls it, might be the following chapter heading in Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo : “What it was that man, when he sinned, removed from God and cannot repay” (I, Ch. 23). The implication of such language, which we also find in Augustine, Calvin, and a host of others, is that humankind or human nature or the human race as a whole is itself a person (or homunculus) who can act and sin against God. Perhaps that explains how Augustine could write: “Man … produced depraved and condemned children. For we were all in that one man, since we were all that one man who fell into sin” ( City of God , Bk. XIII, Ch. 14). And perhaps it also explains how Calvin could write: “even infants themselves, while they carry their condemnation with them from the mother’s womb, are guilty not of another’s fault but of their own” fault (Calvin 1536, Bk. II, Ch. I, sec. 8). The reasoning here appears to run as follows: Humankind is guilty of a grievous offense against God; infants are instances of humankind; therefore, infants are likewise guilty of a grievous offense against God. But most retributivists would reject this way of speaking as simply incoherent. Whether one agrees with it or not, one can at least understand the claim that Adam’s sin had disastrous consequences for all his progeny in that they inherited many defects, deficiencies, and degenerate dispositions. One can also understand Calvin’s claim that, as a result of original sin, “our own insight … is utterly blind and stupid in divine matters” and that “man’s keenness of mind is mere blindness as far as the knowledge of God is concerned” (Calvin 1536, Bk. II, Ch. II, sec. 19). One can even understand the claim that we are morally responsible for doing something about our inherited defects, provided that we have the power and the opportunity to do so. But the claim that we are born guilty is another matter, as is the claim that we are all deserving of everlasting punishment on account of having inherited certain defects or deficiencies. Most retributivists would regard such inherited defects as excusing conditions that decrease , rather than increase , the degree of one’s personal guilt. So even though the Augustinians accept the idea of divine retribution, they appear at the same time to reject important parts of the retributive theory of punishment.

Third, if, as Anselm insisted, even the slightest offense against God is infinitely serious and thus deserves a permanent loss of happiness as a just recompense, then the idea, so essential to the retributive theory, that we can grade offenses and fit lesser punishments to lesser crimes appears to be in danger of collapsing. Many Christians do, it is true, speculate that gradations of punishment exist in hell; some sinners, they suggest, may experience greater pain than others, and some places in hell may be hotter than others. Augustine even tried to ameliorate his views concerning the fate of unbaptized infants by suggesting that “such infants as quit the body without being baptized will be involved in the mildest condemnation of all” ( On Merit and the Forgiveness of Sins, and the Baptism of Infants , Bk. I, Ch. 21 [ available online ]). But many retributivists would nonetheless respond as follows. If all of those in hell, including the condemned infants, are dead in the theological sense of being separated from God forever, and if this implies a permanent loss of both the beatific vision and every other conceivable source of worthwhile happiness, then they have all received a punishment so severe that the further grading of offenses seems pointless. We would hardly regard a king who executes every law-breaker, the jaywalker no less than the murderer, as just; nor would we feel much better if, in an effort to fit the punishment to the crime, the king should reserve the more “humane” forms of execution for the jaywalker. Once you make a permanent and irreversible loss of happiness the supposedly just penalty for the most minor offense, the only option left for more serious offenses is to pile on additional suffering. But at some point piling on additional suffering for more serious offenses seems utterly demonic, or at least so many retributivists would insist; and it does nothing to ameliorate a permanent loss of happiness for a minor offense or, as in the case of non-elect babies who die in infancy, for no real offense at all.

All of which brings one to what Marilyn McCord Adams and many others see as the most crucial question of all. How could any sin that a finite being commits in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and illusion deserve an infinite penalty as a just recompense? (See Adams 1993, 313).

Another set of objections to the Augustinian understanding of hell arises from the perspective of those who reject a retributive theory of punishment. According to Anselm and the Augustinians generally, no punishment that a sinner might endure over a finite period of time can justly compensate for the slightest offense against God. Anselm thus speculated that if no suffering of finite duration will fully satisfy the demands of justice, perhaps suffering of infinite duration will do the trick. But the truth, according to many critics, is that no suffering and no punishment of any duration could in and of itself compensate for someone’s wrongdoing. In the right circumstances punishment might be a means to something that satisfies the demands of justice, but it has no power to do so in and of itself. The Victorian visionary George MacDonald thus put it this way: “Punishment, or deserved suffering, is no equipoise to sin. It is no use laying it on the other scale. It will not move it a hair’s breadth. Suffering weighs nothing at all against sin” (MacDonald 1889, 510). Why not? Because punishment, whether it consists of additional suffering or a painless annihilation, does nothing in and of itself, MacDonald insisted, to cancel out a sin, to compensate or to make up for it, to repair the harm that it brings into our lives, or to heal the estrangement that makes it possible in the first place. [ 5 ] Neither does it justify God’s decision to permit the wrongdoing in the first place.

So what, theoretically, would make things right or fully satisfy justice in the event that someone should commit murder or otherwise act wrongly? Whereas the Augustinians insist that justice requires punishment, other religious writers insist that justice requires something very different, namely reconciliation and restoration (see, for example, Marshall, 2001). Only God, however, has the power to achieve true restoration in the case of murder, because divine omnipotence can resurrect the victims of murder just as easily as it can the victims of old age. According to George MacDonald, whose religious vision was almost the polar opposite of the Augustinian vision, perfect justice therefore requires, first, that sinners repent of their sin and turn away from everything that would separate them from God and from others; it requires, second, that God forgive repentant sinners and that they forgive each other; and it requires, third, that God overcome, perhaps with their own cooperation, any harm that sinners do either to others or to themselves. Augustinians typically object to the idea that divine justice, no less than divine love, requires that God forgive sinners and undertake the divine toil of restoring a just order. But MacDonald insisted that, even as human parents have an obligation to care for their children, so God has a freely accepted responsibility, as our Creator, to meet our moral and spiritual needs. God therefore owes us forgiveness for the same reason that human parents owe it to their children to forgive them in the event that they misbehave. Of course, precisely because they do forgive their children, loving parents may sometimes punish their children and even hold the feet of a child to the proverbial fire when this seems necessary for the child’s own welfare. And if the time should come when loving parents are required to respect the misguided choices of a rebellious teenager or an adult child, they will always stand ready to restore fellowship with a prodigal son or daughter in the event of a ruptured relationship.

We thus encounter two radically different religious visions of divine justice, both of which deserve a full and careful examination. According to the Augustinian vision, those condemned to hell are recipients of divine justice but are not recipients of divine mercy; hence justice and mercy are, according to this vision, radically different (perhaps even inconsistent) attributes of God. [ 6 ] But according to an alternative religious vision, as exemplified in the work of George MacDonald 1889 and J.A.T. Robinson 1968, God’s justice and mercy are the very same attribute in this sense: divine justice is altogether merciful even as divine mercy is altogether just.

3. Free-will Theodicies of Hell

Unlike the Augustinians, Arminian theologians emphasize the role that free will plays in determining one’s eternal destiny in heaven or hell; they also accept the so-called libertarian understanding of free will, according to which freedom and determinism are incompatible (see the entry on free will) ). Because not even an omnipotent being can causally determine a genuinely free choice, the reality of free will, they say, introduces into the universe an element that, from God’s perspective, is utterly random in that it lies outside of God’s direct causal control. Accordingly, if some person should freely act wrongly—or worse yet, freely reject God’s grace—in a given set of circumstances, then it was not within God’s power to induce this person to have freely acted otherwise, at least not in the exact same circumstances in which the person was left free to act wrongly. So in that sense, our human free choices, particularly the bad ones, are genuine obstacles that God must work around in order to bring a set of loving purposes to fruition. And this may suggest the further possibility that, with respect to some free persons, God cannot both preserve their their libertarian freedom in the matter and prevent them from freely continuing to reject God forever. As C. S. Lewis, an early 20th Century proponent of such a theodicy, once put it, “In creating beings with free will, omnipotence from the outset submits to the possibility of … defeat. … I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside” (Lewis 1944, 115).

The basic idea here is that hell, along with the self imposed misery it entails, is essentially a freely embraced condition rather than a forcibly imposed punishment ; [ 7 ] and because freedom and determinism are incompatible, the creation of free moral agents carries an inherent risk of ultimate tragedy. Whether essential to our personhood or not, free will is a precious gift, an expression of God’s love for us; and because the very love that seeks our salvation also respects our freedom, God will not prevent us from separating ourselves from him, even forever, if that is what we freely choose to do. So even though the perfectly loving God would never reject anyone, sinners can reject God and thus freely separate themselves from the divine nature; they not only have the power as free agents to reject God for a season, during the time when they are mired in ambiguity and subject to illusion, but they are also able to cling forever to the illusions that make such rejection possible in the first place.

But why suppose it even possible that a free creature should freely reject forever the redemptive will of a perfectly loving and infinitely resourceful God? In the relevant literature over the past several decades, advocates of a free-will theodicy of hell have offered at least three quite different answers to this question:

• Perhaps the most commonly expressed answer concerns the possibility of an irrevocable decision to reject God forever. Jerry Walls thus describes the damned as those who have made a decisive choice of evil (see Walls 1992, Ch. 5), Richard Swinburne suggests that “once our will is fixed for bad, we shall never [again] desire or seek what we have missed” because we have made an “irrevocable choice of character” (Swinburne 1989, 199), and R. Zachary Manis interprets Kierkegaard, whose view he defends, as suggesting that the “damned are so filled with hatred … so motivated by malice and spite … that they will to remain in their state of torment, all for the sake of demonstrating that they are in the right, and that God is in the wrong” (Manis 2016, 290).
• Another proposed answer rejects altogether the traditional idea that those in hell are lost without any further hope of restoration. Buckareff and Plug (2005) have thus argued from the very nature of the divine perfections (including perfect love) that God will always have “an open-door policy towards those in hell—making it [always] possible for those in hell to escape” (39); and similarly, Raymond VanArragon has argued that those in hell continue to reject God freely only if they retain the power to act otherwise and hence also the power to repent and be saved (see VanArragon 2010). Because the damned never lose forever their libertarian freedom in relation to God’s offer of salvation, in other words, and never lose forever the psychological possibility of genuine repentance, there is no irreversible finality in the so-called final judgment. [ 8 ] Still, the possibility remains, according to this view, that some will never avail themselves of the opportunity to escape from hell.
• A third proposed answer rests upon a Molinist perspective, according to which God’s omniscience includes what philosophers now call middle knowledge, which in turn includes far more than a simple foreknowledge of a person’s future free actions. It also includes a perfect knowledge uf what a person would have done freely in circumstances that will never even obtain. So with respect to the decision whether or not to create a given person and to place that person in a given set of circumstances, God can base this decision in part on a knowledge of what the person would do freely if created and placed in these precise circumstances—or if, for that matter, the person were placed in any other possible set of circumstances as well. From this Molinist perspective, William Lane Craig has defended the possibility that some free persons are utterly irredeemable in this sense: short of overriding their libertarian freedom, nothing God might do for them—whether it be to impart a special revelation. to administer an appropriate punishment, or to help them in some other way—will ever win them over or persuade them to repent as a means of becoming reconciled to God (Craig 1989). Craig himself calls this dreadful property of being irredeemable transworld damnation (184).

In part because it rests upon the idea of middle knowledge, which is itself controversial, Craig’s idea of transworld damnation may be the most controversial idea that any proponent of a free will theodicy of hell has put forward. It also raises the question of why a morally perfect God would create someone (or instantiate the individual essence of someone) whom God already knew in advance would be irredeemable. By way of an answer, Craig insists on the possibility that some persons would submit to God freely only in a world in which others should damn themselves forever; it is even possible, he insists, that God must permit a large number of people to damn themselves in order to fill heaven with a larger number of redeemed. Craig himself has put it this way:

It is possible that the terrible price of filling heaven is also filling hell and that in any other possible world which was feasible for God the balance between saved and lost was worse. It is possible that had God actualized a world in which there are less persons in hell, there would also have been less persons in heaven. It is possible that in order to achieve this much blessedness, God was forced to accept this much loss (1989, 183).

As this passage illustrates, Craig accepts at least the possibility that, because of free will, history includes an element of irreducible tragedy; he even accepts the possibility that if fewer people were damned to hell, then fewer people would have been saved as well. So perhaps God knows from the outset that a complete triumph over evil is unfeasible no matter what divine actions might be taken; as a result, God merely tries to minimize the defeat, to cut the losses, and in the process to fill heaven with more saints than otherwise would have been feasible. (For a critique of this reply, see Talbott 1992; for Craig’s rejoinder, see Craig 1993; and for a critique of Craig’s rejoinder, see Seymour 2000a.)

In any case, how one assesses each of the three answers above will depend upon how one understands the idea of moral freedom and the role it plays, if any, in someone landing in either heaven or hell. The first two answers also represent a fundamental disagreement concerning the existence of free will in hell and perhaps even the nature of free will itself. According to the first answer, the inhabitants of hell are those who have freely acquired a consistently evil will and an irreversibly bad moral character. So for the rest of eternity, these inhabitants of hell do not even continue rejecting God freely in any sense that requires the psychological possibility of choosing otherwise. But is such an irreversibly bad moral character even coherent or metaphysically possible? Not according to the second answer, which implies that a morally perfect God would never cease providing those in hell with opportunities for repentance and providing these opportunities in contexts where such repentance remains a genuine psychological possibility. All of which points once again to the need for a clearer understanding of the nature and purpose of moral freedom. (See section 5.1 below for some additional issues that arise in connection with freedom in heaven and hell.)

Given the New Testament imagery associated with Gehenna, the Lake of Fire, and the outer darkness—where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth”—the question is not how someone in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and misperception could freely choose separation from the divine nature over union with it; the question is instead how someone could both experience such separation (or the unbearable misery of hell, for example) and freely choose to remain in such a state forever. This is not a problem for the Augustinians because, according to them, the damned have no further choice in the matter once their everlasting punishment commences. But it is a problem for those free-will theists who believe that the damned freely embrace an eternal destiny apart from God, and the latter view requires, at the very least, a plausible account of the relevant freedom.

Now, as already indicated, those who embrace a free-will theodicy of hell typically appeal, in the words of Jonathan Kvanvig, to “a libertarian account of human freedom in order to provide a complete response to” the problem of hell (Kvanvig 2011, 54). But of course such a “complete response” would also require a relatively complete account of libertarian freedom. According to Kvanvig, “some formulation of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) correctly describes this notion of [libertarian] freedom”; and, as he also points out, this “principle claims that in order to act freely one must be able to do otherwise” (48). But at most PAP merely sets forth a necessary condition of someone acting freely in the libertarian sense, and it includes no requirement that a free choice be even minimally rational. So consider again the example, introduced in section 2.1 above, of a schizophrenic young man who kills his loving mother, believing her to be a sinister space alien who has devoured his real mother; and this time suppose further that he does so in a context in which PAP obtains and he categorically could have chosen otherwise (perhaps because he worries about possible retaliation from other sinister space aliens). Why suppose that such an irrational choice and action, even if not causally determined, would qualify as an instance of acting freely? Either our seriously deluded beliefs, particularly those with destructive consequences in our own lives, are in principle correctable by some degree of powerful evidence against them, or the choices that rest upon them are simply too irrational to qualify as free moral choices.

If that is true, then not just any causally undetermined choice, or just any agent caused choice, or just any randomly generated selection between alternatives will qualify as a free choice for which the choosing agent is morally responsible. Moral freedom also requires a minimal degree of rationality on the part of the choosing agent, including an ability to learn from experience, an ability to discern normal reasons for acting, and a capacity for moral improvement. With good reason, therefore, do we exclude lower animals, small children, the severely brain damaged, and perhaps even paranoid schizophrenics from the class of free moral agents. For, however causally undetermined some of their behaviors might be, they all lack some part of the rationality required to qualify as free moral agents. [ 9 ]

Now consider again the view of C. S. Lewis and many other Christians concerning the bliss that union with the divine nature entails, so they believe. and the objective horror that separation from it entails, and suppose that the outer darkness—that is, a soul suspended alone in nothingness, without even a physical order to experience and without any human relationships at all—should be the logical limit (short of annihilation) of possible separation from the divine nature. These ideas seem to lead naturally to a dilemma argument for the conclusion that a freely chosen eternal destiny apart from God is metaphysically impossible. For either a person S is fully informed about who God is and what both union with the divine nature and separation from it would entail, or S is not so informed. If S is fully informed and should choose a life apart from God anyway, then S’s choice would be utterly and almost inconceivably irrational; such a choice would fall well below the threshold required for moral freedom. And if S is not fully informed, then God can of course continue to work with S, subjecting S to new experiences, shattering S’s illusions, and correcting S’s misjudgments in perfectly natural ways that do not interfere with S’s freedom. Beyond that, for as long as S remains less than fully informed, S is simply in no position to reject the true God; S may reject a caricature of God, perhaps even a caricature of S’s own devising, but S is in no position to reject the true God. Therefore, in either case, whether S is fully informed or less than fully informed, it is simply not possible that S should reject the true God freely .

By way of a reply to this argument and in defense of his own free–will approach to hell—which, by the way, in no way excludes the possibility that some inhabitants of hell may eventually escape from it—Jerry Walls concedes that “the choice of evil is impossible for anyone who has a fully formed awareness that God is the source of happiness and sin the cause of misery” (Walls 1992, 133). But Walls also contends that, even if those in hell have rejected a caricature of God rather than the true God, it remains possible that some of them will finally make a decisive choice of evil and will thus remain in hell forever. He then makes a three-fold claim: first, that the damned have in some sense deluded themselves, second, that they have the power to cling to their delusions forever, and third, that God cannot forcibly remove their self-imposed deceptions without interfering with their freedom in relation to God (Walls 1992, Ch. 5).

For more detailed discussions of these and related issues, see Swinburne 1989 (Ch. 12), Craig 1989 and 1993, Talbott 2007, Walls 1992 (Ch. 5), 2004a, and 2004b, Kronen and Reitan 2011 (142–146), and Manis 2016 and 2019. See also sections 4.2 and 5.1 below.

Consider now the two conditions under which we humans typically feel justified in interfering with the freedom of others (see Talbott 1990a, 38). We feel justified, on the one hand, in preventing one person from doing irreparable harm—or more accurately, harm that no human being can repair—to another; a loving father may thus report his own son to the police in an effort to prevent the son from committing murder. We also feel justified, on the other hand, in preventing our loved ones from doing irreparable harm to themselves; a loving father may thus physically overpower his daughter in an effort to prevent her from committing suicide.

Now one might, it is true, draw a number of faulty inferences from such examples as these, in part because we humans tend to think of irreparable harm within the context of a very limited timeframe, a person’s life on earth. Harm that no human being can repair may nonetheless be harm that God can repair. It does not follow, therefore, that a loving and omnipotent God, whose goal is the reconciliation of the world, would prevent every suicide and every murder; it follows only that such a God would prevent every harm that not even omnipotence could repair at some future time, and neither suicide nor murder is necessarily an instance of that kind of harm. So even though a loving God might sometimes permit murder, such a God would never permit one person to annihilate the soul of another or to destroy the very possibility of future happiness in another; and even though a loving God might sometimes permit suicide, such a God would never permit genuine loved ones to destroy the very possibility of future happiness in themselves either. The latter conclusion concerning suicide is no doubt the more controversial, and Jonathan Kvanvig in particular has challenged it (see Kvanvig 1993, 83–88). But whatever the resolution of this particular debate, perhaps both parties can agree that God, as Creator, would deal with a much larger picture and a much longer timeframe than that with which we humans are immediately concerned.

So the idea of irreparable harm—that is, of harm that not even omnipotence could ever repair—is critical at this point. It is most relevant, perhaps, in cases where someone imagines sinners freely choosing annihilation (Kvanvig), or imagines them freely making a decisive and irreversible choice of evil (Walls), or imagines them freely locking the gates of hell from the inside (C. S. Lewis). But proponents of the so-called escapism understanding of hell can plausibly counter that hell is not necessarily an instance of such irreparable harm, and Raymond VanArragon in particular raises the possibility that God might permit some loved ones to continue forever rejecting God in a non-decisive way that would not, at any given time, harm them irreparably (see VanArragon 2010, 37ff; see also Kvanvig 2011, 52). Here it is perhaps worth noting how broadly VanArragon defines the term “rejecting God” (see 2010, 30–31)—so broadly, in fact, that any sin for which one is morally responsible would count as an instance of someone rejecting God. He thus explicitly states that rejecting God in his broad sense requires neither an awareness of God nor a conscious decision, however confused it may be, to embrace a life apart from God. Accordingly, persistent sinning without end would never result, given such an account, in anything like the traditional hell, whether the latter be understood as a lake of fire, the outer darkness, or any other condition that would reveal the full horror of separation from God (given the traditional Christian understanding of such separation). Neither would such a sinner ever achieve a state of full clarity. For given VanArragon’s understanding of libertarian freedom, continuing to sin forever would require a perpetual context of ambiguity, ignorance, and misperception.

4. The Universalist Rejection of Everlasting Separation

A theist of any religion who accepts the traditional idea of everlasting punishment, or even the idea of an everlasting separation from God, must either reject the idea that that all human sinners are equal objects of God’s redemptive love (see proposition (1) in section 1 above) or reject the idea that God’s redemptive love will triumph in the end and bring reconciliation to each and every object of such divine love (see proposition (2)). But a theist who accepts proposition (1), as the Arminians do, and also accepts proposition (2), as the Augustinians do, can then reason deductively that almighty God will indeed triumph in the end and successfully win over each and every human sinner. From the perspective of an interpretation of the Christian Bible, moreover, Christian universalists need only accept the exegetical arguments of the Arminian theologians in support of (1) and the exegetical arguments of the Augustinian theologians in support of (2); that alone would enable them to build an exegetical case for a universalist interpretation of the Bible as a whole.

One argument in support of proposition (1) contends that love (especially in the form of willing the very best for another) is inclusive in this sense: even where it is logically possible for a loving relationship to come to an end, two persons are bound together in love only when their purposes and interests, even the conditions of their happiness, are so logically intertwined as to be inseparable. If a mother should love her child even as she loves herself, for example, then any evil that befalls the child is likewise an evil that befalls the mother and any good that befalls the child is likewise a good that befalls the mother; hence, it is simply not possible, according to this argument, for God to will the best for the mother without also willing the best for the child as well.

For similar reasons, Kenneth Einar Himma has argued that some widespread moral intuitions, “together with Christian exclusivism and the traditional doctrine of hell, entail that it is morally wrong for anyone to have children” (Himma 2011, 198). That argument seems especially forceful in the context of Augustinian theology, which implies that, for all any set of potential parents know, any child they might produce could be one of the reprobate whom God has hated from the beginning and has destined from the beginning for eternal torment in hell. The title of Himma’s article, “Birth as a Grave Misfortune,” would seem to describe such cases perfectly. (See Bawulski 2013 for a reply to Himma and Himma 2016 for Himma’s rejoinder.)

In any event, Arminians and universalists both regard an acceptance of proposition (1) as essential to a proper understanding of divine grace. Could God truly extend grace to an elect mother, they might ask, by making the baby she loves with all her heart the object of a divine hatred and do this, as the Augustinians say was done in the case of Esau, even before the child was born or had done anything good or bad? As the Arminians and the universalists both view the matter, the Augustinians have embraced a logical impossibility: the idea that God could extend a genuine love and compassion to one person even as God withholds it from some of that person’s own loved ones. They therefore reject the doctrine of limited election on the ground that it undermines the concept of grace altogether. Where they disagree, of course, is over the issue of whether the objects of God’s love can resist his grace forever. Whereas Arminians hold that, given the reality of free will, we humans can, if we so choose, resist God’s grace forever, universalists tend to believe that, even though we can resist God’s grace for a while, perhaps even for a substantial period of time (while mired in ignorance and ambiguity), we cannot resist it forever. So the issue between these two camps, the Arminians and the universalists, finally comes down to the question of which position has the resources for a better account of human freedom and of God’s respect for it (see, for example, the exchange between Walls 2004 and Talbott 2004). Or, to put the question in a slightly different way, which position, if either, requires that God interfere with human freedom (or human autonomy) in morally inappropriate ways? As the following section should illustrate, the answer to this question may be far more complicated than some might at first imagine.

A widely held assumption among free–will theists is that no guarantee of universal reconciliation is even possible apart from God’s willingness to interfere with human freedom in those cases where someone persists in rejecting God and his grace. Indeed, Jonathan Kvanvig goes so far as to describe universalism as a “view, according to which God finally decides that if one has not freely chosen Heaven, there will come a time when one will be brought to Heaven against one’s will. One will experience, in this sense, coercive redemption at some point” (Kvanvig 2011, 14). But in fact, no universalist—not even a theological determinist—holds that God sometimes coerces people into heaven against their will . For although many Christian universalists believe that God provided Saul of Tarsus with certain revelatory experiences that changed his mind in the end and therefore changed his will as well, this is a far cry from claiming that he was coerced against his will. Kvanvig’s own understanding of libertarian freedom, moreover, already establishes the logical possibility that God can bring about a universal reconciliation without in any way interfering with human freedom.

But in addition to defending the bare logical possibility of such a universal reconciliation on libertarian grounds, Eric Reitan has set forth an intriguing argument, which he calls “the Argument from Infinite Opportunity,” for the conclusion that God can effectively guarantee the salvation of all sinners without ever interfering with anyone’s libertarian freedom (see Kronen and Reitan 2011, Ch. 8). The basic idea here is that a sinner could have, if necessary, infinitely many opportunities over an unending stretch of time to repent and to submit to God freely. So consider this. Although it is logically possible, given the normal philosophical view of the matter, that a fair coin would never land heads up, not even once in a trillion tosses, such an eventuality is so incredibly improbable and so close to an impossibility that no one need fear it actually happening. Similarly, in working with some sinner S (shattering S’s illusions and correcting S’s ignorance), God could presumably bring S to a point, just short of actually determining S’s choice, where S would see the choice between horror and bliss with such clarity that the probability of S repenting and submitting to God would be extremely high. Or, if you prefer, drop the probability to .5. Over an indefinitely long period of time, S would still have an indefinitely large number of opportunities to repent; and so, according to Reitan, the assumption that sinners retain their libertarian freedom together with the Christian doctrine of the preservation of the saints yields the following result. We can be just as confident that God will eventually win over all sinners (and do so without causally determining their choices), as we can be that a fair coin will land heads up at least once in a trillion tosses.

A possible reply to Reitan’s argument, as just briefly summarized, is that our free choices can sometimes create a hardened character, which in turn places constraints on future free choices. But either the hardened character of those in hell removes forever the psychological possibility of their choosing to repent, or it does not. If it does remove that psychological possibility, then they do not continue rejecting God freely in the sense that the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) requires; and if it does not remove that psychological possibility, then Reitan’s argument remains pertinent. Beyond that, the most critical issue at this point concerns the relationship between free choice, on the one hand, and character formation, on the other. Our moral experience does seem to provide evidence that a pattern of bad choices can sometimes produce bad habits and a bad moral character, but it also seems to provide evidence that a pattern of bad choices can sometimes bring one closer to a dramatic conversion of some kind. So why not suppose that a pattern of bad choices might be even more useful to God than a pattern of good choices would be in teaching the hard lessons we sometimes need to learn and in thus rendering a dramatic conversion increasingly more probable over the long run? Are not the destructive consequences that alcoholism can have in the lives of some people the very thing that sometimes motivates them to seek help and even to give up alcohol altogether? [ 10 ] For more on the issue of free will and character formation, see Swinburne 1989 (Ch. 12), Sennett 1999, Murray 1999, the rejoinder to Murray in Kronen and Reitan 2011 (170–177), the discussion of character formation in Talbott 2010 (9–13), and section 5.1 below.

Suppose that a man is standing atop the Empire State Building with the intent of committing suicide by jumping off and plunging to his death below. One obvious way in which God could interfere with the man’s freedom in this matter would be simply to cause him to change his mind; that would effectively prevent the suicide from occurring. But there is another, less obvious, way in which God could interfere with the man’s freedom to commit suicide; God could permit him to leap from the building and then cause him to float gently to the ground like a feather; that too would effectively prevent the suicide from occurring. So one is not free to accomplish some action or to achieve some end, unless God permits one to experience the chosen end, however confusedly one may have chosen it; and neither is one free to separate oneself from God, or from the ultimate source of human happiness as Christians understand it, unless God permits one to experience the very life one has chosen and the full measure of misery that it entails.

Given the almost universal Christian assumption that a complete separation from the divine nature (in the outer darkness, for example) would be an objective horror, it seems to follow that even God would face a dilemma with respect to human freedom. For either God could permit sinners to follow a path that ultimately leads, according to Christian theology, to an objective horror and permit them to continue following it for as long as they freely choose to do so, or God could at some point prevent them from continuing along their freely chosen path. If God should permit sinners to continue along their freely chosen path—the one that unbeknownst to them will inevitably lead them to an objective horror—then their own experience, provided they are rational enough to qualify as free moral agents, would eventually shatter their illusions and remove their libertarian freedom to continue along that path. Alternatively, if God should prevent sinners from achieving their freely chosen goal of separating themselves from the divine nature, then they would have no real freedom to do so. In neither case, therefore, would sinners be able to retain forever their libertarian freedom to continue separating themselves from the divine nature and from the ultimate source of human happiness.

If this argument should be sound, it also seems to follow that, no matter how tenaciously some sinners might pursue a life apart from God and resist the divine purpose for their lives, God would have, as a sort of last resort, a sure-fire way to shatter the illusions that make their rebellion possible in the first place. To do so, God need only honor their own free choices and permit them to experience the very life they have confusedly chosen for themselves. Why interfere with someone’s freedom, after all, at the very point where honoring that freedom would in fact teach a hard lesson and therefore do the most good? Would that not be utterly incompatible with God’s moral character, as most Christians understand it?

However one might answer such a question, the Christian universalist’s understanding of the nature and scope of God’s irresistible grace is very different from the Augustinian understanding of it. For Christian universalists not only reject the Augustinian idea that God’s irresistible grace extends to a limited elect only; they also hold that God’s judgment of sin is essentially a matter of permitting sinners to experience the very condition of separation they have confusedly chosen for themselves. Many Christian universalists are thus fond of quoting St. Paul’s remark that “God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all” (Rom. 11:32—NIV), and they interpret this as a declaration that divine judgment, however harsh it may seem, is itself an expression of divine mercy and is therefore part of what makes God’s grace irresistible in the end. If, as a last resort, God should allow a sinner to live for a while without even an implicit experience of the divine nature, [ 11 ] the resulting horror, they believe, will at last shatter any illusion that some good is achievable apart from God; and such a discovery will finally elicit a cry for help of a kind that, however faint it may be, is just what God needs in order to begin and eventually to complete the process of reconciliation.

In sum, opponents of universalism must either restrict God’s redemptive love to a limited elect or admit that God’s love will suffer an ultimate defeat in this sense: God’s own desire for the human race as a whole, as expressed in a place like 1 Timothy 2:4, will never be satisfied. Because the Arminians and the universalists agree that God could never love an elect mother even as, at the same time, God rejects her beloved baby, they both agree that the first alternative is utterly impossible. But because the issues surrounding the idea of free will are so complex and remain the source of so much philosophical controversy, perhaps they can also agree that a free–will theodicy of hell is the best philosophical account currently available for a doctrine of everlasting separation from God.

5. Heaven: Three Critical Issues

Rarely, if ever, are Christian theologians very specific about what heaven will supposedly be like, and there are no doubt good reasons for this. For most of them would deny that the primary sources of the Christian faith, such as the Bible, provide much information on this particular matter. But three issues have typically arisen in the relevant philosophical literature: first, because so many of the recent Christian philosophers have focused upon free will theodicies of hell, it is hardly surprising that the issue of freedom in heaven should likewise have arisen; a second issue is whether the misery of loved ones in hell would undermine the blessedness of those in heaven; and a third issue is whether immortality of any kind would ultimately lead to tedium, boredom, and an insipid life.

Like the arguments over universalism and human freedom, as briefly summarized in section 4.2 above, the issue of freedom in heaven once again illustrates the need for a reasonably clear and complete account of free will. It also illustrates how easily a purely verbal dispute, which is an apparent dispute that arises from different uses of the same term, can sometimes disguise itself as a genuine disagreement over some matter of substance. With respect to the issue of freedom in heaven, here are a couple of additional examples to consider: (a) the honest banker whose deeply-rooted moral and religious convictions make it psychologically impossible for him to accept a bribe in a given situation, and (b) the mother whose great love for her newborn baby makes it psychologically impossible for her knowingly to harm her beloved child physically. The question of whether there is freedom in heaven seems relevantly similar to the question of whether our honest banker freely refuses the bribe and whether our loving mother freely refuses to do anything she knows would harm her baby physically.

Consider now three different non-compatibilist accounts of what it means to act freely and the implications that each of these accounts has for the possibility of freedom in heaven. According to the first account, briefly introduced in section 3.1 above, freedom always requires that PAP obtain; that is, one is free with respect to some action A in a given set of circumstances only if it is within one’s power to do A in that set of circumstances and also within one’s power to refrain from doing A. So if no one in heaven, as Christians typically understand it, will ever have the slightest inclination to disobey God—if, that is, it would be as psychologically impossible for the saints in heaven to disobey God as it would be for our loving mother to torture her beloved baby to death, then there can be no freedom of that kind in heaven. This is not a matter for dispute; it is instead merely a matter of being clear about a specified use of the term “freedom.” Either the saints in heaven retain a robust power to disobey God and to sin, or they do not have the kind of freedom that PAP specifies. Or, to put it another way: if the saints in heaven do have this kind of freedom even as Lucifer, according to one traditional interpretation of his supposed fall from perfection, was able to commit the primal sin in heaven, then they also retain the power to sin in heaven (see Matheson 2018, 66).

A second account carries no implication that having the relevant freedom in the present always requires an ability to do otherwise in the present , though it does require an ability to do otherwise at various times in one’s life history. For according to Robert Kane, “Agents with free will . . . must be such that they could have done otherwise on some occasions of their life histories with respect to some character- or motive-forming acts by which they make themselves into the kinds of persons they are” (Kane 1998, 72). In a similar vein, James F. Sennett defends the free will of the saints in heaven by in effect arguing that they have freely chosen their own moral character. “A character that is libertarian freely chosen,” he therefore suggests, “is the only kind of character that can determine compatibilist free choices” (Sennett 1999, 74; and for a similar view, albeit tweaked a bit, see Pawl and Timpe 2008). The basic idea here seems to be that one’s own motives and character can determine a free action in the present only when one is fully responsible for the motives and character traits that determine this action.

A possible difficulty here is to provide a coherent account, not to mention an empirically verifiable account, of how certain undetermined choices buried in a life history might render one responsible for one’s present motives and character traits. This is a problem in part because, as Manuel Vargas points out, “even freely chosen features of our lives and ourselves can, because of our epistemic limitations, yield unanticipated consequences” (Vargas 2005, 282)—as, for instance, when someone sincerely cultivates moral integrity and inadvertently produces some of the worst character traits: moral rigidity, self-righteousness, and a lack of compassion. Similarly, someone’s worst choices and the lessons learned from them may be the very thing that has the most profound effect on the development of a good character. So given our epistemic limitations and the unanticipated consequences of our free choices, is it any wonder that many Christian theologians view a good character as a gift from God rather than as something for which we can credit ourselves?

A third account of freedom, sometimes neglected by those who emphasize the importance of human freedom, is Susan Wolf’s Reason View, according to which “the freedom necessary for responsibility consists in the ability (or freedom) to do the right thing for the right reasons” (Wolf 1990, 94). But unlike the autonomy view, as she calls it, such freedom does not require the ability to refrain from doing the right thing for the right reasons. Wolf thus commits herself to the following asymmetry: whereas committing a wrong (or immoral) act freely requires an ability to do otherwise and therefore to refrain from acting wrongly, doing the right thing for the right reasons freely does not require an ability to act otherwise. Such a view takes full advantage of the idea, expressed in section 3.1 above, that the relevant freedom requires a minimal degree of rationality, and it might be modified slightly as follows. If a relevant threshold of rationality requires only an ability to make reasonable judgments, rather than infallible ones, concerning the best course of action, then perhaps we can say that freedom consists in the ability to follow one’s own reasonable judgment concerning the best course of action in a given situation (see Talbott 2009, 388). Whether one accepts such a modification or not, something like Wolf’s Reason View seems to accord perfectly with the religious view that those in heaven are the freest of all created persons, even as those in hell remain in bondage to sin (a bondage similar to an alcoholic’s bondage to alcohol). Such a view also seems to accord perfectly with St. Paul’s view that salvation is a means by which the will is released from its bondage to sin.

Assuming that love ties people’s interests together in the way described in section 4.1 above, one might then wonder how God could preserve the happiness of those in heaven who know that some of their own loved ones are suffering forever in hell. For the question inevitably arises, “How could anyone remain happy knowing that a genuine loved one, however corrupted, is destined to be miserable forever ”. When a reporter asked the mother of Ted Bundy, a serial murderer of young women, whether she could still support a son who had become a monster, her answer provided a poignant illustration of the problem. “Of course I support him,” she declared, as her eyes filled with tears and her body literally began shaking. “He is my son. I love him. I have to support him.” She obviously did not support his monstrous crimes, and neither did she even object to the severity of his punishment. But still, one wonders how this suffering woman—a committed Christian, by the way—could ever achieve supreme happiness knowing that the son she continued to love was destined to be lost forever without any future hope of redemption.

Such considerations have led some, including the 19 th Century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, to argue that the misery of those in hell would undermine altogether the blessedness of the redeemed in heaven (see Schleiermacher 1830, 721–722; Kronen and Reitan 2011, 80–89; and Talbott 1990b, 237–241). But others have argued that God could always shield forever the redeemed in heaven from painful memories of the lost in hell. William Lane Craig thus raises the possibility that God could simply “obliterate” from the minds of the redeemed “any knowledge of lost persons so that they experience no pangs of remorse for them” (Craig, 1991, 306). Given the widespread theological view, which Craig seems to accept, that billions of people will eventually be lost forever, one issue here concerns how much of some people’s minds, particularly those whose entire family is lost forever, God would have to wipe out in order to accomplish such a strategy. Another concerns how God, as an infinitely loving being, might expunge the infinitely more painful memories from his own mind. But the main issue to be resolved here is whether blissful ignorance qualifies as a worthwhile form of happiness at all.

As a matter of historical fact, in any case, some of the most influential theologians in the Western tradition, including some who are widely admired as heroes of faith, have not only made an eternal torture chamber an important part of their teaching about hell; they seem also to have gloried in the idea that the torments of those writhing in hell forever will increase the joy of those in heaven. Jonathan Edwards thus wrote: “When the saints in glory … shall see how miserable others of their fellow-creatures are, who were naturally in the same circumstances with themselves; when they shall see the smoke of their torment, and the raging of the flames of their burning, and hear their dolorous shrieks and cries, and consider that they [the saints] in the mean time are in the most blissful state and shall surely be in it to all eternity; how will they rejoice!” (Edwards 1834, sec. II [ available online ]). Remarkably, Edwards was also a theological determinist who held that God determined from the beginning to bring a huge number of people to a horrific end and did so for the precise purpose of increasing the joy of the elect in heaven. He even insisted, contra Craig, that the inhabitants of heaven and hell will be acutely aware of each other’s condition; so even as the torments of former loved ones in hell will contribute to the joy of those in heaven, so the joy of former loved ones in heaven will contribute to the psychological torment of those in hell. He thus made the following kind of warning an important part of his preaching: “How will you bear to see your parents, who in this life had so dear an affection for you, now without any love to you … How will you bear to see and hear them praising the Judge, for his justice exercised in pronouncing this sentence, and hearing it with holy joy in their countenances, and shouting forth the praises and hallelujahs of God and Christ on that account?” (sec. IV).

As horrifying as such descriptions are apt to appear to someone such as Ted Bundy’s mother, perhaps all parties can agree on one thing at least. If justice were to require that one suffer eternally for sins that God himself causally determined, then such suffering would have to be a source of satisfaction, if not outright bliss, on the part of any fair-minded person witnessing it. But since, as they say, one person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens, [ 12 ] a critic of Edwards will simply reply in the following way. No fair-minded person would find satisfaction in someone’s experiencing eternal torment as punishment for even the worst of sins, particularly in the case of sins that God himself has causally determined; therefore, such torment is not what justice requires. According to Edwards’s own theology, moreover, he was no less deserving of eternal torment himself than are those who suffer in hell. Schleiermacher and many others therefore find it hard to understand how those who receive special favor in this regard could be so deliriously happy in the knowledge that some of their own loved ones do not receive a similar special favor. [ 13 ]

A third issue concerning heaven that sometimes arises is whether everlasting bliss is even a possible state of affairs. Bernard Williams has thus suggested “that immortality would be, where conceivable at all, intolerable” (in Fischer 1993, 73). Commenting on a play by Karel Capek about a women who at age 42 receives immortality and by age 342 no longer wants to live, Williams wrote: “Her trouble was, it seems, boredom: a boredom connected with the fact that everything that could happen and make sense to one human being of 42 had already happened to her” by age 342 (82).

Such a statement is reminiscent of a quotation often attributed to Charles H. Duell, who became commissioner of the U.S. patent office in 1898. According to legend, Duell declared that everything that can be invented has already been invented; and even though this wonderful story is probably apocryphal, it nonetheless illustrates in a humorous way the possible consequences of an impoverished imagination. It would hardly take even 30 years, depending upon the circumstances, for a given life to become dull and insipid. But the idea that a healthy person could exhaust all the possibilities for adventure and meaningful experience in a mere 300 years will strike many as simply preposterous. A mere 300 years is virtually nothing, it is true, when compared to a life without end. So the real issue is whether it is logically possible that an unending life (in which one retains one’s identity as the same person) should be filled with unending joy and ever increasing opportunities for novel and meaningful experiences.

Addressing this very issue, John Martin Fischer writes: “Remember [the possibility] that certain … of one’s family and friends also have the relevant sort of immortality. It seems to me that under such circumstances one could live an attractive life characterized by a desirable mix of fulfilling activities” (Fischer 1993, 10—his italics). Might not an unending life even increase the possibilities for such a desirable mix? A favorite symphony not heard for a hundred years or so might be experienced as utterly fresh and exciting. And even if we set aside anything that might raise a controversy about personal identity, the mere discovery of an unexpected means of traversing our extravagant universe, with its billions of galaxies and billions of star systems within each of them, might open up—for adventurous spirits anyway—incredible possibilities for new and exciting experiences. Nor should we ignore the further possibility of experiencing infinitely many other realms and universes that are not spatially contiguous with our own. Pursuing Fischer’s idea of a desirable mix even further, a longer life could also increase the chances for the experience of boredom itself to fit into a larger context of meaningful experience. In caring for her baby, for example, a mother typically performs many mundane tasks that might seem utterly tedious were it not for the joy of interacting with her baby and of watching it grow and flourish. Similarly, St. Paul found even the tedium of prison to be tolerable, so he claimed, because he saw it as part of a larger story that he believed to be both true and glorious. So why allow, many religious people would ask, an impoverished imagination to exclude the very possibility of an over-arching story arc perpetually giving fresh meaning to our individual lives?

Still, all of that having been said, Williams’s view concerning the inevitably tedious nature of an unending life is not that far removed from the religious view that in our present unperfected condition we are not yet fit for eternity and not yet capable of experiencing the most worthwhile forms of happiness; indeed, given our present condition, some would claim, we might even turn heaven itself into a hellish experience. And if that be true, then the task of rendering someone fit for eternal joy may be far more complicated, even for an omnipotent being, than one might have imagined. As many religions including Christianity teach, we must first learn to love properly before we can experience enduring happiness, and this requires that we also be purged of all selfish tendencies, all lust for power over others, every temptation to benefit ourselves at the expense of others, and anything else that might separate one person from another. Right here, of course, is where Williams would question whether a suitably transformed person would be the same individual as the unperfected person that existed previously. But none of our moral imperfections, a religious person might retort, can coherently be numbered among our essential properties—as if we could never progress morally and never learn to become more loving persons. So here, perhaps, is the sum of the matter from a religious perspective: the more self-absorbed we become, the more tedious and dreary our lives inevitably become over time. But the more outwardly focused we become in loving relationships, the more joyful and meaningful our lives also become over time.

In any case, the controversies associated with Williams’s understanding of immortality are also relevant to the problem of evil. For the same considerations that lead some to wonder whether immortality would eventually become dreadfully boring may also lead some of the religious to consider favorably the following hypothesis. For all we know, an environment such as the one we live in—an environment in which one encounters real threats and dangers of a temporary kind, where one person’s temporary welfare may depend upon the choices of others and upon natural forces over which one has limited or no control, where a quest for truth and genuine discoveries about the glories of God’s creation are possible, and where moral failure would likely provide ample opportunities for repentance, forgiveness, and atonement—for all we know, such an environment is an important part of the process whereby God renders us fit for eternal joy. Although the problem of evil is the subject of another entry (see the entry on The Problem of Evil ), the relevant point for the topic of heaven is just this: one need not think of heaven (or the coming age, as the Gospel writers sometimes refer to it) as a static ethereal realm in which there is nothing to do. One might instead suppose that God will never stop creating additional persons to love and additional realms for us to experience and that we will always have important roles to play, as Paul hinted in Ephesians 2:7, in this ongoing process of creation and revelation.

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• Jordan, J., 2012, “The Topography of Divine Love,” Faith and Philosophy , 29: 53–69.
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• –––, 2020, “The Limits of Divine Love,” in O. Crisp, J. Arcadi, and J. Wessling (eds.), Love: Human and Divine: Contemporary Essays in Systematic and Philosophical Theology , New York: T&T Clark: 81–95.
• Kane, Robert, 1998, The Significance of Free Will , Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
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• Knight, G., 1997, “Universalism and the Greater Good: A Response to Talbott,” Faith and Philosophy , 14: 98–103.
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• Küng, H., 1984, Eternal Life? E. Quinn (trans.), Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
• Kvanvig, J., 1993, The Problem of Hell , New York: Oxford University Press.
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• Lewis, C. S., 1944, The Problem of Pain , New York: The MacMillan Company.
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• Pawl, T. and K. Timpe, 2008, “Incompatibilism, Sin, and Free Will in Heaven,” Faith and Philosophy , 26 398–419.
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• –––, 2009, “God, Freedom, and Human Destiny,” Faith and Philosophy , 26: 378–397.
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• –––, 2020, “In Defense of the Loving Parent Analogy,” in O. Crisp, J. Arcadi, and J. Wessling (eds.), Love: Human and Divine: Contemporary Essays in Systematic and Philosophical Theology , New York: T&T Clark: 97–112.
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• –––, 2010, “Is it Possible to Freely Reject God Forever?” in Buenting 2010: 29–43
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• Walker, D. P., 1964, The Decline of Hell , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Walls, J., 1992, Hell: The Logic of Damnation , Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
• –––, 2002, Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2003, “A Philosophical Critique of Talbott’s Universalism” in Universal Salvation? The Current Debate , R. Parry and C. Partridge (eds.), Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 105–124.
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• Williams, Bernard, 1973, “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” reprinted in J. M. Fischer, The Metaphysics of Death, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993, 73–93.
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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Kvanvig, Jonathan, “Heaven and Hell”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/heaven-hell/ >. [This was the previous entry on heaven and hell in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy —see the version history .]
• Several texts in the bibliography are available online in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (host: Calvin College).
• Augustine, On Merit and the Forgiveness of Sins, and the Baptism of Infants . New Advent website: The Fathers of the Church.
• Keith DeRose, “ Universalism and the Bible ”.
• Prosblogion , a blog in the philosophy of religion.

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Paradise Understood: New Philosophical Essays about Heaven

T. Ryan Byerly and Eric J. Silverman, (eds.), Paradise Understood: New Philosophical Essays about Heaven, Oxford University Press, 2017, 365 pp., $110.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198794301.

Reviewed by Evan Fales, University of Iowa

Here is a new volume about heaven, a topic to which not very many anthologies have been devoted in the recent Anglo-American philosophical literature. It is a collection of 17 essays, paired to cover eight topics that have challenged philosophical and theological thought about human existence in the afterlife in heaven. It appears that all the authors are Christian, or at least writing from within the Judeo-Christian soteriological perspective.

The afterlife raises a number of perplexities, which we might place under two general kinds. There are puzzles about what the goodness of heavenly existence consists in for the saints; and there are questions of a metaphysical and epistemological nature about what it is to experience eternal life in an incorruptible state of beatitude. The two are, of course, in many ways interconnected.

Those who (like myself) are entirely skeptical about the very existence of an afterlife, and a heaven -- or hell -- in which it will be domiciled, will likely be inclined to dismiss such a project as a delusory exercise, and a waste of philosophical effort. But that would be overly hasty. Anyone who finds thought experiments heuristically illuminating can (with a bit of thought) see that topics, such as this, in the philosophy of religion are a fertile source of conundrums whose exploration can illuminate issues that theists and atheists alike puzzle over.

Thus, reflections on the goodness of heaven proceed under the constraint that a heavenly existence is supposed to be maximally good for those who achieve it, by asking what, in fact, such a maximally good existence might look like. We are allowed, in constructing such an ideal, to remove other constraints (such as those imposed by the possession of ordinary human bodies subjected to ordinary processes of deterioration). But what constraints, exactly, are to be removed, and why? Here, our authors appear to be guided by two primary considerations: congruence with what hints the Bible, especially the New Testament, provides, and intuitions about the ideal conditions for human flourishing.

Puzzles attend both aims. First, the lineaments of Biblical eschatology are, like so much else in Scripture, all too often notoriously unclear and historically understood in diverse ways. A quick example: it is almost universally supposed that the afterlife endures for eternity. But the New Testament describes it as lasting for an αίών (literally, an eon), which can mean an age, or long period (it having been common to divide history into such ages). Now a good case can be made for understanding αίώνιον in this context to mean 'everlasting,' 'without end' (cp., e.g., Mt. 25:46); but then it appears that punishment for the damned is also everlasting -- which chafes against universalism (the view that all are eventually saved, stoutly defended in some quarters, although only in the present volume for animals -- see Shawn Graves, Blake Hereth, and Tyler John). With one commendable exception (Richard Tamburro), the contributors to this volume seem not particularly concerned about such exegetical difficulties. And for philosophical purposes, though not soteriological ones, perhaps it doesn't matter that much: it remains an interesting question whether life everlasting is a condition to be desired, and if so, under what conditions.

The range of issues that fall under our second heading are more metaphysical and epistemological. They include questions about how much the saints in heaven know (Ted Poston, Jonathan Kvanvig), about the status of morality and freedom among the citizens of paradise (Rachel Lu, Timothy Pawl and Kevin Timpe, Brian Boeninger and Robert Garcia, Richard Tamburro, Katherine Rogers), and about the metaphysics of resurrection (Robert Audi, Eric Yang and Stephen Davis, Christopher Brown, Hud Hudson). Here, we inevitably confront the possibility of miracles, the mereology and mechanics of resurrection, criteria of personal identity, and the location of paradise, inter alia .

I do not have nearly the space required to do justice to all the contributions to this volume -- those mentioned, and a couple of others as well. So, with due apologies, I shall have to be selective, my comments guided mainly by my own interests and reactions, rather than the intrinsic merit of individual essays. The volume begins with a helpful introductory survey by the editors, followed by an essay by Eric Silverman that tackles the question whether the saints exist in a state of stasis or can undergo change, and one by Rogers that comments on a range of positions defended by other contributors, in the light of views staked out by Anselm.

Silverman tackles a dilemma created by the doctrine that our heavenly state is one of perfection (on the one hand), which seems to suggest that any deviation from "peak experience" can only be a come-down, and the fear that eternal bliss would be a recipe for crushing boredom. There certainly are passages, e.g. in Revelation, that suggest that various activities are on the menu, but they seem heavily weighted toward praise and adoration. Might we be so changed (1 Cor. 15:51-56) that these activities are infinitely engaging, never tedious? Perhaps: but would such monomania be an improvement, or something of a caricature of the fulfilment of the many facets of our teleological ordering? Silverman plumps, plausibly I should think, for a heavenly program that makes room for the pursuit and realization of a wide variety of goods, and of increasing appreciation of them over time. At stake, in any event, are fundamental questions about human felicitude and, correspondingly, about human nature. How much could God change our natures when the trumpet sounds, in the interest of human beatitude, before we have become no longer human, and thus no longer genidentical with the human seeds from which we sprang?

In several entries, this theme is carried further in explorations of the range of cognitive and affective states that the saints might be expected to enjoy. "He will wipe away every tear" (Rev. 21:4): does that mean that the saints will not -- perhaps even will be unable to -- experience doubt, sorrow, regret, remorse, sympathy, and the like? If so, are not the saints affectively impoverished in ways that preclude the exercise of a whole range of virtues?

Lu offers us a tour of the positions of major theologians of the medieval period respecting the debate over which virtues will be possessed by the saints, and which will be left behind. At stake are certain theological claims (e.g. Aquinas' distinction between natural and infused virtues), but also exploration of the teloi with which the various virtues are associated, and questions that emerge respecting the relevance of those ends to a heavenly existence.

Several contributors consider whether various affective and developmental states are plausible contributors to the psychological terrain of the saved. Could the virtuous increase in virtue, even indefinitely, during their everlasting paradisical careers? Pawl and Timpe argue that (at least in certain respects) they could: there's always room for improvement; and thus eternal life is an adventure, not a static condition of supreme ecstasy. In a careful study, Adam C. Pelser makes a case for certain saintly "negative" emotions, especially sorrow, with its close association with feelings of sympathy, care, and love -- hence, that the saints, like perhaps God himself, can (and would lack certain virtues if they did not) experience sympathy, loss, and fellow-suffering.

Finally, T. Ryan Byerly examines the possibility of the saints exercising what he calls the virtues of repair -- in particular the virtue of forgiveness, given that there is no wrongdoing in paradise. He discovers several ways in which forgiveness might nevertheless be exercised, using, as his working conception of forgiveness, a good-will analysis: "When S forgives R for offense O, S wills that O leads to a good for R." (p. 139) By way of clarification, Byerly notes (p. 138) that ill will, in his sense, need not be voluntary at all; one might presume the same for good will. But Byerly argues that the good will must be freely offered -- hence, presumably, not involuntarily.

Perhaps free will isn't a sine qua non for heavenly residence; in their defense of animal universalism, Graves, Hereth, and John (GHJ) engage the currently lively discussion about (non-human) animal eschatology, arguing that a perfectly just and loving God would not deny such bliss as sensitive creatures can enjoy, rather than oblivion. Why stop at conscious beings? GHJ leave open the question of non-sentient animals. But even plants, though they do not experience pain or happiness, are ordered toward certain ends that they pursue with either success or failure. An ancient, flourishing oak is surely a thing of value, even if unappreciated by human beings.

GHJ rest a good deal of their case on the point that non-human animals have this advantage over us with respect to meriting heaven: they can't sin, so hell is not for them. They also consider sentience highly relevant; indeed, take it to be a necessary and sufficient condition for moral status. Both seem problematic. As for sentience, its borders may well be fuzzy, subject to sorites paradoxes. As for sin: Capuchin monkeys (who have an intelligence comparable to that of the great apes), for instance, seem to be quite capable of intentional cruelty and bullying, not only of conspecifics, but of animals of other species. Of course, Capuchins display differing temperaments. Would a particularly sadistic Capuchin be admitted to heaven? Or purgatory?

More generally, I find it quite hard to envision how such an eschaton works, once we expand our purview beyond the familiar dogs, cats, and pangolins. The female parasitoid wasp (who can see, and no doubt feels pain) lives and dies to paralyze a caterpillar and bury it with her eggs; her offspring then devour the living prey. Would this rather distasteful ritual be engineered out of heavenly wasps? Would they even enjoy their altered ecology? If so, would they still be parasitoid wasps? Similar questions arise for, e.g., tapeworms and black widows (who eat their mates). One doesn't quite know what to say. Does God enter them into a kind of blissful "matrix"?

At the heart of Robert Audi's wide-ranging article are questions about the nature of embodiment and re-embodiment in the Resurrection. Audi is right, I think, to focus on embodiment as a key relation in the ontology of human personhood. The relation is one on which, as Audi puts it, the person animates his/her/its body. Animation is presumably (at least) a causal relation of some sort; but how does it work? About this, space forbids adequate elaboration; but Audi expands on the relevant mental/physical connections elsewhere ( Rationality and Religious Commitment , Ch. 10). One option is to take seriously the possibility that God himself is in some way an embodied person, and to model our thinking about Him on what can be made of human mind/body relations. While leaving open a range of options, Audi is not unsympathetic (in the human case) with the view that the physical is sufficient for the mental, and that a kind of causal closure principle can be respected (with respect to the former) on the view that mental events are token-token identical with physical ones, but that explanations of, e.g., actions require mental descriptions of these events. There are questions a-plenty that arise here (e.g., about the nature of human freedom, and about the sense in which the mental qua mental can "cause" physical or mental change). But Audi's view, at least on the supposition that God might in the relevant sense be embodied, seems to elude objections based on causal closure.

Three chapters that follow concern aspects of our understanding of the general Resurrection. One is a problem almost as old as Christian thought: what is the ontology of the genidentity relation between pre-mortem human persons and their post-mortem continuation in the Resurrection? Brown calls this the Problem of Personal Identity: PPID. The second problem did not, to my knowledge, become acute until the modern period: where, exactly, is heaven?

Yang and Davis offer a newish account of the composition of the Resurrection body. Theirs, like the other contemporary positions they consider, takes more or less literally the teaching of 1 Cor. 15 (and, arguably, Revelation) that resurrected persons will be embodied. What Yang and Davis aim at is a resuscitation of something like the venerable Patristic understanding of the Resurrection body as constituted by a re-assembly of the earthly body. That view is saddled with numerous difficulties; Yang and Davis look to develop a version that eludes those objections. Their core response to a range of problems with criteria for bodily compositionality is that a kind of voluntary sustaining action by God is needed to constitute a set of particles as a bodily continuant. If your watch is taken apart and later reassembled with replacement of some of the worn pieces, it remains that very watch, God willing (and only if God is willing). (To be sure, God can't make it the case that those watch-parts, arranged watch-wise, compose a human being or a star.) However, Yang and Davis seem then committed to thinking that, should theism prove false, there are no composites whatever. Yang and Davis do aver, inter alia , that their view can solve the cannibal case (God can will that the spatial regions in the cannibal's body occupied by parts of the victim Christian's body are not part of the fusion that comprises the cannibal.) Not so: suppose the cannibal subsists from infancy upon an exclusive diet of Christians till all of his body-volume is occupied by parts of former Christians, then himself converts to Christianity (you are what you eat). Is Mr. Cannibal out of luck? Finally, Yang and Davis argue that God couldn't reassemble both the atoms once comprising the 10-year-old Davis and those comprising Davis at his death into separate Davis resurrection bodies. But why not? Doesn't God manage something even more extraordinary with Jesus' body every Sunday?

Reasons of space preclude my devoting adequate discussion to Brown's Thomistic solution to the PPID. At its heart lies the idea that human persons are, in this life, body and soul (the soul is the form of the person); when an individual dies, the body decomposes but the soul, as it is an "active" form, enjoys substantial survival until the general Resurrection, when God miraculously re-embodies it: "Since the human soul has an act that does not make use of the body, that is, the act of understanding . . . , the human soul is a subsistent thing for St. Thomas, not an abstract object (as are the substantial forms of non-human material substances)." (p. 253, author's italics) Unfortunately, I have never understood this key claim. A form must be an abstract object; it cannot per se perform any act whatever. Perhaps that form can act independently of a human body -- but only insofar as it orders a substance, whether bodily or not.

In his short piece, Hudson presses the advantages of his proposal that we are resurrected in the hyperfuture rather than the future; that is, into a space-time block, distinct from ours, situated in an additional temporal dimension: hypertime. The conceptual resources of the hypertime model are fairly remarkable, perhaps even paradoxical: as Hudson notes with some bemusement, it allows, not only for a hypertime heaven but for a hypertime hell, and for the possibility that some (or all) human beings consigned to hell might also enter into eternal salvation in some hyperfuture. Might it go without saying (and Hudson doesn't say it) that perhaps some (or all) of the saved also enter into eternal perdition in some hypertime future?

One of the oldest puzzles about Paradise is whether, in the eschaton, the saints are capable of sin -- and, if not, whether they have free will anymore, and are able to profit from the superlative goods that require autonomy (and if not, why didn't God just create Adam and Eve as enjoyers of beatitude?). Boeninger and Graves, along with Tamburro, examine the question at some length. A decisive issue that underlies the discussion and constrains possible solutions is how, exactly, freedom is to be understood. Theists, more often than not, are committed to a libertarian conception of freedom (as are these authors); but what, from that perspective, are the necessary and sufficient conditions for freedom?

Boeninger and Garcia explicitly adopt as criterial a Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP), indeed, a stronger requirement: not only must it be possible for an agent to act in alternative ways, but, to be genuinely free in the morally relevant sense, the agent must have available to him actions that are sinful. But heavenly agents do not sin; yet, the goods dependent on freedom are, on the Free Will Defense, worth the risk of sin. Boeninger and Garcia focus on moral praise and blame, and engage at some length with the strategy, suggested by Pawl and Timpe, that saints may deserve moral credit for actions, taken pre-mortem, which helped to shape them into the sinless beings they become upon beatification.

But, so Tamburro observes (p. 314, n.18), Boeninger and Garcia are wrong to think that heavenly impeccability is a result of character perfection alone. Tamburro invites us to enrich the notion of freedom by appealing to the view that reasons are not causes, and that the exercise of freedom lies centrally in a rational agent's ability to act on any of their reasons, including ones not the most rationally compelling. Tamburro can then go on to argue that beatific communion with God in heaven can provide saints with decisive reasons to reject sinfulness, while leaving open to them choices that are significant. This seems to me an improved view, but one that still does not go far enough. One way to see this is to reflect on the fact that an agent's failure to act in the rationally best way is, so far from an exercise of freedom, a failure at perfect agency, either through ignorance, weakness of character, or incorrect reasoning. Consider an agent in whom none of these failings can be found -- consider God. Is He maximally un free -- confined to making only random choices between options that rate as equally maximal in goodness (if such there be)? Or should we accept, as the pre-eminent criterion of free agency, the capacity to be guided by (good) reasoning? To theists, I should commend the latter view, as more fundamental than PAP.

The volume ends with what might be thought of as a benediction -- two articles commending the blessedness of eternal life with God. Heavenly life, Walls argues, is a telos we fail to hope for on pain of despair. He considers in this light the famous equanimity with which David Hume reportedly faced his end. But I should think that Hume's frame of mind remains for us a mystery. Wells doubts the perspicacity, or candor, of Hume's inference that the Supreme Being (if any) would, on the evidence, have to be morally indifferent. The signal piece of evidence that Hume ignores, according to Walls, is the moral nature of human beings. I should beg to differ: Hume was acutely aware of the morally checkered record of humanity. For Wells, however, the signal fact that points to a moral Creator is the human approval of happiness and what is productive of it, and disapproval of misery and what produces it. Does Wells think that, absent God, human beings wouldn't care whether their existence is happy or miserable? Or, perhaps, that Darwinian natural selection could not produce social beings imbued with codes of conduct conducive to flourishing? Perhaps Wells is correct that Heaven is our true and best hope. Or perhaps one might accept the view of some of the Jewish sages, of Melville, and of Ivan Karamazov, that the greatest problem we face is how we can forgive God.

About Swinburne's measured closing reflections I shall say very little. Although I find areas of disagreement, it seems to me that he is refreshingly in accord with the essentially Augustinian conception of freedom I advocated above (p. 356).

The contributions to this volume should provide rewarding food for thought about a wide range of issues, to theists and non-theists alike.

What is Heaven Like? Top Questions Answered with Bible Quotes

"Heaven is a place, just as much a place as is New York or Chicago." ~ Charles Ferguson Ball

Everyone wants to know about heaven, and everyone wants to go there. Recent polls suggest that nearly 80% of all Americans believe there is a place called heaven. I find that statistic encouraging because it tells me that even in this skeptical age, there is something deep inside the human heart that cries out, "There's got to be something more. Something more than the pain and suffering of this life. Something more than 70 or 80 years on planet Earth. Something more than being born, living, dying, and then being buried in the ground.

Sometimes, we discuss a "God-shaped vacuum" inside the human heart. I believe there is also a "heaven-shaped vacuum," a sense that we were made for something more than this life. We were made to live forever somewhere. In a real sense, we were made for heaven.

There is another fascinating statistic I should mention. Not only do most Americans believe in heaven, but most people expect to go there when they die. If you took a microphone to the streets of Chicago and asked, "Do you think you will go to heaven when you die?" the vast majority of people would answer, "I hope so," or "I think so," or perhaps "I think I've got a good chance. Not very many people would say they aren't going to heaven. Perhaps one modest point is in order. Whenever you talk about living forever somewhere, it would help to know for sure where you are going. After all, if you're wrong about heaven, you will be wrong for a long, long time.

With that background, I now consider some of the most frequently asked questions about heaven. But before I jump in, I should make one preliminary point. The only things we can know for certain about heaven are the things revealed in the Bible. Everything else is just speculation and hearsay. The Bible tells us everything we need to know, and I believe it also tells us everything we can know for certain about heaven.

What Is Heaven?

There are three things I can tell you in answer to this question. Let's look at what the Bible says about the location and definition of heaven:

Heaven is a Real Place

1. The most important fact is that heaven is a real place . Listen to the words of Jesus on the night before he was crucified:

"Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am" ( John 14:1-3 ).

Twice in three verses, Jesus calls heaven a place. He means that heaven ("my Father's house") is a real place, as real as New York, London or Chicago. The place called heaven is just as real as the place you call home. It's a real place filled with real people, which is why the Bible sometimes compares heaven to a mansion with many rooms ( John 14:1-3 ) and sometimes to an enormous city teeming with people ( Revelation 21 ).

Heaven is the Dwelling Place of God

2. The Bible also tells us that heaven is the dwelling place of God . His throne is there, the angels are there, and the Lord Jesus Christ is in heaven. Philippians 3:20 says very plainly that "our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ." That's why Jesus told the thief on the Cross, "Today you will be with me in paradise" ( Luke 23:43 ).

Heaven is Not That Far Away

3. Third (and I find this fact fascinating), the Bible hints that heaven is not as far away as we might think. Because heaven is a real place, we sometimes think it must be outside our present universe - which would mean that it is billions and billions of light years away. However, it's very clear that the early Christians understood that they would pass immediately from this life into the presence of Christ in heaven. How can that be possible if heaven is beyond the farthest galaxy?

Hebrews 12:22-24 tells us something amazing about what the gospel has done for us: 

"But you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel."

The writer is here comparing Mt. Sinai with Mt. Zion. Under the old covenant, no one could come near God except under very strict conditions. That's why the mountain shook with thunder and lightning. [Note: three times, the writer of Hebrews uses a Greek word that means "to come near" or "to approach closely.] But now, in Christ, we have been brought near to heavenly realities. Think of what he is saying:

• We're not that far from heaven.
• We're not that far from the angels.
• We're not that far from our loved ones in heaven.
• We're not that far from God.
• We're not that far from Jesus himself.
• Heaven is a real place; it's where Jesus is right now, and it's not far away from us.

Now, let's look into aspects of heaven that the Bible gives us. 

What Is Heaven Like?

I would answer by saying that the Bible doesn't give us much information. What we have are images and pictures of heaven and comparisons with life on earth.

What is heaven like? Here are seven biblical facts about heaven . It is …

• God's dwelling place ( Psalms 33:13 ).
• Where Christ is today ( Acts 1:11 ).
• Where Christians go when they die ( Philippians 1:21-23 ).
• The Father's house ( John 14:2 ).
• A city designed and built by God ( Hebrews 11:10 ).
• A better country ( Hebrews 11:16 ).
• Paradise ( Luke 23:43 ).

Most of us have heard that heaven is a place where the streets are paved with gold, the gates are made of pearl, and the walls are made of precious jewels. Those images come from Revelation 21 , which offers us the most extended picture of heaven in the entire Bible. If you ask me if I believe those things are literally true, the answer is yes and no. Yes, they are literally true, but no, heaven won't be anything like we imagine. It will be much greater.

Here's a delightful legend that makes the point very well:

I love the old story of the rich man who, on his death bed, negotiated with God to allow him to bring his earthly treasures with him when he came to heaven. God's reaction was that this was a most unusual request, but since this man had been exceptionally faithful, permission was granted to bring along just one suitcase. The time arrived, the man presented himself at the pearly gates, suitcase in hand- BOTH hands, actually, since he had stuffed it with as many bars of gold bullion as would fit. St. Peter said, "Sorry, you know the rules-you can't take it with you." But the man protested, "God said I could … one suitcase." St. Peter checked, found out that this one would be an exception, prepared to let the man enter, then said, "OK, but I will have to examine the contents before you pass." He took the suitcase, opened it, saw the gold bars and asked quizzically, "You brought PAVEMENT?"  

[Note: This story is from the sermon "Heaven" by Dr. David Leininger, March 30, 1997]

When John writes about a street paved with gold, I do not doubt his words. He simply reports what he saw in his vision. Thus, his words are literally true. They are also meant to tell us that the things we value so highly in this life will be used to pave the roads to heaven.

Who Is In Heaven Right Now?

This question is not difficult to answer. God is in heaven because heaven is his dwelling place. The Lord Jesus has been in heaven ever since he ascended from the earth shortly after his resurrection ( Acts 1:9-11 ). The Bible tells us that angels are in heaven. In fact, there are myriads of angels (uncountable numbers of heavenly beings) all of them serving the Lord in various ways.

And the saints of God who died on this earth are in heaven. [Note: I mean by this that heaven includes the Old Testament Saints who by faith trusted in God's Word and looked forward to God's redemption at Calvary (which they did not fully understand). It also includes every true believer from every continent and every denomination. Everyone who has genuinely trusted in Christ as Lord and Savior will be there. I also think that children who died before the "age of accountability go to heaven, and I would also include those born with such mental limitations that they cannot understand the gospel.] The Bible teaches that the moment we die we go directly into the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul spoke of this in 2 Corinthians 5:7-8 and Philippians 1:21-23 .

But I do not want to be ambiguous on this point. Not everyone is in heaven now. Some people won't make it. The Bible speaks of the saved and the lost. The saved are those who trust Jesus Christ as their eternal Savior. The lost are those who do not trust Christ as Savior. This is the great dividing line of humanity-you are either saved or you are lost. And there is no middle category. You will either spend eternity in heaven or eternity in hell.

I simply want you to know what God has said about heaven and who will go there. The saved of all the ages will be there - and that vast throng will no doubt include many people who would surprise us if we knew it now. Certainly, heaven will be more wonderful than our imagination and its population more diverse than we expect.

But I am sure of this one truth. No one will go to heaven except by the grace of God and through the merits of the blood of Jesus Christ. If a man says "No" to Jesus, he has no hope of heaven.

Photo credit: Crosscards.com

Will We Know Each Other in Heaven?

This is one of the most frequently asked questions about heaven. I would like to share an answer given by a Bible teacher of another generation - a man named William Pettingill. [Note: see the book 1001 Bible Questions Answered , William Pettingill and R.A. Torrey, Inspirational Press, 1997, p. 157. This is a reprint in one volume of two books first published many years ago. I highly recommend it as a handy reference tool for Bible students and Sunday School teachers.] He said, "We may be sure that we shall not know less in heaven than we know here."

In proof he quotes 1 Corinthians 13:12 , "Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known." How does God know us? Answer: He knows us completely, intimately, thoroughly, inside and out, with nothing hidden but everything seen as it really is ( Psalms 139:1-4 ; Hebrews 4:12 ). When we get to heaven we'll know each other as God knows us because all the imperfections of this life will be removed. In this life, sin causes us to cover ourselves not just physically but emotionally and spiritually. But when sin is finally lifted from us, then we can be ourselves with no shame, no pain, no embarrassment, and no covering up.

Dr. Pettingill concludes that in heaven, we will know every person in heaven, and all of them will be friends and loved ones to us.

In his very helpful book on heaven, W.A. Criswell makes the additional point that individual personality survives into eternity. I'll be the same person then that I am now-only with all the imperfections and limitations of sin finally removed. This is a wonderful thought-that the essence of who we are will remain throughout eternity-yet vastly improved by God's grace. [Note: W.A. Criswell and Paige Patterson, Heaven , Tyndale House Publishers, 1991, pp. 33-38. He also says that in heaven we can eat all we want and not get fat. I certainly hope he's right about that.]

That helps me think about a related question that people sometimes ask: How old will we be in heaven? I once heard a preacher say that we will all be 33 years old because that's approximately how old Jesus was when he died. Of course there is no scriptural support for that statement. The truth is, there won't be any age in heaven in the sense we speak of age on the earth. Growing old is a function of the decaying effects of sin. I do not believe that babies who die in infancy will be babies for eternity nor do I believe that people who waste away of cancer will appear emaciated in heaven. It will be something else entirely - which I can barely explain and certainly do not understand.

In heaven, we will know each other intimately. That's why Peter, James and John recognized Moses and Elijah, even though they had been dead for hundreds of years, on the Mount of Transfiguration ( Matthew 17:1-9 ). I don't think they had nametags on. I think there was something about those two men that made Peter, James and John recognize them even though they had never seen them before.

That's why a wife whose husband died when she was young will be able to pick her husband out of a crowd of billions of people, even though she hasn't seen him for 50 years since he died on the earth. In heaven she will say, "Sweetheart! I knew it was you." And he will know her.

How this can be I do not know, but I believe it to be true. In heaven there will be no strangers.

What will we do in Heaven?

Again, the Bible doesn't tell us everything we would like to know, but of this we can be sure: Heaven won't be boring and it will be more fun than the best party you ever attended.

So what will we do for all eternity? The answer is, we're going to help God run the universe. Do you remember the story Jesus told about the man of noble birth who gave his servants money to invest? One servant had doubled his money so the man said, "You will rule over ten cities." The next servant had seen a 50% increase so his master said, "Rule over five cities." And the man who hid his money had even that amount taken from him in punishment ( Luke 19:11-27 ). The story is a picture of what heaven will be like. We will use our gifts to administer the new heaven and the new earth. Bakers will bake, teachers will teach, singers will sing, and I suppose that preachers will preach. For all I know, soldiers may march off to battle and quarterbacks will throw passes. Think of the flowers the botanists will study. Gifted astronomers will go from galaxy to galaxy studying the wonders of God's creation.

I can guarantee you this: No one will be sitting around on a cloud eating grapes and polishing his halo. No, we'll all be too busy for that.

Here are five things that will occupy us in heaven. We will …

• Worship without distraction.
• Serve without exhaustion.
• Fellowship without fear.
• Learn without fatigue.
• Rest without boredom.

[Note: this is not original with me. I found this list in a sermon by David Burns, Minister at the Homer Church of Christ, called "Heaven is a Wonderful Place," Feburary 25, 1996.]

The best part of heaven will be seeing Jesus himself face to face. We will worship the Son of God and celebrate his great victory over sin while the endless ages of eternity roll on and on. The best music you've ever heard will pale compared to the music of heaven. The most awesome worship you've experienced on earth is but a dim reflection of the praise we will render around the throne of God.

How can I be sure I am going to Heaven?

This is the most important question of all. Here is a wonderful truth: God has made it easy for you to go to heaven. He did the hard part when he sent his Son to die on the Cross for you. He paid the price for your sins so that you could one day stand before God in heaven. Jesus said, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" ( John 14:6 ). He also said, "I am the door; if anyone enters through Me, he shall be saved" ( John 10:9 , NASB). Jesus is not only the way to heaven, but he is also the door to heaven. If you want to go to heaven, you've got to go through the door marked "Jesus Christ." There is no other entrance.

Suppose you were to die and found yourself at heaven's door. If God were to say, 'Why should I let you into heaven?' what answer would you give?

Picture the scene. You are standing at the very gates of heaven. It's more beautiful than you ever dreamed possible. This is where you want to spend eternity. This is where you belong. But before you enter, the Lord himself asks what possible reason you have to claim admission. You pause, knowing that all eternity hangs on your answer. What will you say?

Let me make this very personal. If you were to die tonight, do you know for certain that you would go to heaven? I've already said that this is too important to say "I think so" or "I hope so." If you're wrong, you're going to be wrong for a long, long time.

What we need is solid ground on which to stand. And we have it in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our entire hope of heaven is wrapped up in what Jesus did when he died on the cross for the sins of the world and rose from the dead on Easter Sunday morning. 

One of our most beloved hymns puts it this way:

My hope is built on nothing less Than Jesus' blood and righteousness; I dare not trust the sweetest frame, But wholly lean on Jesus' name. On Christ the solid rock I stand; All other ground is sinking sand; All other ground is sinking sand.

That says it all. If you want to go to heaven, you must base your hope on the solid rock of Jesus' blood and righteousness. Are you standing on the Rock this morning? Are you wholly leaning on Jesus' name?

No one goes to heaven by accident. Heaven is God's prepared place for prepared people. We prepare for heaven, and then God prepares heaven for us. I've already told you that most people believe in heaven, and most people think they are going there. But are they on the right road? Are they building their lives on Jesus Christ, the solid rock? Too many, I fear, are standing on sinking sand and do not know it.

What is your hope for heaven? Mine is Jesus Christ. I've staked everything I have on him. If he can't take me to heaven, then I'm not going there. What about you? When the dark night falls, the lights go out, and the waters of death swirl around you. What will happen to you then? If you know Jesus, you have nothing to fear. Put your trust in Jesus. Run to the Cross. Stand with your full weight on the Solid Rock of our salvation. May God help you to trust in Jesus Christ and him alone for your salvation. And may God grant that we will all meet one day in heaven.

Safe at home. In heaven at last. I'll be there. What about you?

Photo credit: Unsplash/Davide Cantelli

Related: Heaven - What is it Like and Where is it? How Do I Get to Heaven? Do Babies Go to Heaven When They Die?

Do Dogs go to Heaven? Is Hell Real? Are There Levels of Hell?

Friday essay: what might heaven be like?

Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought, The University of Queensland

Disclosure statement

Philip C. Almond does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Queensland provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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What will Heaven be like? Perhaps not surprisingly, competing images abound. Until around the end of the 17th century, Heaven was primarily about the Beatific Vision. The perfect happiness of eternity in Heaven consisted in the worship, praise and adoration of God along with the angels, saints, martyrs, Old Testament worthies and even some noble pagans like Plato and Aristotle.

This was seeing God “face to face”, and not through “a glass darkly”. It was an eternity centred on God or the heavenly Christ. Thus, The Last Judgement (1425-30) by Fra Angelico shows Christ seated on a throne surrounded by the angels, Mary and the saints. His right hand points up to Heaven, his left towards Hell. On Christ’s right, angels are taking the saved through a paradisal garden to a heavenly walled city, while on his left, demons are driving the wicked into Hell.

Traditional Judaism was somewhat reticent about the life to come. But when it was spoken of, it was primarily in terms of the spiritual vision of God. As one third-century rabbi explained it,

In the world-to-come there is no eating, no drinking, no mating, no trading, no jealousy, no hatred, and no enmity; instead, the righteous sit with crowns on their heads and enjoy the splendor of the divine Presence.

Islam too has the idea of a Beatific Vision. But Heaven is also very much a place of sensual delights. In the Islamic Paradise, the blessed will reside in gardens of bliss, on couches facing one another. A delicious cup of wine from a flowing stream will be passed around from which none will suffer ill effects. Fruit and meat will be available. And there will be maidens, “with dark, wide eyes like hidden pearls - a reward for what they have done” (Quran 56.22-4).

Within Christianity, the image of a God-centred Heaven was to last well into the 19th century. As Bishop Reginald Heber (1783-1826) put it in his hymn Holy, Holy, Holy:

all the saints adore thee, Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea; Cherubim and Seraphim falling down before thee, Which wert and art and evermore shalt be.

Read more: In spite of their differences, Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same God

Human activities

But from the middle of the 18th century until the end of the 19th, there was a gradual transition to a Heaven centred on human activities. The medieval notion that the happiness of those in Heaven would be improved by being able to see the sufferings of the damned in hell disappeared, not least because, as people became more disinclined to see the public sufferings of others in the here and now, the notion of hell as a place of eternal physical punishment was beginning to disappear. There were hints developing that all could eventually be saved, at least if they wanted to be.

Heaven was now closer than it was earlier – only a thin veil separated the living from the dead. It was also a continuation of material existence, only without the sufferings of this present life. Although Heaven remained a place of rest, the saved were increasingly active, making moral progress in a joy filled environment. Human love replaced the primacy of the divine love. Relationships between people became fundamental to the afterlife, not a distraction from it and families were re-united.

If not often eroticised, as in William Blake, the modern Heaven was romanticised. Lovers too would meet again.

Thus, for example, in the final version of his poem The Blessed Damozel (1881), Dante Gabriel Rossetti has his damsel looking longingly over the bar of Heaven upon the earth beneath hoping for the soul of her lover to come to her while

Around her, lovers, newly met / ‘Mid deathless love’s acclaims / spoke evermore among themselves / Their heart-remember’d names.

A genteel place

The Victorian Heaven was very much a domesticated, genteel and well-mannered affair. It was a kind of ethereal Victorian holiday resort with entertainments attached - Moses lecturing on the Ten Commandments at 10am in the main auditorium followed by a performance of Handel’s The Messiah (conducted by the composer) at 2.00 pm. A God-centred Heaven was marginalised.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911) in her best seller The Gates Ajar summed up the passing of the old style Paradise:

There was something about adoration, and the harpers harping with their harps, and the sea of glass, and crying Worthy the Lamb! that bewildered and disheartened me so that I could scarcely listen to it. I do not doubt that we shall glorify God primarily and happily, but can we not do it in some other way than by harping and praying.

All this required the right sorts of bodies. In the modern Heaven, we would have “spiritual bodies”, rather like the angels. But they would not be like those at the time of our deaths. Rather, they would be made perfect and at the perfect age – that of Christ during his ministry on earth, that is, about 30 to 33 years old. Those who had died in infancy or were severely deformed would be made perfect.

Faith in a perfect and loving God was also much tested in the 19th century by the suffering of animals in this present life having no compensation in the next. New companionate relationships between people and their pets led many to wonder how their happiness in Heaven could be complete in the absence of animals who had loved and been loved so much. So the issue of animals in Heaven came on to the agenda for the first time.

It was in the middle of the 19th century also that the spirits themselves seemed to decide that, rather than us seeking them out in their heavenly homes, they would seek us out in ours. This was the age of spiritualism when the spirits of the departed manifested themselves in a bewildering variety of ways. The ritual of connecting with the dead in the séance no doubt provided consolation to those who received message from a deceased love one.

But the séance also provided entertainment for the curious, phenomena to be explained for the scientist and provoked frissons of horror for the believer or amusement for the sceptic. For the conservative Christian, to attend a séance was to dabble with the Devil. For the more credulous and adventurous, this was no doubt part of its attraction.

Within spiritualism, as within the modern social Heaven more generally, God played a minimal role. So belief in Heaven remained strong, as it does still, even when belief in God was on the wane. God as a frightening judge and the enforcer of morality was replaced by deceased parents, aunts and uncles looking down upon us from the outer reaches of the universe.

The secular modern mind

By the 20th century then, Heaven had become secularised and the modern Heaven part of the secular modern mind. Ironically perhaps, as it did so, in Catholic and Protestant theology, at least on the more liberal side, the afterlife became an afterthought. Within liberal Christian theologies, the meaning of life was not to be found in what came after it, but during it, through radically transformed individuals (in existentialist theologies or radically transformed societies (in liberation theologies ).

Read more: What is hell?

Within a more mystically inclined modern Christianity, the eternal was not to be found in the future but in the present: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour”, as William Blake put it .

Uncertainty about the afterlife generally is perhaps why modern Christian funerals have become more about celebrating a life that was than rejoicing in a life that is yet to come.

Still, in spite of our present day uncertainties about the existence of a life to come, our contemporary Heaven combines features of both the God-centred Heaven and the social Heaven that replaced it. It is no longer thought to be, as it was in previous times, a geographical place way beyond the stars, although it is still metaphorically “up there”.

Heaven is also still the place where God is thought to live - a state in which we will be closer to a loving father God. “There in my Father’s home, safe and at rest, There in my Saviour’s love, perfectly blest” as the popular hymn Nearer my God to Thee puts it.

It is still believed that angels dwell there, occasionally doing good works on earth. But the highly developed angelology of 1000 years ago has virtually disappeared.

Heaven is widely regarded as a state after death in which we continue to have a consciousness of ourselves and memories of our life on earth. Along with this, there remains the conviction that we will be reunited with those whom we loved on this earth. Life there, as on this earth, will be one in which we laugh, love and grow ethically, intellectually and spiritually.

Although we will no longer be in physical bodies, there remains the hope, if not the certainty for some, that we will be recognisably ourselves. So Eric Clapton wonders, in his 1992 Tears in Heaven, if his deceased son will recognise him when he arrives in Heaven.

In contrast to earlier times when Heaven was exclusive to Christians or Muslims or Catholics or Protestants only, it is now expected that Heaven is a “place” to which everyone will go or, at least, those who have lived a “good” life.

As in times past, Heaven is seen as a place of supreme happiness, joy and contentment. So, experiences of great joy on this side of the grave are said to be “heavenly”. As Fred Astaire reminds us in the film Top Hat (1935): “ Heaven, I’m in Heaven … when we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek”.

In short, this life, despite all its sorrows and miseries, provides occasional glimpses of the next. The life to come - it is believed - will be this life made perfect.

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