Heaven on earth

I am about as sure as I am about anything that there is no heaven. By "heaven," I mean some inchoate place up in the sky where "good" or "saved" people go when they die. To contradict T-Rex: we're not going up to the "Spirit in the sky." It's because I believe in the bodily resurrection that I don't believe in heaven, at least not as I've briefly described it.

You see, if we are made to be and will forever be corporeal beings, then we have to be somewhere. It is also because we're corporeal beings that we don't become angels, who are, by definition, incorporeal. This raises the question- what happens to us during the time between death and resurrection?

One way to answer the question about our situation between death and resurrection is that because we presumably are temporarily something like disembodied spirits or consciousnesses, that is, immaterial, we are outside of time. This is not how are meant to be. Hence, rather than experiencing the burden of time, the time between death and resurrection may seem to us near-instantaneous. There is no reason this intense experience cannot be purgatorial, hellacious, or blissful.

It is an ancient Christian teaching that God will establish "heaven" on earth, not somewhere up in the sky, the place of disembodied spirits. This teaching is largely based on Revelation 21:2- "I also saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband." Like the Incarnation, this is wholly incarnational, like us.

It's also important to point out that, according to this line of theo-logic, the city of God (a city, a completed human and completely human [in the best sense of the word] civilization, not a garden or a wilderness) comes down, meaning we don't "go up." The passage continues: "I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race.c He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them [as their God]'" (Revelation 21:3).

Conceiving heaven as a disembodied realm of the spirits has theological implications, few, if any, of which are good. It seems to me that Lent is a good time to reckon with ultimate things, seeking to purify our faith by the grace of God in the light of revelation. Besides, I think we've reached the end of the long epoch during which faith became a fantasy, leading many reasonable and sane people to reject it. Locating heaven on earth also speaks to us deeply about the vastly overlapping domains of the sacred and the secular, a dichtoomy Christ came to abolish. Separating the sacred from the secular at the expense of the secular is to live as a pagans.

Our traditio for today is a repeat: the Psychedelic Furs' "Heaven."