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CHRISTIAN HISTORY
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Web site: http://ChristianHistory.net/


Saturday, August 10, 2002

How the Early Church Saw Heaven
The first Christians had very specific ideas about who they would meet in the afterlife.
by Chris Armstrong

   As this week's Newsweek cover article insists, "heaven"
   is a powerful and pervasive word. It has been used to motivate
   people of many faiths in many ways: To instill character and
   strengthen resolve. To build community and spur change. To
   steel terrorists and comfort victims. It is easy to imagine
   this word, as the writers of the Newsweek article do,
   on the lips of both the hijackers of American Airlines Flight
   11 and many of the passengers.

   Apparently, although ministers in mainline Christian churches
   in America don't preach much about heaven, 75 percent of
   Americans believe they'll go there -- if they're good.
   Evangelicals talk more about the subject, believing that only
   faith in Christ can put them on the "highway to heaven." And
   most folks expect that once through the gates, they will see
   not only their Lord, but also their loved ones (for some,
   including their pets).

   For thoughtful Christians, all of this raises the question,
   "What did the early church believe about heaven?" The answer
   draws together both divine communion and human reunion.

   For the apostles, heaven-as-divine-communion was a given.
   Indeed, in the New Testament the word "heaven" is often used
   to stand for God himself (Luke 15:21; Matt. 21:25, 23:22; John
   3:27).

   But heaven was a place, too. As Jesus had promised, "I go to
   prepare a place for you ... that where I am you may be also"
   (John 14:3-4). And this place was not simple, but rather a
   complicated space with rooms or levels (an idea the great
   Italian poet Dante Alighieri would expand upon to
   unforgettable effect over a millennium later). In 2
   Corinthians 12:2-4, the Apostle Paul pulls perhaps the biggest
   tease of the Bible when he tells of being lifted up into "the
   third heaven," where he experienced "things so astounding"
   that, to the great disappointment of his readers ever since,
   "they cannot be told" (New Living Bible).

   Not only was heaven a place, it was populated. Especially
   during the centuries of Roman persecution, Christians looked
   forward to communing with God and with each other.

   The earliest evidence of this trend is The Martyrdom of
   Perpetua and Felicity, an account of two Christian women
   killed in Carthage (in North Africa) around 202 or 203. This
   book records a dream Perpetua had in prison just before she
   and her companions were thrown to the wild beasts. In the
   dream Perpetua saw her sickly brother, Dinocrates, who had
   died at the age of 7, in heaven drinking from the fountain of
   life. In the same book, other soon-to-be-martyred Roman
   captives envisioned themselves after death joyously rejoining
   their fellow martyrs in a garden paradise.

   The Martyrdom was a widely circulated book, and it may
   well have shaped many early Christians' visions of their
   eternal reward. For example, we find communal images of heaven
   -- as banquet and as playground for Christian children --
   depicted on the walls of the Christians' catacomb hideouts
   beneath Rome.

   Such pictures of heavenly human fellowship, however, didn't
   push God from the center of the picture. Clement of
   Alexandria, one of the earliest Church Fathers, said in the
   second century that heaven was above all the place where
   believers received the vision of God from Christ.

   Indeed, by the year 400, with the era of persecution ended,
   the communal and sensual aspects of heaven seemed to recede as
   God himself took center stage again. Christian leaders wrote
   increasingly of heaven as, above all, the place where one
   participated in God's spiritual perfection. For the fourth-
   century Eastern Father Gregory of Nazianzus, heaven was where
   the tired pilgrim could finally rest in God. There the
   Christian could at last, released from the distractions of the
   flesh, enjoy the full nearness of Christ-tasted only briefly
   and tantalizingly on earth.

   Augustine of Hippo (354-430) painted his vision of heaven in
   the great City of God. He wrote the book as humanity's
   highest societal achievement, the Roman Empire, tottered on
   the brink of dissolution. Against this backdrop he turned his
   eyes upward to a kingdom whose splendor far surpassed that of
   the world beneath. In his Confessions, Augustine had
   insisted that "our heart does not rest until it rests in God."
   Now he painted heaven as one long embrace -- an embrace of
   God, and an embrace of other people who love Christ.

   Treasuring this vision of eternal communion and community,
   Christians ever since have looked forward to a time and a
   place where "the young women will dance for joy, and the men --
   old and young -- will join in the celebration." So said
   Jeremiah, the "weeping prophet," who though he lived before
   the word "heaven" was first spoken, still insisted that he
   heard God say "I will comfort them and exchange their sorrow
   for rejoicing." (Jer. 31:13, New Living Bible)

   *This article draws from Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang's
   Heaven: A History and Everett Ferguson's
   Encyclopedia of Early Christianity.

   *For more on early Christians' visions of heaven, click here.

   *For more on The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity,
   click here.

   *For a multifaceted introduction to the vivid heavenly (and
   hellish and purgatorial) imagery of Dante Alighieri's
   Divine Comedy, see Rolland Hein's "Divine Imagination"
   and other on-line articles from issue 70 of Christian
   History.

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