ABSTRACT
The doctrines of heaven and hell are among the most intellectually fascinating as well as existentially engaging claims made by historic Christianity. For the better part of two millennia, heaven and hell have been vivid realities that have provided moral and spiritual orientation for western culture. The truth was never so beautiful, nor the stakes ever so high in the quest to nd and follow the truth. Eternal joy of unimaginable glory and delight could be gained, and eternal misery of unspeakable horror could be suffered. With the prospects for happiness and misery so magni ed, the meaning of our lives and the signi cance of our choices are both elevated to dramatic proportions. This dramatic picture of our lives is entailed by the Christian doctrine of God and its remarkable account of salvation. Of course, the other great theistic religions, Judaism and Islam, have their own doctrines of salvation and corresponding accounts of heaven and hell. But the distinctively Christian doctrine that God is a Trinity of persons who exists in an eternal relationship of love, and has created us in his image, gives a distinctive shape to how Christians conceive of heaven and hell. Whereas the essence of heaven is a perfected relationship of love with the Trinitarian God that ful lls our nature, hell is the loss of this relationship and of all the good things we were created to enjoy. Both heaven and hell must be understood in light of the Christian conception that nal salvation includes the redemption and restoration of the larger created order. The God of Christian revelation, who created this world and became incarnate in a real body of esh and blood in order to redeem it, promises a nal salvation in a resurrected body on a renewed earth. As N. T. Wright puts it, ‘the ultimate future, as chapters 21 and 22 [of Revelation] make clear is not about people leaving ‘earth’ and going to ‘heaven’, but rather about the life of ‘heaven’, more specifically the New Jerusalem, coming down from heaven to earth – exactly in line with the Lord’s Prayer’ (Wright 2003: 59-60). This conception of salvation is profoundly at odds with notions of salvation that are exclusively spiritual in any sense that would demean or trivialize material creation, including our bodies.
