My pious Baptist grandmother once shockingly confessed, at the ripe old age of 93, that she didn’t want to go to heaven. “Why,” we asked? “Well, I think it will be rather boring just sitting around on clouds and singing hymns all day” she answered. She had a point.
Mark Twain might have agreed with her assessment. He once famously quipped that one should choose “heaven for the climate, hell for the company”.
Most of us have some concept of heaven, even if it is one formed by movies like What Dreams May Come, The Lovely Bones, or think it involves meeting Morgan Freeman in a white room. And while not as complicated as biblical ideas about hell, the biblical concept of heaven is not particularly simple either. In the Christian tradition, heaven and paradise have been conflated as an answer to the question “where do I go when I die?” The idea of the dead being in heaven or enjoying paradise often brings enormous comfort to the bereaved and hope to those suffering or dying. Yet, heaven and paradise were originally more about where God lived, not about us or our ultimate destination.
The words for heaven or heavens in both Hebrew (shamanic)and Greek (Uranus)can also be translated as sky. It is not something that exists eternally but, rather, part of creation.
The first line of the Bible states that heaven is created along with the creation of the earth (Genesis 1). It is primarily God’s dwelling place in the biblical tradition: a parallel realm where everything operates according to God’s will. Heaven is a place of peace, love, community, and worship, where God is surrounded by a heavenly court and other heavenly beings. Biblical authors imagined the earth as a flat place with Sheol below (the realm of the dead) and a dome over the earth that separates it from the heavens or sky above. Of course, we know the earth is not flat, and this three-tiered universe makes no sense to a modern mind. Even so, the concept of heaven (wherever it is located) continues in Christian theology as the place where God dwells and a theological claim that this world is not all that there is.
The other main metaphor for God’s dwelling place in the Bible is paradise. According to Luke’s version of the crucifixion, Jesus converses with the men on either side of him while waiting to die and promises the man on a neighboring cross “today you will be with me in paradise”.
References to paradise in the Bible are likely due to the influence of Persian culture and particularly Persian Royal gardens (parodied). Persian walled gardens were known for their beautiful layout, diversity of plant life, walled enclosures, and being a place where the royal family might safely walk. They were effectively a paradise on earth. The garden of Eden in Genesis 2 is strikingly similar to a Persian Royal garden or paradise. It has abundant water sources in the rivers that run through it, fruit and plants of every kind for food, and it is “pleasing to the eye”. God dwells there, or at least visits, and talks with Adam and Eve like a King might in a royal garden.
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