A History of Heaven

Lisa Miller writes on the history of different perceptions about heaven in her recent headline article for Time Magazine.  She outlines the Jewish perspective of the afterlife pretty straightforwardly.  Ancient Jews believed heaven was the dwelling place of the divine.  It is where God is.  The dead were in “sheol,” the grave.  The great (and unique) Jewish hope was not in our immaterial souls floating above the clouds after death.  The Jewish hope instead was in a cataclysmic divine intervention on earth at the end of time, where ultimately the righteous would be raised from the dead.  And then a new order of justice and glory would begin.  In a word, Jewish hope was in a resurrection –bodily resurrection.

I was expecting the article to follow mainline scholarship by saying it was the Greeks that introduced the concept of heaven as a dwelling place for immaterial souls into the Jewish/Christian mind.  And in a way, the article did.  But the historical recounting at this point took a very unexpected turn.  It was a late Jewish prophet, she says, that turned the tables.  It was “second Daniel.”  The writer of Daniel chapter twelve; a Jew, she says, who was living in 2^nd century BC during the time of the Greek Seleucids.  Encouraging his people to a hope beyond, this Daniel says, “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life , and some to shame and everlasting contempt.  And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever” (Daniel 12:2-3).  Miller writes, “The words he wrote would change forever the way people imagined their immortal souls… With this verse, Daniel gave us heaven” (pg. 21).

Huh?

This is probably one of the clearest verses talking about resurrection.   The only reference to the heavens (skies) is that the righteous will shine like some of the objects of heaven.  And I am even more befuddled where she is getting “immortal souls” here.  It’s all about the dead (those asleep) being raised and awakened from the dust.  Dust alludes to the creation of Adam, the dust of our bodies, the dust that God breathed life into (Genesis 2:7), dust that eventually is buried in the grave.  And if people are awakening from the grave, this is bodily resurrection.  Of course, in other places the Old Testament alludes to the fact of immaterial souls, but it’s not talking about that here.  And it certainly is not being invented for the first time here!

Further disastrous, Miller starts to read Jesus’ statements about the “kingdom of heaven” under this new rubric.  And she writes as if Jesus just inherited this new heavenly vision straight from her perceived Danielic invention.  But of course, this rubric will have difficulty understanding some of Jesus’ other words on the kingdom of heaven –like ‘the kingdom is in the midst of you’  …and so Miller is forced to say Jesus’ words on heaven are often “cryptic.”  Instead, it just shows that her rubric is too narrow.  It does not have the legs to explain Jesus’ true understanding of the ‘kingdom of heaven,’ not to mention the broader Jewish vision of it.  It’s a view that was destined to hit the skids from the beginning –when she forgot that biblical heaven is really where God is.