Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

INTRODUCTION

When I thought about God as a child, I thought about the afterlife. I obviouslyhad no clear understanding of death. But I did believe that after I died I wouldgo to heaven or hell. And I was bound and determined to make it one and notthe other.Looking back, the afterlife later helped motivate me to become more deeplyinvolved in my Episcopal church, participating in worship, saying prayers,singing hymns, confessing my sins, learning the creeds, becoming an altar boy.Naturally I worshiped God and tried to live the way I thought he wantedbecause I thought it was the right and good thing to do, but also, at least in part,it was because I knew full well what would happen to me if I didn't.I am also sure that hope for heaven and fear of hell played a large role whenlater, as a mid-teenager, I had an even deeper spiritual experience. Some of myhigh school friends were committed Christian kids who believed it was necessaryto make an active and specie commitment to God by "asking Jesus into myheart." They convinced me, and as a fifteen-year-old I became a born-againChristian.From that point on, I had no doubt: I was going to heaven. I was equallyconvinced that those who had not made this commitment—namely, most of thebillions of other people in the world—were going to hell. I tried not to think Iwas being arrogant. It was not as if I had done something better than anyone elseand deserved to go to heaven. I had simply accepted a gift. And what about thosewho hadn't even heard about the gift, or who had never been urged to considerit seriously? I felt sorry for them. They were lost, and so it was my obligation toconvert them. Believing this made me a Christian on a mission. It is not at allunlikely that I was more than a little obnoxious about it.These views were confirmed for me in my late teens, first at the Moody BibleInstitute, the fundamentalist Bible college I attended after high school, and thenat Wheaton, the evangelical Christian liberal arts college where I finished myundergraduate degree. After graduating I chose to pursue the study of the NewTestament more seriously, and went for various reasons to the decidedly non fundamentalist Princeton Theological Seminary. It was there I started havingdoubts about my faith. In part, the doubts were caused by my studies, as I beganto realize that the Truth I had believed since high school was actually rathercomplicated and even problematic. My scholarship led me to realize that theBible was a very human book, with human mistakes and biases and culturallyconditioned views in it. And realizing that made me begin to wonder if thebeliefs in God and Christ I had held and urged on others were themselvespartially biased, culturally conditioned, or even mistaken.These doubts disturbed me not only because I wanted very much to knowthe Truth but also because I was afraid of the possible eternal consequences ofgetting it wrong. What if I started doubting or even denying that the Bible wasthe inspired word of God? Or that Christ was the unique Son of God? Or eventhat God existed? What if I ended up no longer believing and then realized toolate that my unfaithful change of heart had all been a huge blunder? Wouldn'tmy eternal soul be in very serious trouble?There was a particular moment when these worries hit me with specialpoignancy. It involved a late-night sauna.In order to pay for my graduate school, I worked a part-time job at theHamilton Tennis Club outside of Princeton. Most days of the week I was on thelate shift. Members of the club with busy lives would schedule their tennismatches deep into the night, and I worked the desk taking reservations andsweeping the courts afterward. One of the benefits of the job was that I couldtake advantage of the facilities, including the sauna when the place was shut up.The evening in question I had been sweeping the courts and thinking abouteverything I had been hearing—and resisting—in my biblical studies andtheology courses at Princeton Seminary, pondering just how die rent myprofessors' perspectives were from what I had been taught to believe as aconservative evangelical Christian in my high school and college years. Thesenew views were very liberal from my former point of view. I was hearing, andstarting to think, that the Bible was not a consistent revelation whose very wordscame from God; that the traditional Christian doctrines I had always held asobviously true (e.g., the Trinity) were not handed down from heaven but wereformulations made by very fallible human beings; and that there were lots ofother views out there—even Christian views—that did not jibe with what I hadlong believed. I was doing my best to sure it all out. Whatever I decided tobelieve and think, I wanted it to be right. I was willing to change my views ifnecessary, but I didn't want to leave a faith I loved, especially if it turned out thatI had been right in the First place and had simply begun to backslide down theslippery slope that leads to perdition.After sweeping the courts, I decided to have a sauna, and so I cranked up theheat as high as it would go, stripped down, and went in for a good after-worksweat. As I sat on the upper wooden bench all alone late at night, perspiringprofusely, I returned to my doubts and the questions I had about my faith andthe fears I had for the possible outcomes of pursuing them—fears not just formy life, but even more for my afterlife. Then I started realizing: Wow. It sure ishot in here! Oh, man, is it hot in here! It is really, really hot in here! And then,naturally, the thought struck me. Do I really want to be trapped in a massivelyoverheated sauna for all eternity? And what if the sauna is many, many timeshotter than this? Do I want to be in re forever? Is it worth it? For me, at thatmoment, that meant: Do I really want to change my beliefs and risk eternaltorment?I don't need to discuss my long transition here. Sucre it to say that Ieventually did begin to change, and over a number of years I moved into a liberalform of Christianity that cherished questions and thinking more than beliefbased simply on what others told me. Finally I left the faith altogether. As afriend of mine, a Methodist minister, sometimes jokes, I went from being bornagain to being dead again.And yet I continue to be fascinated by the question of the afterlife—not somuch because I fear it anymore but because it plays such a crucial role in thethinking and literature of the earliest Christians, which is my particular led ofacademic interest. Knowing where ideas of the afterlife came from, how theydeveloped, and how they changed can tell us, historically, a lot about howChristianity came to be what it is today: the most historically significant andculturally influential religion in the world.But these ideas are even more important for nonacademic reasons.Traditional Christian beliefs in the afterlife continue to be widely held in oursociety. A recent Pew Research Poll showed that 72 percent of all Americansagree that there is a literal heaven where people go when they die; 58 percentbelieve in an actual, literal hell.1 These numbers are, of course, down seriouslyfrom previous periods, but they are still impressive. And for the historian, it isimportant to realize that in the Christian West prior to the modern period—think, for example, the Middle Ages or, for that matter, the 1950s—virtuallyeveryone believed that when they died their soul would go to one place or theother (or to Purgatory in painful preparation for ultimate glory).One of the surprising theses of this book is that these views do not go back tothe earliest stages of Christianity. They cannot be found in the Old Testamentand they are not what Jesus himself taught. Then where did they come from?A related thesis is that neither ancient Christianity nor the Judaism it wasbuilt on—let alone the other religions in their immediate context—had a single,solitary view of the afterlife. Both religions—and all the religions at the time—were remarkably diverse in their views. These various views competed with oneanother. Even within the New Testament, die rent key grues promoteddivergent understandings. The apostle Paul had die rent views of the afterlifefrom Jesus, whose views were not the same as those found in the Gospel of Lukeor the Gospel of John or the book of Revelation. Moreover, none of these viewscoincides exactly with those of Christian leaders of the second, third, and fourthcenturies whose ideas became the basis for the understandings of manyChristians today. So how did all these views originate?I have called this book Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife. When I'vetold people the title, they have often been puzzled or even slightly ended. Butlet me be clear: I am not saying that a literal heaven and hell have experiencedhistorical changes. I'm saying that the ideas of heaven and hell were invented andhave been altered over the years.And I think that can be proved. There was a time in human history when noone on the planet believed that there would be a judgment day at the end oftime. At another time, people did believe it. It eventually became a standardChristian teaching and is accepted as orthodox truth by many millions of peopletoday. Between the time no one believed it and many people did, someone cameup with the idea. That is, it was invented. So too with every idea of the afterlife.That doesn't make the ideas wrong. It just means they were ideas that once didnot exist and then later did. That, of course, is true of all ideas, views, theories,perspectives, rules, laws, formulae, proofs—everything thought up by humanagents. Some of them are right, some are wrong, and some are not susceptible tothe categories of right and wrong. But whether right, wrong, or neither, all ofthem came into someone's mind at some point in time. A physicist came upwith the theory of gravity, a mathematician with the formula for determiningthe area of a rectangle, a political thinker with the idea of democracy, and on andon and on. We evaluate these formulations and their claims to the truthindependently of the fact that for most of human history no one subscribed tothem.So too with understandings of the afterlife. In this book I will not be urgingyou either to believe or disbelieve in the existence of heaven and hell. I aminterested, instead, in seeing where these ideas came from within the dominantculture of the West, Christianity, especially as it emerged out of the paganreligions of its world and out of Judaism in particular. I want to see how views ofthe afterlife came about and how they were then mo died, transformed,believed, doubted, and disbelieved over time.Through the course of this book we will see that there was indeed a timewhen literally no one thought that at death their soul would go to heaven or hell.In the oldest forms of Western culture, as far back as we have written records,people believed everyone experienced the same fate after death, an uninteresting,feeble, and rather boring eternity in a place often called Hades. This is the viewclearly set forth in Homer's Odyssey. But eventually people came to think thiscould not be right, largely because it was not fair. If there are gods with anythinglike our moral code who oversee the world, there must be justice, both in this lifeand the next. That must mean that faithful, well-meaning, and virtuous peoplein the world will be rewarded for how they live, and the wicked will be punished.This is the view that developed next, as we will see in the writings of Plato.A similar transformation happened in the ancient religion of Israel. Ouroldest sources of the Hebrew Bible do not talk about "life after death" butsimply the state of death, as all people, righteous and wicked, reside in their graveor in a mysterious entity called Sheol. The focus for these texts, therefore, is onlife in the present, in particular the life of the nation Israel, chosen and called byGod to be his people. He would make the nation great in exchange for itsworship and devotion. But that long-held view came to be challenged by therealities of history as tiny Israel experienced one disaster and calamity afteranother: economic, political, social, and military. When parts of the nation cameto be destroyed, some survivors wrestled seriously with how to understand thedisaster in light of God's justice. How could God allow his own chosen peopleto be wiped out by a foreign, pagan power?Starting in the sixth century BCE, Hebrew prophets began to proclaim thatthe nation that had been destroyed would be restored to life by God. In a sense,it would be "raised from the dead." This was a national resurrection—not of thepeople who lived in the nation but a restoration of the nation Israel itself—tobecome, once more, a sovereign state.Toward the very end of the Old Testament period, some Jewish thinkerscame to believe this future "resurrection" would apply not to the fortunes of thenation but to individuals. If God was just, surely he could not allow thesue ring of the righteous to go unrequited. There would be a future day ofjudgment, when God would literally bring his people, each of them, back to life.This would be a resurrection of the dead: those who had sided with God wouldbe returned to their bodies to live forevermore.Jesus of Nazareth inherited this view and forcefully proclaimed it. Those whodid God's will would be rewarded at the end, raised from the dead to live foreverin a glorious kingdom here on earth. Those opposed to God would be punishedby being annihilated out of existence. For Jesus this was to happen very soon.Evil had taken control of this world and was wreaking havoc in it, especiallyamong the people of God. But God would soon intervene to overthrow theseforces of evil and establish his kingdom here on earth.After Jesus's death, his disciples carried on his message, even as theytransformed it in light of the new circumstances they came to face. Among otherthings, the expected end never did come, which led to a reevaluation of Jesus'soriginal message. Some of his followers came to think that God's vindication ofhis followers would not be delayed until the end of human history. It wouldhappen to each person at the point of death. Believers in Christ would be takeninto the presence of Christ in heaven as they awaited the return to their bodies atthe future resurrection. Those opposed to God, however, would be punished.Eventually Christians came to think this punishment would not entailannihilation (Jesus's view) but torment, and not just for a short day or two butforever. God is eternal; his creation is eternal; humans are eternal; and eternitywill show forth God's glorious judgments: paradise for the saints and pain forthe sinners. Heaven and hell were born.In short, the ideas of the afterlife that so many billions of people in our worldhave inherited emerged over a long period of time as people struggled with howthis world can be fair and how God or the gods can be just. Death itself cannotbe the end of the story. Surely all people will receive what they deserve. But this isnot what people always thought. It was a view that Jews and Christians came upwith over a long period of time as they tried to explain the injustice of this worldand the ultimate triumph of good over evil.A study of the evolution of these beliefs can lead to important and salutaryends. On the academic and intellectual level, it will tell us a lot about thehistorical development of Christianity, the most important religious movementin the history of our civilization. On a more personal level—in fact, in the mostpersonal terms possible a fuller understanding of where the ideas of heavenand hell came from can provide assurance and comfort because, contrary towhat I once thought, even if we do have something to hope for after we havepassed from the realm of temporary consciousness, we have absolutely nothingto fear. I believe this assurance, on a practical level, can free us to appreciate andenjoy our existence in the here and now, living lives full of meaning and purposein the brief moment given us in this world of mortals.