“What will you do first when you get to Heaven?”
If you believe in some variation of the Christian afterlife, you’ve probably thought or talked about this topic at some point. These conversations likely start when we’re children or teenagers, and perhaps they still pop up in those rarer imaginative days of adulthood. Regardless, it’s hard to answer with anything but a little whimsy:
I want to talk to the great philosophers and theologians.
I want to play with all my old dogs at once.
I want to see which politicians weren’t faking it.
It’s a fun topic. It’s often a silly topic. But the answer may reveal a lot about the speaker and where he/she is in life. Personally, I used to have a pretty hardline stance on exactly what the Christian afterlife would look like (more on this in an upcoming post), but my views have softened over the past few years, and when a question like this comes up, my answer now is always:
I want to have a nice long laugh about how wrong I was about everything.
You see, when it comes to how we see the world, I think we often make a crucial mistake: we take frameworks for understanding and mistake them for irrefutable natural laws. We take manmade philosophies, mere tools of interpretation, and we make them infallible. We take that which was only truly descriptive and assume it’s prescriptive. For example:
Socialism works great in theory. It has a consistent internal logic. It can be helpful for making sense of many situations we encounter in our daily lives. But there are also many cases where the system breaks down. That’s okay. No philosophy is perfect. It’s not universal.
Calvinism works great in theory. It has a consistent internal logic. It can be helpful for making sense of many situations we encounter in our daily lives. But there are also many cases where the system breaks down. That’s okay. No philosophy is perfect. It’s not universal.
Anselm’s Theory of the Atonement works great in theory. It has a consistent internal logic. It can be helpful for making sense of many situations we encounter in our daily lives. But there are also many cases where the system breaks down. That’s okay. No philosophy is perfect. It’s not universal.
I could keep going, but you get the idea. My beliefs are tools for making sense of the world, but I’m still hampered by how little I can understand of the infinite. These frameworks that I might use to find meaning in our existence all have their limits, and thus, while I might value them, I’m constantly reminded of how I need to hold them with an open hand, always remaining willing to be proven wrong. The one thing I do assume: at the end of it all, I’ll eventually get to have a conversation where Jesus looks at me and says, “Wait, you believed what?” and we’ll both have a good laugh.
All this is what I mean when I say, “All theology is approximate.”
It may come close to portraying how God and the world function,
but there’s still a grander truth it can’t quite capture.
This doesn’t mean we should give up the search.
This doesn’t mean our discussions and debates are pointless.
Rather, it’s a reminder:
Stay open.