Heaven: A Traveller’s Guide to the Undiscovered Country. Peter Stanford
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debate within the leadership of the early church as it separated from Judaism. With regard to the afterlife, the last judgement, the immortal soul and the question of bodily resurrection, there were many conflicting threads to this debate – all of them owing something to Judaism and all of them presenting the next generation of Christians with a hazy, confused picture of heaven.
Alongside the words ascribed to Jesus must be considered those of St Paul. In his biography of Paul (Paul: The Mind of the Apostle), the historian and polemicist A. N. Wilson holds that it is impossible to underestimate the importance of this saint in shaping Christian thought. Jesus was, Wilson states bluntly, a minor ‘Galilean exorcist’ interested in Jewish matters and one of many messiahs who two thousand years ago attracted the attention of a people desperate for divine assistance in overthrowing their Roman overlords. The tiny cult that surrounded him after his death would, he says, have petered out like all the rest had it not attracted the attention of Paul of Tarsus who is, for Wilson, ‘a richly imaginative but confused religious genius who was able to draw out a mythological and archetypical significance from the death of a Jewish hero’.
Wilson is certainly right to note how little Paul’s writings owe to any recorded words or deeds of Jesus, save for the overriding inspiration of the image of the crucified Christ. Paul, a Greek-speaker, borrowed as liberally from Greco-Roman culture as from Judaism and as a missionary was always alert in fashioning his teachings to the need to create something that would have resonance in the Gentile world rather than simply satisfy an already fragmented Israel. In this sense, today’s Christians are not Christians at all, but Paulians.
Another important factor in weighing Paul’s writings is that most of them predate the Gospel accounts. His are the earliest records of the Jesus cult. Rather than see Paul as refining Jesus’ message and words, as set out in the Gospels, it is more accurate to see the Gospel accounts as offering another take on stories that may have been in the oral tradition, and that may have been adopted as a counterpoint to Paul within the disharmonious and scattered early Church.
Paul differed from Jesus on several points about afterlife. Certainly there was nothing in Paul’s writings that suggested that the dead would rise again with God before the last judgement, though Paul fervently believed that this event was near at hand. His view on resurrection came, as with all else in his writing, from the symbol of the risen Christ.
We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and that it will be the same for those who have died in Jesus: God will bring them with him. We can tell you this from the Lord’s own teaching, that any of us who are left alive until the Lord’s coming will not have any advantage over those who have died. At the trumpet of God, the voice of the archangel will call out the command and the Lord himself will come down from heaven; those who have died in Christ will be the first to rise, and then those of us who are still alive will be taken up in the clouds, together with them, to meet the Lord in the air. So we shall stay with the Lord for ever. (I Thess 4:14–17)
With no precise location of this heaven ‘in the air’ and ‘in the clouds’ mentioned elsewhere, Paul might well have been speaking metaphorically, but both the apostle and Jesus were utterly at one in emphasising the central importance of being with God in heaven and in dismissing Jewish hopes for an earthly messianic kingdom. From the perspective of earth, Paul wrote in one of his best-known phrases that we can only imagine meeting God as ‘we see through a glass, darkly’. However, he gave the theocentric line an imaginative new gloss: God’s kingdom, he argued, was already here in one form because Christ was everywhere where people worshipped him and praised him. (This interpretation may indeed be what the author of Luke is driving at when he has Jesus speak of the ‘God of the living’.) Heaven, by contrast, would bear little resemblance to this life because, according to Paul, our resurrected bodies would not be our earthly ones.
For we know that when the tent that we live in on earth is folded up, there is a house built by God for us, an everlasting home not made by human hands, in the heavens. In this present state, it is true, we groan as we wait with longing to put on our heavenly home over the other; we should like to be found wearing clothes and not be without them. Yes, we groan and find it a burden being still in this tent, not that we want to strip it off, but to put on the second garment over it and to have what must die taken up into life … we remember that to live in the body means to be exiled from the Lord. (2 Cor 5:1–7)
The Acts of the Apostles tells us that Paul was a tent-maker by trade, so the metaphor he uses is apt. The separation of body and soul was, as we have already seen, a distinctly Greek idea, especially in the hands of Plato, and Paul knew Greek as well as any of the early Christian leaders. His talk, of a ‘spiritual body’, however, was never precise or well-defined. And his insistence that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom’ (1 Cor 15:50) was strangely at odds with his focus on the image of the risen Christ – who ascended to heaven body and soul.
Indeed there is a good deal of confusion in Paul’s writings, for two verses further on, he states that the dead would be raised ‘imperishable … because our present perishable nature must put on imperishability’. This sounds suspiciously like bodily resurrection. Paul may have spoken Greek, have read Plato, and been influenced by him on the separation of body and soul, but he was also a Jew and Jews did not split up humanity in this fashion. Some argue that the distinction he was making was between ‘flesh’ (sarx), by which he meant the whole human being, body and soul, turned away from God, and ‘spirit’ (pneuma) the whole human being, body and soul, turned towards God.
‘Conceivably, had Paul known about atoms and molecules,’ writes E. P. Sanders, the American religious historian and admirer of Paul, ‘he would have put all this in different terms. What he is affirming and denying is clear: resurrection means transformed body, not walking corpse or disembodied spirit. We can hardly criticise him for not being able to define “spiritual body” more clearly. His information on the topic was almost certainly derived entirely from his experience of encountering the risen Lord.’
In spiritual man, then, Paul could have been suggesting an entirely new kind of human being, for whom there were no adequate words, essentially a transcendent being. Such a radical thought could then be placed alongside Paul’s habit of invoking other notions similarly revolutionary (for his time) – namely that there were no divisions between men and women, slave or freeman, Jew or Gentile.
The same might be said about the passage in his Second Letter to the Corinthians which links in closely with this line of thought. Here Paul wrote of a man (taken by many to be a thinly veiled reference to Paul himself) who ‘was caught up into paradise’ where he ‘heard things which must not and cannot be put into human language’ and therefore about which he refused to speak when he returned to earth. One approach would be to deduce that here Paul was offering an early hint of what came to be called ‘Jewish Throne Mysticism’. This entailed an inward trip, rather like the Buddhist search for nirvana, but done in the form of a symbolic ascent to a place of greater knowledge undertaken within this life. Paul was then encountering heaven, or salvation, but doing so within himself in a mystical form, a theory not wholly inconsistent with the ideas found in the Paulian writing we have already looked at.
Mysticism has traditionally been a difficult concept for the monotheistic creeds to cope with because it cuts against their practical, naturalistic, action-reward philosophies and their taste for the literal. Yet it is ever-present in the history of heaven down the ages. Derived from the Greek verb musteion, meaning to close the eyes or mouth, mysticism generally refers to an experience of darkness or silence. It has been one of the main ways in which various religious traditions have attempted to explain the inner world of the psyche and the imagination in relation to a deity, and it has obvious parallels with modern-day psychoanalysis.
In the second and third centuries Judaism developed a strong and well-recorded mystical bent as a way of turning away from external realities of political persecution towards a more powerful internalised divine realm. This may already have been around in Paul’s time. The throne of God in this strand of theology was approached via an often terrifying but explicitly imaginary, inward journey through seven heavens. Throne Mysticism thrived within Judaism and even inside the great rabbinic academies until it was overtaken by a new form of mysticism, Kabbalah, in the twelfth