Tyler Johnson, MDiv
Tyler is a pastor and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Iowa with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has pondering the mysteries of light.
I ended last week’s post with the conviction that “it is only other-worldliness that guarantees an appropriate kind of this-worldliness.” This is an uncomfortable thought for me as I immediately think of the kinds of conservative Christianity which treat the church, their families, or the faith in general as an ark to which they escape while the world dies. That is to say, I have seen far too much of a kind of other-worldliness which leads to no kind of this-worldliness. This is not what I’m advocating, or what C.S. Lewis, or Hans Boersma are advocating (both quoted in the last post). The issue is complicated, so I’ll start with a couple of observations.
The culture of our little suburb is quirky, especially when it comes to rewards. After any school concert, whether band, vocal, or just a class program, there comes the expectation of ice cream. This is a cultural phenomenon here. Any business that serves ice cream will be jam packed after the high school auditorium is used for virtually any kind of performance. It does not matter how late, or whether it is a school night, ice cream is the expected outcome of school-related performing. We have resisted this quirk, to our children’s chagrin.
In an equally silly move, Gatorade is the expected drink after doing anything sports-related. If you’ve been nominally active, you need to drink some Gatorade. It doesn’t matter if you’re seven and you barely broke a sweat during soccer practice, nor that a small Gatorade has twice the amount of sugar you should have in a day. If you’ve done something related to a sport, you need your Gatorade.
The point I want to make is that these rewards have no relation to the activity. But this is how our culture works. We award rings to football champions and belts to boxers. I personally have a number of trophies from my tae kwon do career. This seems normal to us, but it is hardly natural. In fact, the idea of a natural reward is probably fairly foreign to us. We don’t tend to think in such terms. C.S. Lewis reorients us in his sermon The Weight of Glory, when he writes,
There are different kinds of rewards. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward for love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring it…. The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.
Ultimately, Lewis is defending the idea that heaven is a natural reward for how we’ve lived on earth.
I think we easily lose sight of this. We allow the cultural norm of disconnected rewards to inform our understanding of a heavenly reward. This makes heaven something that is wholly other; it is disconnected from this world by an immeasurable gap and no part of this world has any resonance with that world. This is far wrong.
Lewis tells us of the natural rewards which “are the activity itself in consummation.” This reminds me of playing music with friends. The natural reward of practicing an instrument, learning new skills and new songs, is found in playing music. The natural reward of physical activity is the joy that comes when your body is able to play to its full potential. Natural rewards tends towards participation in something rather than possession of something. And these natural rewards are far more gratifying than a trophy or some ice cream.
What if Lewis is right? What if heaven is a natural reward, rather than just something tacked on at the end of a “good” life? What if living right in this world actually prepares us for that other life?
This is the point Lewis makes in The Weight of Glory. He explains that we must learn to like the things of heaven. It is difficult for us to grasp what he means by this, especially since our highest hopes of heaven rarely go beyond a kind of family reunion. So it will be helpful to note that a family reunion is not central to the images of heaven that we find anywhere in the Bible.
Heaven will be a place of joy, not sorrow; a place of peace, not conflict. It will be a place where God is present in all His abundance and glory. And since God is God, and we are not, heaven won’t be about us. It is not a place where we will find fame and fortune and meaning. Heaven is all about God. And as such, nothing can diminish the joy, the glory or the peace of the heavenly lands. Not even the absence of you, or one of your loved ones.
I think this is the hardest part of heaven to imagine. If I were to end up in heaven, then my joy there wouldn’t be diminished one iota if my wife, my kids, or anyone else I loved was absent. This is the nearly unbearable logic of heaven.
Since heaven is about God and not us, then it would make sense that the joys of heaven are something of an acquired taste. That is to say, we have to learn to enjoy the joy that heaven offers. If we stubbornly cling to our pride and self-sufficiency throughout our whole lives, then what on earth would make us ready to enjoy an eternity depending on Someone else? If we spend our lives fighting for our rights, what would prepare us to enjoy a heaven of self-denial? If we spend our whole lives absorbed in pursuing our own fame and fortune, then how could we endure a heaven where we aren’t needed and all the glory goes to God? (Read Lewis’ The Great Divorce for more such examples.)
This is why Lewis is so insistent that the doors of hell are locked from the inside, that no one is sent to hell, rather they get there “on their own steam.” And this is why a proper kind of other-worldliness will lead us to a proper kind of this-worldliness. If life is about learning to enjoy the joy that heaven has to offer - and that joy is rooted in selflessness, mercy, humility, servant-hood, and the like - then practicing these other-worldly habits will lead us to engage this world in a more Christ-like way.
On the other hand, it is hard to imagine how political activism, by itself, could ever prepare us to enjoy a heaven where no activism is needed since God reigns and justice prevails.
Our actions in this world are not an end in themselves. They should always point beyond themselves and prepare us for something beyond as well. Are our lives preparing us to enjoy the joys of heaven? This question should never be far from our minds.