The problem with Peter Kreeft’s eloquent and moving book
Heaven is not the author but the author’s faith. Kreeft
follows a particular Christian thread that portrays heaven as
the place of our ultimate longing and our highest reality.
It’s what we should aspire to and yearn for, with a craving best
captured in the book’s subtitle: The Heart’s Deepest
Longing. Here’s Kreeft subordinating everything to the
aspiration for heaven: “If life on earth is not a road to heaven
then it is a treadmill, a merry-go-round minus the merry.”
These are curious words. Really? If we lived a full and glorious
life on this earth, filled with the laughter of children and the
love of a good woman, and suffused with kindness to strangers, it
is still just a worthless treadmill? Statements such as these,
founded as they are on an otherworldly theology in which heaven is
everything and earth is virtually worthless, are what give atheists
endless ammunition to lob against religion. Their principal
compliant—that faith has focused on the heavens and abandoned the
earth—becomes justified.
The Christian and Jewish views of heaven could not be more
different. Christians believe heaven is just that: in the heavens,
detached from earth, a “higher” reality, filled with the light of
disembodied spirits. Jews, however, view heaven as the way this
world will become when it is perfected in Messianic times. What is
heaven? It is the earth in a faultless state, purged of hatred,
hunger, and hostility.
Why do we naturally assume that the sky is more sacred than the
earth, or that the life of a soul outside a body is higher than
that of a soul within? The denigration of the physical can only
lead, as a tributary, to the denigration of life as well. Kreeft
goes down this unfortunate path: “The real present is something to
be endured while you await the hoped-for future, where your heart
is.”
Hence, one finds Kreeft quoting leading Christian thinkers who
extol death, like C. S. Lewis, who refers to death as “a severe
mercy.” You’re kidding, right? How does this approach differ from
that of Dr. Kevorkian, who went to jail for performing “severe
mercies”? Kreeft also quotes Heidegger: “My very being is a being
toward death.” Whoa. That’s pretty macabre.
But Kreeft can give as well as he can quote, and he finds
eloquent metaphors to add to the morbidity: “As soon as we are born
we begin to die. This world is like a rocket ship; we are already
launched into the beyond. Life is like an escalator, and there is
no way off except at the end.” And he seems strangely enamored by
the brilliance of death. “Death is the ‘golden key’ to my identity.
Death is the door not only to life but also to selfhood.”
The problem with these sentiments is not their degradation of
only life, but especially of a life lived nobly. Let’s imagine for
a moment that God loses the battle with Satan, and the reward for a
righteous life is that the honorable soul goes straight to hell.
Would Kreeft and other Christian theologians of his persuasion tell
us that such acts of righteousness on this earth are now all for
naught because they do not result in heaven?
In Auschwitz the reward for being Jewish was the gas chamber and
cremation furnace. Did that make the experience of living a Jewish
life any less vibrant? Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and saved
the Union. His reward? A bullet to the neck. Martin Luther King
ended Jim Crow and segregation. His reward was to be cut down by an
assassin’s bullet on the balcony of a cheap motel. Luckily, noble
effort is judged not by the reward but by the effort itself. Life
is the same, and whether or not we go to heaven should have no
bearing on the value of our lives.
What I am saying is that heaven is…er…overrated, especially by
people of faith. Indeed, it seems counterintuitive to the religious
experiment. Aren’t we supposed to serve God sincerely and not out
of any desire for reward? And isn’t serving God supposed to be
about doing the right thing with no thought of spiritual bliss or
ecstatic enlightenment?
DON’T GET ME WRONG: As a religious Jew I believe in heaven. It’s
just that I don’t much think about it. We Jews have been
conditioned to think about this world, not the next. Our
objective is not to use heaven as an escape from a world filled
with pain, hunger, death, and disappointment; but rather to rid the
world of those curses so that the earth itself becomes more
heavenly.
The difference between the Jewish and Christian approaches to
heaven comes up in nearly all my public debates with Christian
missionaries, especially in light of my book Kosher Jesus,
which seeks to introduce Jesus’ Jewishness into the Christian
theological equation. My opponents will invariably ask me, toward
the end of the debate, how I can expect to get into heaven if I
don’t accept Christ as my personal savior, given the New
Testament’s emphatic statements that only through Jesus can one be
saved. My response is cynical but clear: Heaven? Who cares about
heaven? I couldn’t give one damn where I am going. Even one moment
of thinking about it is a moment taken away from my duties here on
earth to clothe the naked, house the homeless, and comfort the
bereaved. Charity and righteousness are not portals through which
one ultimately caters to one’s own spiritual needs; and religion
dare not become a ticket one purchases for a heavenly lottery.
But Kreeft, for all his beautiful writing, seems oblivious to
the contradiction in touting religion as a means to escape modern
narcissism—“Our deepest destiny is death, not just to the body but
to the ego”—all while saying that if we seek God enough, we will
receive the ultimate narcissistic reward, an eternity indulging the
ecstatic heavenly pleasures of our own souls.
It’s time for religion to refocus its efforts on bettering our
world, rather than getting us into heaven. We can only start by
reversing the idea that life in this world is just a means to an
end.
“Earth is only the castle’s drawbridge, the road to the great
hall or the dungeon, upstairs or downstairs.” No, Professor Kreeft.
Earth is the whole game, the players and the arena, the bees and
the hive. Heaven is a mere afterthought, a place of spiritual
indolence where souls wait around until they are resurrected back
into a body and can do some good in the world.
IN JUDAISM there is a law that says when visiting a cemetery, we
must tuck our tzitzit, fringes we wear to remind us of
God’s commandments, in our pants so that they not mock the dead.
The dead may be in heaven, but they wish they were performing God’s
commandments here on earth.
It turns out that heaven, like retirement, is vastly overrated.
I prefer what Rabbi Menachem Schneerson once said: That retirement
should involve re-tiring, or putting on new tires and doing even
more than before. Let us recommit to making heaven on earth.
