Heaven

“But endless future is without final aim: It repeats itself and could well be described as an image of hell.”

- Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now. 125.

“I don’t believe in the afterlife“ I told a fellow worker weeks ago, ”I believe in resurrection.“ The point may seem mute to some but to me it is significant. I find the way people talk about life after death to be strangely self-indulgent, familiar and vapid. Most people talk as if heaven were a place of endless [T]hanksgiving. They talk as if eternity were a holiday in which they get together with their immediate family, stuff themselves with turkey and watch football forever. This, it seems, is paradise. An extended, cyclical vacation where things basically go on being the same but without pain or death. Everyone is happy. No one has to change in this “endless future.” But the thanksgiving of eternity is an action in which the inhabitants of God’s presence are forever changed by a great mystical sacrifice, brought from death into life anew and are delighted in his Glory. And in this thanksgiving there is no room for the merely familiar. But only as of yet unknown abandonment to the other. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sounds like a new piece of art in the making.