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The early medieval pope Gregory the Great, quoted in Russell, records one such vision, typical of many others:

Across the bridge there were green and pleasant meadows carpeted with sweet flowers and herbs. In the fields groups of white-clothed people were seen. Such a sweet scent filled the air that it fed those who dwelt and walked there. The dwellings of the blessed were full of a great light. A house of amazing capacity was being constructed there, apparently out of golden bricks.

The idea of going back to the primeval garden (the "return to Eden") rather than forward to a garden city is deeply rooted in Christian History, but its popular acceptance today seems to owe much more to John Milton's Paradise Lost than to biblical prophecy. Indeed, the concept resembles the Islamic notion of a heavenly oasis awaiting faithful Muslims much more than it does the heavenly Jerusalem as a garden city descending to earth. The biblical vision in Revelation 22 shows that in the midst of the "city and its gates and walls" is the "river of the water of life," and on each side of the river is "the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit."

Who gets to go to heaven, and who enjoys what there, is another earth-heaven symmetry revealed in these volumes. As Russell dryly points out, when monks write the accounts, monasticism receives the highest heavenly recognition. When bishops or theologians offer their versions, clergy and scholars rank highest. Customarily, to be sure, the reader is assured that no one will be envious in heaven and thus higher and lower ranks won't pose a problem to anyone's beatitude. (We'll see.)

A related question is the destiny of non-Christians, whether Old Testament saints, "righteous pagans" (such as Plato or Aristotle, who in the eyes of many Christians have taught so much truth), or those who never had the opportunity to hear the gospel before death. Here, too, Dante is hardly the spokesman for all orthodox Christians in his awarding of heavenly positions to distinguished pagans he happened to admire. Still, we must charitably recognize that our own generation has not answered this question to everyone's satisfaction—a question that grows ever sharper as we encounter more and more people of other religions.

The question of who will be in heaven has vexed Christians for two millennia. Surely, however, we agree at least on the bare fact that we are indeed going to heaven—right?

Paul Marshall contradicts this apparent truism in his Heaven Is Not My Home. With Russell, McGrath, and others, he notes that the ancient Israelite and early Christian traditions agree that the destiny of God's people is a redeemed and renewed earthly city, the New Jerusalem, and not some celestial alternative. Heaven is, properly speaking, the abode of God, and humans cannot live there. Heaven thus represents God's unapproachable transcendence. Earth instead is the proper abode of humans who enjoy the unspeakable blessing of communion with the God who condescends to inhabit the city he makes for them. God foreshadowed this sort of dwelling both in the Old Testament tabernacle and in the New Testament "tabernacling" of the Incarnation of his Son. In the New Jerusalem to come, there is no tabernacle or temple at all, for "its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb" (Rev. 21:22).

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June 2003, Vol. 47, No. 6