Special Feature: Randy Alcorn - Heaven (and other books)

[Destined-To-Reign]

No, I am not MPMW, but I wanted to come in here and say that the discussion here, and your introductory post in particular, Shadowlander, has made me want to read the book very much. I've heard ww and Dr. Ransom talking about Heaven a little, and so I know a little bit about it, but this thread has really piqued my interest. I suspect I shall have to get the book from the library soon.

[johobbit]

Please note that this Special Feature will be closing on Friday evening of this week, after which you may continue discussion of Alcorn's books on the Books thread.

[Dr Elwin Ransom]

Argh! I have almost missed my chance entirely to say more about this awesome book. Who/what do I blame? Perhaps my computer, for being slow and unwieldy. Or being work, for being an entirely reasonable taker of much of my time. Or other writing projects. Or, perhaps, I could blame Christmas. Yes, that seems a good idea. I’ve been so busy with Christmas — just as busy as anyone else can be, actually. Okay, I give up on trying to make excuses. ...

Speaking of holidays ...

Do you think we’ll still celebrate holidays on the New Earth? Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Birthdays, etc.?

My de facto “policy” is this: if it’s not sinning here, then why not have it there? Can a holiday like Christmas give glory to God on Old Earth? If so, then I think the “burden,” if there is one, is to show from Scripture that something like recognizing a special occasion won’t be in the New Heavens and New Earth, rather than proving from Scripture that it will be. There isn’t space enough in the Bible to say what all we’ll be able to do, think, achieve, etc., in the New Heavens and New Earth.

My mom got the book...agh, forgot it’s name. Something about “Passion for Purity” or something like that by Randy Alcorn. She’s really liking it, and after she’s done, she had suggested for my sister and I to read it so we’ll probably do that. What are some other books by him that y’all would suggest?

Heaven. Read Heaven. After that you might read If God Is Good..., a book about the reasons for suffering that is apparently in the same deep-and-lengthy-yet-readable vein as Heaven. I haven’t read that book yet, but it’s on my Christmas wish list!

[T]he discussion here, and your introductory post in particular, Shadowlander, has made me want to read the book very much. I've heard ww and Dr. Ransom talking about Heaven a little, and so I know a little bit about it, but this thread has really piqued my interest. I suspect I shall have to get the book from the library soon.

Hey, you could add Heaven to your wish lists, Aslanisthebest and Destined-to-Reign. (See below for more glowing comments on this book from yours truly, in a review I wrote this past summer. ...)

Randy Alcorn’s fiction Safely Home seems to have standard Apocalypse storylines intermingled with scenes from the New Heaven and New Earth (stargazer referenced it in an earlier post. Phosphorous also referenced a few more of his works *points up*).

After Heaven, I read Safely Home, but I loved Heaven much more. Make no mistake, I love great fiction, and Alcorn’s work was good — but his nonfiction was better. Much of the novel he set in China, and dealt in a very linear way with a Chinese man from the persecuted church. As such, it was very depressing, and rightfully so, and to the point where the Heaven elements (and that being the present-day “intermediate” Heaven, not the New Heavens and New Earth) seemed almost tacked-on. It seemed to imitate Lewis more, too.

Lest that seem overcritical, I still can’t say enough about Heaven. In fact, come to think of it, I finally got around to condensing a lot of what I’ve written on the subject for a book review, written last June for my church’s website: ’Heaven’ is imbued with Biblical doctrine, informed imagination. Well, I might as well excerpt it here, eh wot?

This book, along with Desiring God by John Piper, really did “change my life,” in the way people hear about sometimes, back in 2006 when I read it for the first time. Now, since reading it twice more in three years, I can eagerly agree with Alcorn’s back-cover quote:

The next time you hear someone say, “We can’t begin to imagine what Heaven will be like,” you’ll be able to tell them, “I can.”

Unlike other Christian authors, who may assume unbelieving readers already know, he begins with a carefully written chapter that ensures some readers are told that they are actually headed by default for Hell. Alcorn blessedly knows his audience — and the fact that some among them will be naïve non-Christians who assume that a pleasant afterlife is theirs to claim.

From there he heads into more assumption-questioning that continues throughout the book. (Some have said Alcorn seems too redundant in doing that, though I argue that rebuttals to long-held un-Biblical beliefs often need to be this redundant.) For the first several chapters he hits hard against popular Churchian legends about the afterlife. Heaven is not only the present-day “interim” Heaven where the redeemed go upon death, Alcorn writes, but in the future, it will be the New Heavens and New Earth. And the New Earth will by definition be earthly.

By calling the New Earth Earth, God emphatically tells us that it will be earthly, and thus familiar. Otherwise, why call it Earth?

When Scripture speaks of a “new song,” do we imagine it’s wordless, silent, or without rhythm? Of course not. Why? Because then it wouldn’t be a song. If I promised you a new car, would you say, “If it’s new, it probably won’t have an engine, transmission, doors, wheels, stereo, or upholstery”? If a new car didn’t have these things, it wouldn’t be a car. If we buy a new car, we know it will be a better version of what we already have, our old car. Likewise, the New Earth will be a far better version of the old Earth.

The word new is an adjective describing a noun. The noun is the main thing. A new car is first and foremost a car. A new body is mainly a body. A New Earth is mainly an Earth.

The New Earth will not be a non-Earth but a real Earth. The Earth spoken of in Scripture is the Earth we know — with dirt, water, rocks, trees, flowers, animals, people, and a variety of natural wonders. An Earth without these would not be an Earth.

Heaven, page 158

Many people don’t seem to get that — and I’m not just talking about non-Christians. Wrong ideas of Heaven are just as common in the Church. Some Christians, if they think about it, assume Heaven is a nonmaterial world of spiritoid weirdness where life may be really boring and you may even lose your individuality. It’s like the Twilight Zone. But we’re often given quick assurances that it’s not creepy — it’s all a good sort of spiritoid-ness, and we’ll love it anyway.

Those lines are out there, just floating around in Christendom without Scriptural support — ideas like: Well, we have no way to know much about heaven. Or, We’re not sure what kind of bodies we’ll have in heaven. Or this one: Time (or work) will be no more in heaven.

Many others secretly wonder, Will we eat and have fun? Will there be pizza in Heaven? What about coffee drinking?[i] And — as I used to do — many Christians don’t think beyond those questions, but think them somehow “unspiritual” and end them right then.

Alcorn believes many such Christians mean to be humble and not presumptuous. Of course we don’t know [i]everything there is to know about what God will have for us in Heaven. But God has revealed plenty for us in Scripture, Alcorn writes. Wrong ideas about Heaven have come not from the Bible, but from “Christoplatonism” — underlying ideas that only the “spiritual” is spiritual, and created matter does not matter to God.

Sprinkled throughout Alcorn’s first chapters are quotes and testimonies from believers who, he writes, secretly admitted they wished Heaven were more like Earth. The (supposed) fact that it won’t be like Earth frightened them. But Alcorn shows how Scripture contradicts many of the myths people have about Heaven, and points readers to the truths of God’s resurrecting not only His people from sin and death, but the rest of His material creation as well.

I’ve done my steady best to get MPMW to come here and post because there’s nothing I’d like more than to see some serious theological discussion on the subject, as well as a lot of prognostication from members as to what the New Earth will be like.

“What is that mysterious [PM writer] noise? Hmm — not over here, not over there. Kinda — catchy.”

I also wish the Mysterious PM Writer had actually come here to engage in some interaction. Why does he/she want to believe an imbalanced view of the New Heavens and New Earth, I would ask? Is there suspicion of Alcorn’s book because the ideas really sound un-Biblical, or because the ideas sound merely counter to prevailing myth-conceptions among Christians that themselves may be un-Biblical?

Yes, people can overdose on the Earth side of things. But that isn’t the main problem in many Christians. The bigger problem is overdosing on the Heavenly part, ignoring or dismissing the goodness of God’s material world as evil or pointless.

Either way, we ought not base our views on reactions to wrong views, as if we can fix everything simply by avoiding them, but upon love for Biblically balanced truth.

Apparently God didn’t see such a dichotomy between New Heavens and New Earth. His Spirit inspired Isaiah, and later the apostle John, to write about the New Heaven and New Earth. By definition, that means both. “Now the dwelling of God is with man,” Revelation 21 says. Why reject this?

Well, anything I write here won’t get much far if the Mysterious PM Writer still declines to show up and actually discuss. It only amounts to trying to throw sections of a literal, material, New-Earthly golden street at the passing car whose driver has just engaged in drive-by shooting. Meh.


Meanwhile, for further reading, I’ve dug up one of the best threads in Old NarniaWeb, from the Narnia and Christianity section: wisewoman had started the Aslan’s Country... and Beyond discussion. She had a great introduction, which I’ll also excerpt here:

I am only a few chapters in to Alcorn’s book, but I was struck by one of his opening arguments. He makes the case that most people, Christians included, have a hard time being sincere about wanting to go to Heaven. This sounds crazy, but when you think about how Heaven has been portrayed to us... as a totally spiritual place where disembodied spirits float in stasis and supposed bliss... how could we really look forward to something so boring?

We can’t. We are physical as well as spiritual creatures, and any notion of the afterlife that discounts our physical being can’t be right. We can’t want to be disembodied spirits, because that is not what we were made for. After being a physical and spiritual creature, downsizing to one “dimension” would be boring!

Part of the problem, and why the overspiritualized version of Heaven has been so unconsciously picked up by even the most orthodox of theologians, is that we have the mistaken notion that physical things are inherently wrong, or at least not quite as good, as spiritual things. We recoil from the idea of physical pleasures in Heaven because the very phrase “physical pleasure” has such negative connotations, doesn’t it? But didn’t God create those pleasures to be experienced by us? Is “physical pleasure” in and of itself a bad thing?

Later, I wrote in this about adventure in the New Heavens and New Earth:

Adventure is also for exploration, discovery, and learning. Those elements will be thrilling enough without the risks of being injured or dying. In fact, they’ll be even more thrilling!

I like to imagine doing all those foolish, daredevil things most people wouldn’t try in this world, just to see what will happen there. Imagine diving underwater, and trying to breathe — on purpose. Or, as a practical joke, whacking someone over the head with a two-by-four. (Will it just go clunk and not hurt, as if the other person were Superman? Or might it actually break in half?)

Or — one of my favorites — jump out of an airplane. Without a parachute.

The risk of talking about such things is it makes the New Heavens and New Earth seem like a cartoon world. But won’t humor be there also? I daresay some Christians who read the verse about no more crying or pain also include “no laughter” as part of their personal translation. ... Still, we want to be careful in knowing that even the hilarity in Heaven will be for a very serious purpose, and yet a joyous one: glorifying God and enjoying Him forever as His redeemed people.

Anyway, I think the parachute line stuck in Shadowlander’s mind, and as I recall, he had an absolutely hilarious extension on the theme:

I can almost see it now. A bunch of us on the ground watching the Doc flying around in a plane and jumping out at 30,000 feet. Just for the heck of it.

Spectator 1 - “So there I was, just walking through the mall when....uh...what’s that?” (points up)
Spectator 2 - “Oh that?” (squints) “That’s just Ransom”
Spectator 1 - “You’re kidding me....”
Spectator 3 - “Oh yeah. Major adrenaline junkie.”
Spectator 1 - (squints) “Why is he wearing a Superman cape?”
Spectator 3 - “Ahh, just for effect. Last week he rolled down Mt. Everest in a shopping cart. Week before that he walked across the Rockies entirely on his hands.”
Spectator 1 - (squints again) “Is he....is he reading a book?”
Spectator 2 - “Oh yeah...he said something about being able to finish the works of Herodotus before he hit ground.”
Spectator 3 - (long pause) “Didn’t Chuck Norris already do all of this last year?”
Spectator 2 - “Yeah. But don’t tell Ransom. He’ll probably try and grow facial hair like ‘The Bearded One’ next.”

Well, I hope that is sufficient to keep the discussion going, even if we only have two days for it. If this is the last I say here, I shall end with this: Heaven, not just as a book of opinions but as a well-done 500-plus-page sermon on the true eternal destiny of God’s redeemed, is still affecting me. The truth of the New Heavens and New Earth makes me want and work to glorify God in this Earth. The solution to being of no earthly good for God is not less Heavenly-mindedness, but more!

[Shadowlander]

I'm glad you remembered that little write-up Doc, it was a lot of fun to write. But just remember, no matter what you do in the New Heaven and New Earth, Chuck Norris will have done it first.

Along those lines sometimes I find myself pondering what everyday life will be like when we get there. Imagine a group of friends from different time periods gathered together with Christ sitting in an vast open plain, with the greenest rolling hills imaginable.

Friend 1 - *pats his belly* "What a great lunch! What a great place to have it, Lord!"
Christ - *smiling wide* "I knew each of you would appreciate it. What do you think of the hills?"
Friend 2 - *looking around and smiling* "It's quite different to what I was used to back in the Old Time, Sire. I think I could get quite used to it. I love too the earthiness of the Black Forest in my native land, although times were rough back then. Much harder than it was for you 'young ones'" *winks at Friend #3, who died of influenza in 1920*
Friend 3 - "Oh please, Hans, influenza would beat the pants off of your Bubonic Plague any day of the week. Mighty ill stuff, that!"
Friend 2 - *belly laughs* "Says you! What makes you think yours is worse than mine, eh?"
Friend 3 - "Well it killed me, didn't it!?" *laughter all around*
Christ - "That was a messy one, I have to admit. I didn't like to see you suffer so Charles, but I knew that the example you'd set in your suffering would influence Michelle here to hear My call". *smiles at the latter*
Friend 4 - "Indeed my Lord, though I didn't understand it at the time, I do now and am eternally grateful for it."
Friend 1 - *stands up suddenly and looks to the east* "My, my...look, though it's a thousand miles away you can still see the spires of New Jerusalem from here!"
Friend 3 - "At least you're not using that newfangled Metric system to judge distance by."
Friend 5 - *with a grin* "You crazy Americans and your stubborn persistance in clinging to that obsolete English system forever asounds me!"
Friend 3 - *flexes his legs a little bit* "Oh is that so? Well then, my friend. *grins from ear to ear* "How about a friendly contest, eh? I'll race you to New Jerusalem on foot. Whoever gets there last has to use the winner's measurement system for the next thousand years! *looks over at Christ* "With my Lord's permission, of course. Would you must humbly serve, Sire, as, say...Referee for this little contest?"
Christ - *laughing* "But of course, my friends. I'll have Paul meet us at the gate. He's into this sort of thing". *winks*
Friend 5 - *laughs heartily* "Oy! It's on then, my friend. Last one there is a plague germ!"

My friends...I cannot wait!