All Christians believe in heaven.  The belief is affirmed in the last line of the Nicene Creed “We believe also in… the resurrection of the dead, in the everlasting judgement of souls and bodies, in the Kingdom of Heaven and in the everlasting life.” Yet Christians have different interpretations of what heaven is like, ranging from belief that heaven is a place much like earth, but perfected and everlasting, through to belief that heaven is a spiritual state or even entirely symbolic. Overall, it is the first of these interpretations, that heaven is a perfected, eternal place, that is most consistent with Christian doctrine.

Firstly, the Roman Catholic Church affirms that while human beings have a soul and a body, these form a single human nature, and according to Catechism 366 “[the soul] will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection.” This suggests that our eternal life in heaven will be much like our life on earth, so that each person will have a soul and a body, but our life in heaven will be eternal and we will be with God, much as Adam and Eve were with God in Eden.  This view of heaven is consistent with Jesus’ teaching in the Gospels and with the fact that Jesus ascended into heaven, where he remains “at the right hand of the father”, which suggests that heaven is a place.  In the Parable of the Sheep and Goats in Matthew 25 Jesus describes a final judgement where people are judged and then sent off for an eternal life in heaven or eternal punishment in hell.  This confirms that there will be a final resurrection and judgement, as the Catechism says, and that heaven will be eternal life. Also, the Parable of Dives and Lazarus in Luke 16 describes heaven being separated from hell by a chasm, with those in hell being able to see and call to those in heaven.  Again, this suggests that heaven and hell are eternal places, of reward and punishment respectively.  Nevertheless, it is true that the two parables give different impressions of when people will go to heaven.  The Parable of the Sheep and Goats suggests that there will be a final judgement, followed by eternal heaven or hell, whereas Dives and Lazarus suggests immediate judgement and entry into heaven and hell while life on earth continues.  Despite this, Roman Catholic teaching makes sense of this through its teaching about purgatory, whereby the soul separates from the body and is reclothed in a heavenly body for purification in purgatory, a temporary hell, the gates of which will then be opened at the final judgement so that souls can be released and reunited with their risen bodies for final judgement and eternal reward in heaven, as appropriate. While purgatory is not supported by clear Biblical evidence, the Church was given authority to “bind and loose” by Jesus in Matthew 16:19 so the authority of the Church to add to Biblical revelation such as regarding purgatory is consistent with the Bible. Further, purgatory makes sense of how sinners can still hope for eternal life given what Revelation 21:27 says about heaven namely that “nothing impure will ever enter it”, and how God’s goodness and justice are compatible.  It follows that the Roman Catholic view of heaven as a place is most consistent with the Bible and Christian doctrine. 

Secondly, the idea that heaven is a spiritual state has always been popular because there is no physical evidence supporting the belief in heaven as a place while heaven as a spiritual state would not require such evidence.  Belief in heaven as a spiritual state is also compatible with Platonic Dualism; heaven would be like the world outside the cave in Plato’s famous allegory, illuminated by the sun and filled with the “forms” of things we only encounter as shadowy particulars in the body. Naturally, St Augustine’s view of heaven was influenced by neo-Platonism; he spoke of heaven as the eternal contemplation of God in Confessions Book XII.  Patly because of St Augustine, Platonic Dualism dominated the Classical and then Medieval worldviews, with philosophers such as Descartes seeing the soul and heaven saw as purely spiritual, with death being a liberation from the mechanistic snares of the physical body. There is some Biblical support for the view that heaven is spiritual; for St Augustine and later for Descartes, the ultimate reward was to see God face to face and have a perfect understanding of reality, as was promised in 1 Corinthians 13:12 and also in 1 John 3:2.  This might explain why Pope John Paul II seemed to imply that heaven and hell are spiritual states more than places in some remarks he made in 1999.  He spoke most particularly of hell, describing it as the absence of God in a way that is consistent with 2 Thessalonians 1:9 “They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might”.  But the Pope also said “Heaven “is neither an abstraction not a physical place in the clouds, but a living, personal relationship with the Holy Trinity. It is our meeting with the Father which takes place in the risen Christ through the communion of the Holy Spirit…” this seems to suggest that the Pope supported the view that heaven is a spiritual state and not a place, contradicting his own Catechism.  Yet this is a misunderstanding of the Pope’s meaning. The Catechism affirms that through the sacraments we participate in Christ, who is in heaven at the right hand of the father, so through the sacraments Catholics have a “living personal relationship with the Holy Trinity” in heaven while they are still alive, tasting the heavenly reward they will one day enter each time they partake of the sacraments.  The Pope in his remarks was telling Catholics to focus on what heaven is to them now rather than speculating about what it might be like in the future in a way that cannot be accurate.  After all, the “Kingdom of Heaven” – at least as it will be after the end of time and judgment – does not exist yet. Also, neither the Bible nor Pope John Paul II’s remarks exclude the view that the Kingdom of heaven will ultimately be a place.  It could be that people are shut out from God’s presence while in a place that is Hell, or that they see God face to face and know God as he is while in the place that is heaven, described in other Biblical references.  Seeing heaven as a spiritual place casts doubt on the numerous references which suggest that heaven is a place.   Further, if heaven is a spiritual state only, this suggests that only our soul goes to heaven.  This implies that “I” am my soul and that my body is less important, which might encourage me to denigrate the body and/or see its actions as less important than those of the soul, as Gnostic heretics did during the first centuries of Christianity, and as Cathar heretics later did.  Because of the practical implications of these heretical positions, such as for sexual ethics, the Roman Catholic Catechism 362-368 specifically rejects these ideas, affirming that the body and the soul are a unity and are both necessary for eternal life.  The Roman Catholic theology of the body is consistent both with the doctrine of the incarnation, which shows the importance of the human body in that God chose to become incarnate in one, and with St Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore, honour God with your bodies.” So, it follows that the idea that heaven is a spiritual state is less consistent with the Bible and Christian Doctrine than the idea that heaven is a place.

Thirdly, the idea that heaven is a symbol of a person’s spiritual and moral life on Earth and not either a place or a spiritual state has grown in popularity through the later 20^th and early 21^st Centuries amongst ordinary believers, seeking to reconcile their faith with a scientific worldview. Amongst philosophers, Paul Tillich is most often associated with the argument that words used to describe heaven are symbolic.  However, by Tillich’s understanding of symbolic language, this does not suggest that heaven is not a place or spiritual state, because for Tillich symbolic language is cognitive and symbolic words participate in the objective reality to which they refer.  For Tillich, just as God is not a thing but is the “ground of our being”, ‘immortality does not mean a continuation of eternal life after death, but it means a quality which transcends temporality’ (Tillich 1963: 410 [vol. 3]).  This suggests that it is mistaken to imagine that heaven is a place like earth, because it will be timeless as God is timeless.  Nevertheless, Tillich did not suggest that “heaven is a symbol of a person’s spiritual and moral life on earth and not either a place or spiritual state.”  This idea might instead be associated with anti-realism and the belief that religious language takes its meaning not from correspondence and reference but from coherence within a religious form of life.  By this view, when a believer speaks of heaven, they would not be referring to a specific place or state after death, but to their hope for reward in union with God more generally.  It is fair to say that this position is neither compatible with the Bible nor with mainstream Christian doctrine.  The Bible speaks of what is “True” and not of what is “true for us” and so does Christian doctrine. Also, it is difficult to find scholars who really accept this anti-realist position.  While John Hick had some unconventional views about the afterlife and went so far as to describe the incarnation as a metaphor, he never suggested that talk of heaven is only symbolic.  In his earlier writings he implied that heaven was a place, populated by people in replica heavenly bodies, while in his later writings he spoke of some form of re-incarnation, whereby the energy of one life is reused in and influences future lives.  Hick was not an anti-realist and neither did he see heaven as a symbol.  Some textbooks suggest that DZ Phillips is a good example of a Christian who saw heaven as a symbol and not as a place or a spiritual state, and yet Patrick Horn describes this as a “caricature” of Phillips position, and is supported by others including Mikel Burley, who reject the basic claim that Phillips is a non-realist. While Phillips did claim that much religious discourse is “not fact stating”, he did not mean that it is non-cognitive but rather that it refers not to the worldly reality in which there can be facts, but to a different kind of reality.  For Tillich, Hick and Phillips, as for many other Philosophers of Religion through history, God’s existence is not like our existence.  God does not exist in the way that a cat exists, but that does not mean to say that he does not exist either.  As Aquinas put it, there is no-thing that is God… but God is not nothing.  Extending this to heaven, if heaven exists it would not be a place quite like earth but that doesn’t mean that it is not a place, so Tillich, Hick and Phillips is right to point out that religious language about heaven is neither like ordinary language nor only an expression of our own beliefs and hopes. This shows that the view that heaven is only a symbol is not compatible with the Bible, with mainstream Christian doctrines or indeed, even with the philosophy of those claimed to share this view.

In conclusion, the Roman Catholic view of heaven as a place is most consistent with the Bible and Christian doctrine.  While the view that heaven is a spiritual state is supported by some Biblical references and by parts of Catholic doctrine, both in the Catechism and in Pope John Paul II’s 1999 remarks, the view that heaven is ONLY a spiritual state is not compatible with the Bible or Christian doctrine as a whole. It could be that heaven is a spiritual state AND a place therefore.  Further, while some Philosophers have explored the nature of language that refers to heaven and have shown that claims are not ordinary fact-stating claims, the view that heaven is only a symbol is not found in scholarly works, probably because it is not compatible with either the Bible or with Christian doctrine.