Christians in our culture have a pretty odd default view of life after death. We call it “heaven” and tell the world they ought to make sure they get to go there, but we portray it as frankly boring. You know the schtick: sitting forever on a cloud holding a harp you don’t know how to play.
Today the churches of the Anglican communion commemorate St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 – c. 395). There’s a guy who had a great way to think about heaven.
He is the least commonly known of the “Three Great Cappadocians,” the others being his brother St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory of Nazianzus. If you want a first dip into the wonders of fourth century theology, I recommend Gregory of Nyssa’s book Life of Moses (readily available in the wonderful Paulist Press “Classics of Western Spirituality” series).
Gregory looks at the Bible’s narrative of Moses’ life and takes it a model for the process of growing in the love and knowledge of God.
The crucial bit is where Moses goes up the mountain to meet with God face to face and receive the Ten Commandments. There is no denying that this is a story of someone growing closer to God. The higher he goes, the closer he gets, until he is right there in a powerful, transforming, intimate encounter with the creator of heaven and earth.
But Gregory points out something crucial: The closer Moses gets to the presence of God, the less he sees and knows. On the top of the mountain, face to face with God, Moses is completely surrounded by clouds.
That’s right: being in the presence of God is like being lost in a fog bank.
Quite a contrast from Christians today who think being with God is all clarity and light and happiness.
That is a matter for another post. Or a bunch of posts. (Actually you can read more about this point of view in my chapter on The Cloud of Unknowing in Kneeling with Giants.)
Gregory shows us that this life, in the midst of foggy confusion, is actually about coming closer to God.
And it has consequences for our living: Moses gets the Ten Commandments, after all, telling us what life as God’s people is supposed to look like.
It is not just about behavior though. Being in the presence of God is about transformation — in the Bible, when Moses came back down the mountain he actually glowed in the dark. Had to wear a veil so he wouldn’t scare the rest of the people.
And all of this leads up to the question of heaven.
This life is about drawing closer to God, and being transformed to be like God — renewed in the image of God, made to be more like Jesus, however you want to put it.
The next life, life in heaven, is about that same process.
We continue to draw close to God. Closer and closer.
We continue to be more like God. More and more like God.
Here’s Gregory’s really helpful insight: We are finite people. God is infinite. The journey of transformation will never come to an end.
No matter how close we draw to God, we can always draw infinitely closer.
No matter how much we are transformed to be like God, we can always be infinitely further transformed.
That is heaven, my friends — ever closer to God, ever more like God, in a never-ending journey of life.
Or as Paul put it, “transformed from glory into glory.”
Or as C.S. Lewis put it, “Further up! Further in!”
I’d quote Gregory himself, but I’m doing this from memory on my first day home from some arduous travels.
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I’d love to hear from you in the comments: What do you think about heaven?
REally enojyed this post. Am seemingly in an endless process of challenging growth and feeling like I wouldn’t mind just taking a rest on a cloud for a while. But forever up and in it will be. Hope your summer is going well.
Thank you so much, Heather. Sorry for the delay in replying. A season of travels and visits is now calming down. Hope you are doing well too.
This also reminds me of Jonathan Edwards description of heaven as an expereince of ever increasing joy–like a rising tide that never recedes. He explains that when we reach the capacity for experiencing the presence of God with our present human faculties, we will be given ever more and more capacity to continue to know more and more of the glory of God who is infinite. We will never come to the end of ever new and more and more delightful revelations of the grace of God. Edwards writes about being able to sing notes we have never heard before, and see colors we have never before perceived in order to describe how our faculties will be changed to accommodate the riches of what we will come to know of God. It is true that we are glorified when we reach heaven, all our imperfections done away with, but we must not think of perfection as a static state since one can ever more grow and grow in that perfection. I think our mistake is sometimes thinking of perfection as the reaching of the ultimate pinnacle with nowhere else to go, like summitting Everest. In reality perfection in Christ is being re-located to a whole new country with ever new landscape to explore. Augustine writes of heaven in a similar manner at the end of the City of God when he talks about the 8th day, the true sabbath we will enter when we die in Christ. Edwards and Augustine have dramatically reshaped my understanding of heaven and have vastly improved my funeral sermons! I am glad to know about Gregory of Nyssa and add him to the list of those who present a vision of heaven that offers a strong and anything but boring hope for a life with Christ. An abundant life that does not end and only ever more and more draws us into a greater and more glorious reality that we only now glimpse through a dark glass. Thanks for this post Gary.
Thank you so much for sharing this, Tracee! Great to hear from you. (I’d love to hear how you are doing some time…)
Do you remember which of Edwards’ works has this?