Imagine no Heaven?

“There is no end to the world I see.” This Peter Garret line from the 2001 Midnight Oil song "World that I See” could change everything. Imagine how motivating it could be to know our life and work today is somehow meaningfully connected to a future world that never ends.

OR…the world simply ends, meaninglessly, drearily, and utterly demoralizing.

But if the world continues forever as an endless line of crumbling civilizations, that too seems burdensomely dreary. There is very little motivation toward  social “progress” when leaving the world a little better than we found it is only tyrannized by the next evil dictator. 

We become one insignificant cog in the machine of endless eternity. Our short stint of time on earth can’t shift the thermodynamic waves of entropy from crashing. We are spinning toward chaos. Technological progress can not stop this, perhaps only make it more comfortable (for a time).

Endless reincarnations of civilization feels like hell, especially to the student of history. We know the repeating cycles of power and despair. At some point, the human experiment must evolve. Or we all die. If we go on, we must somehow learn to outgrow our humanness. 

Or, perhaps, we must grow perfectly into it. 

No matter what religion or creed, we can all agree that something in and outside the human heart is broken. There is something that continually derails human culture and our attempts at peace. There is some part of us humans that likes to be selfish, even unkind, proud, and sometimes defiant.  

Ok, not us ;-), but maybe others. But why haven’t humans learned how to peaceably and justly live with each other? Why are we rude? Inequitable? Why do we act in anger? Why do we rejoice when others fail?Humans have and continue to take humanity the wrong way.

No of us perfectly maintain coolness and only act out of kindness. We all screw things up. Given enough power, our screw ups only get bigger, and sometimes really ugly and deeply devastating. No amount of human “progress” can keep this from happening.

So how can there be any hope for a preferred future?

Somehow everything must be reconciled, all of it—if we are to have a compelling vision of the future. John Lennon’s “Imagine” romantically longed for a world with no divisions, and no need to sacrifice or conquer. It was a prayer for the oneness of all things.

He imagines people “living for today,” a peace-filled today with all the world sharing harmoniously. He sees religion as divisive and part of the problem—necessarily conflicting with such a vision, but more than once borrows imagery from biblical allusions of the afterlife.  

Particularly the Evangelist John’s well-defined “revelation” of a new heaven and new earth. Lennon imagines there’s no heaven, but goes on to describe a restored, healed earth. The Revelation agrees, explicitly saying “there will be no more death, or mourning, or crying or pain” (2.4). 

What some abstractly call “heaven” is actually called by John the “new earth.” 

Lennon’s vision of a place with no wars, no reason to compete, and no urgency is profoundly similar. Both envision a time and place where all tears (and all that causes tears) will be wiped away. Both long for and express a future garden city, one names it as the capital city of the new earth.