The Paradoxes of Heaven:
How Might God Balance Competing Priorities
When pondering heaven’s nature, it is easy for Christians to sit back and assume God will take care of everything. We might be going through particular trials in this world, but if we can just hold on, all our problems will eventually be solved. Yet when pondering the afterlife we quickly run into complications. Can humans in heaven and the new creation experience happiness and contentment over long stretches of time? What utopia can even balance the needs of groups along with the needs of individuals? How exactly will mankind grow while still remaining recognizably human?
Let us not minimize the many contrasts we experience and enjoy in this life, and its many conflicting human needs. For example, is there enough novelty in the afterlife to sustain human interest? How does God balance our need to stay safe against our need to develop our skills and make risky, consequential decisions? How does God promote human freedom, happiness, and independence while maximally bringing his order to the new creation. We may not want God to control our thoughts, but if the consequence is that we will have to suppress desires for eternity, how will we manage this task?
Only God knows the true answers, but fortunately we can speculate. The challenge ahead need not be as difficult as it appears as long as we can find the tools to support a new “heavenly” equilibrium. I will emphasize three.
First, we should emphasize fully how God can bring order to his new creation. There are many ways in which the world and human experience can improve without getting into potential trade-offs. However, we should not despair if we find these running up against human nature. This is because, secondly, God can do much to engage us as we are. If we divide human nature into its willed and non-willed aspects, we can see how God can focus on each so that we still remain human. Yet, even with this there may still be edges that cannot be smoothed. It can be hard, for example, to have an action be both low risk and high risk. Thus, we will explore in our third and final category environmental tools available to support these situations.
Given how hard life is, it is very easy to suggest improvements God can make. Eternal life and ending hunger, war, and disease are good places to start, keeping the horsemen of the apocalypse from leaving their stables. We can emphasize positive traits too, such as time to follow our passions and a general environment where we can love our fellow man. Biblical imagery points the way, where swords are beaten into plowshares, and where the New Jerusalem descends from heaven, with glory of God shining over a golden street in a city where the gates are never shut. What more would we want?
The trick though is in the details. I would say that these images of the Christian afterlife can be roughly divided into two themes: new creation and the beatific vision. These are not necessarily in conflict, and both are important. The new creation broadly speaking concerns a world like this one, but generally “better” and more in line with God’s purposes. The beatific vision, popularized by theologians like Thomas Aquinas, focuses specifically on God himself and how he is the source of maximum human happiness.
However, if one follows analogies of static happiness to other static happiness situations, such as the high from drugs, we run into difficulties. If humans were “high” on God, would we want to do anything else aside from contemplating God and worshiping him for all eternity? Other religions appear to have similar situations, like the state of moksha in Hinduism, without all the fuss about a renewed creation and what that might entail. Yet, in Christianity we have a focus on new creation and a non-static afterlife. Thus, the challenge is how exactly do we blend the two.
Thus, while we should not lose sight of the joys of seeing and knowing God, we must focus on how the new creation enhances human life in a way that resembles our present life. God may have his ideas of how to run things, and he might intervene to prevent excesses. However, the afterlife cannot be on rails, and must respect our free will, if we are to avoid a hell of mind control without meaningful free choices. We can get distracted by the metaphysical minefield of free will itself, so I do not want to really open up the wider discussion of what exactly free will is. Rather, what exactly might God change in the human condition, given a free will that, however defined, resembles what we experience now?
I propose two rough categories of human attributes: our will and everything else. The will concerns what we decide to eat for breakfast in the morning, what clothes we decide to wear, what TV shows we watch, etc. However, we might have a preference for waffles over omelettes based on nutritional needs, or want to wear a jacket because we are cold. These needs are part of everything else. The chicken and egg question of what causes what is part of the larger free will discussion, but this will work for our purposes.
Now the goal of God in the afterlife should be to improve both categories, however he defines improvement. It is easier, perhaps, to see how God can improve our non-will attributes. If we suffered abuse and trauma, God can adjust our mental pathways so that those images do not come up when we encounter a similar situation. If we suffer from narcissism or sociopathy because of our brain’s wiring, God can rewire. He may also lead us on to a myriad of interests that will occupy us for a long time. As adults gain interests that they did not have as children in this life, God can cultivate new interests in the next. For example, if we grow bored with music, God can cultivate an interest in painting. Given the variety of topics out there, changing curiosity could satisfy us for a long time.
Focusing on the will, alas, will take a bit more work and transparency from God. If we are selfish or prideful, God cannot make us choose to always think of other people. If he finds our will making these decisions consistently, God may have to intervene and therapeutically ask us why we are making these decisions. Assuming everyone in the heavenly afterlife is trying to follow God’s will, then eventually we can be led to make the decision that God wants us to make. He probably would not do this for every decision, to preserve our freedom, but if things are getting out of hand, he would reserve the right to intervene.
We might fear that God would engineer out of human experience what we consider fun. For example, we might enjoy the high of drugs or to live out scenarios of being a princess, secret agent, or action hero. However, there is a difference between “unworthy” desires, such as unloving pride, and wanting to eat a million donuts but having the body be unable to take it. Getting high by itself is not a negative, in the sense that what God created is still good. It becomes an issue though when it wrecks your life and is its sole focus. We are made for more than just to experience pleasure, and we should not forget this. However, I speculate that there may be an place in a heavenly afterlife where we can experience these types of things to some degree, perhaps as a simulation, as long as we do not go overboard.
These concerns touch into the need to take into account the surrounding environment in which we operate. Environmental concerns on earth may not apply in the new creation, as the environment is one of the more obvious ways in which God can improve things. For example, external complications such as eliminating famine and disease are part of the broad environmental strokes we expect any utopia to incorporate. Yet even with these examples questions arise. If famine is taken care of, what skill is truly required of farmers who specialize in growing food in many different conditions. How much skill is truly needed for doctors specializing in disease? If the range of potential afflictions is narrowed, we lose the human flourishing that responds to these challenges and addresses them. Perhaps God still will require farmers and doctors to do their work, or redirect them to other tasks. However, if generally high stakes cannot occur, how much motivation is there to excel?
These tensions concerning safety vs. risk are not easily resolved. Some of these trade-offs just may need to be made, as it is hard to say many should go hungry just so farmers can work on improving agricultural techniques. I wonder, however, whether there might be certain zones in the new creation where different environmental factors apply. For example, in one zone where people desire safety, food is endlessly provided as in a buffet. In another, where risk is more highly desired, individuals would have to grow their own food, and potentially suffer hunger if they make a mistake. Each zone has its own kind of beauty to contribute to God’s purposes.
If we push the separation further, fully separating risk from safety, we might arrive for those valuing risk at something resembling reincarnation. While not explicitly in the Christian tradition, minimizing safety does resolve our paradox. Perhaps we stay with God if wanting to experience the heavenly kingdom a while longer, and if we want to recover from the psychological scars of our lives. However, when we are ready for more high stakes situations, with a different artistic meaning, we could shift into something resembling the world we have now, where we are on our own in reflecting the image of God into the world. It is a clean way to transition to risk from safety, and if one is prepared to accept different roles with minimal knowledge of previous ones, it could recur for eternity. However, we are not required to make this leap, and we might prefer narratives where the knowledge of God in human experience continually waxes. Just note that God might have a plan that we do not expect.
In sum, the idea of heaven and the new creation is a destination for which Christians yearn. Yet it is hard to see what specifically this means in practice, especially when we are confronted with potentially conflicting objectives. However, we do have tools to work through the paradoxes. God has many tools with which to improve things vis-à-vis humanity in a new heavenly equilibrium, through the wider environment, the beatific vision, and working with willed and non-willed human nature. There even might be different zones where conflicting goals like safety and risk are prioritized differently. We just need to have faith and imagination.
