Theopedia

Heaven

“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

— Revelation 21:3-4 (ESV)

Definition

Heaven is the place and state of consummate blessedness in which the redeemed dwell forever in the immediate presence of God, beholding him “face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12) in what theology calls the beatific vision. At death the souls of believers are made perfect in holiness and received at once into this presence (Phil. 1:23; 2 Cor. 5:8). At Christ’s return their bodies are raised and reunited with their souls (1 Cor. 15:42-44), and the redeemed inherit a renewed creation, the new heavens and new earth, as their everlasting home (Rev. 21:1-4; 2 Pet. 3:13).

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession describes what happens to the believer’s soul immediately at death:

“The souls of the righteous being then made perfect in holiness, are received into paradise, where they are with Christ, and behold the face of God in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies.”1

Its chapter on the last judgment adds what follows at Christ’s return, when soul and body are together again: “the righteous go into everlasting life, and receive that fulness of joy and glory with everlasting rewards, in the presence of the Lord.”2 The Westminster Confession states the intermediate portion of this in nearly identical wording, closing its own chapter with the same description of the righteous soul’s reception “into the highest heavens.”3 Both confessions therefore witness to two distinct moments: an immediate, real blessedness for the soul at death, and a fuller, embodied blessedness still to come at the resurrection.

The confession locates heaven’s blessedness in the soul being “made perfect in holiness” and beholding “the face of God in light and glory,” not in any place or possession distinct from God himself.1 It also states that this reception into Christ’s presence happens “then,” at death, without an intervening process; Reformed Baptist theology recognizes only two destinies for the soul after death, with paradise and hell as “these two places, for souls separated from their bodies,” besides which “the Scripture acknowledgeth none.”1

Biblical Basis

Paul expected to be “with Christ” the moment he departed this life, calling it “far better” than remaining (Phil. 1:23), and told the Corinthians that to be “away from the body” is to be “at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8). Jesus promises the same immediacy to the thief on the cross: “today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). Scripture also describes what Jesus went to prepare: “In my Father’s house are many rooms… I go to prepare a place for you… that where I am you may be also” (John 14:2-3). Paul names the believer’s ultimate hope “a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor. 5:1), and Peter and Paul both point beyond the intermediate state to a still greater renewal: “according to his promise, we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Pet. 3:13; Phil. 3:20-21).

Revelation’s closing vision describes this consummation at length: God’s own dwelling with his people, the wiping away of every tear, and the end of death, mourning, crying, and pain (Rev. 21:3-4), in a city that “has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (Rev. 21:23). Paul calls the surpassing goodness of what is prepared beyond any human power to conceive in advance: “what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9). Job anticipates seeing God in his own restored flesh: “in my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:26), and Jesus names the pure in heart as those who “shall see God” (Matt. 5:8), a promise Paul says will one day be unveiled fully: “now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12).

Charles Hodge draws these strands of teaching about heaven’s future blessedness together under three main points: the “vision of God” in the face of Jesus Christ, which “transforms the soul into the divine image”; the “manifestation… of the love of God”; and the “indefinite enlargement” of the redeemed’s faculties as they grow forever in the knowledge and enjoyment of him.4

Historical Development

Patristic origins

The church’s reflection on seeing God centered from an early date on what later theology named the beatific vision, the direct sight of God promised to the redeemed. Gregory of Nyssa (AD 335-394) held that God’s “uncreated Nature” is in itself “ineffable and incomprehensible,” so that no creature can exhaust the knowledge of him even in glory; this did not, for Gregory, rule out a real and increasing vision of God, only a comprehensive one.5 Augustine (354-430) likewise affirmed that the saints will see God’s essence directly, while denying that a finite creature could ever comprehend an infinite one, a tension patristic writers held together rather than resolved by shrinking either side of it.5

Medieval refinement

Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) gave the doctrine its most extensive scholastic treatment in the Summa Theologiae, arguing that God is “infinitely knowable” and that the saints’ vision of him, while real and immediate, will always be proportioned to a creature’s finite capacity rather than to God’s own infinite self-knowledge.6 Aquinas grounded the certainty of this vision in a natural desire he took to be built into rational creatures, reasoning that a desire for the ultimate cause of all things could not be permanently frustrated without leaving man without any final end at all; reaching that vision nonetheless requires a “light of glory” added by grace, since the natural power of a created intellect does not of itself extend to seeing God’s essence.6

Reformation clarification

The Reformation’s dispute with Rome over purgatory turned, in large part, on when and how the believer reaches this vision. Bavinck traces the medieval and Tridentine position: because justification, sanctification, and glorification are held to be, in part, humanity’s own work on the basis of infused grace, a believer who dies without full “condign or full merit” must go on completing that work after death before attaining “eternal life and the beatific vision of God in heaven.”7 Against this, the Reformation’s recovery of justification by faith held that everything needed for admission to God’s presence, Christ’s punishment-bearing and his law-keeping both, is already imputed to the believer in full; those who believe “are ready and fit for heaven and need not go through a purgatory either here or hereafter.”7 The question the Reformers pressed was not whether the beatific vision is real, which the whole tradition affirmed, but when a believer already united to Christ by faith begins to possess it.

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic. Rome affirms the beatific vision as the substance of heaven’s blessedness, but holds that reaching it depends on merit completed either in this life or, for the imperfectly sanctified, in purgatory afterward.7 On this view the souls of those who die in a state of grace, without any unpaid debt of temporal punishment or unforgiven venial sin, enter the vision of God immediately; those who die still owing that debt are purified first.7 Reformed Baptist theology denies both the merit this scheme requires and the purgatorial delay it makes necessary, holding instead that the righteous are “made perfect in holiness” and received into God’s presence at the moment of death, without exception or further process.1

Soul sleep and annihilationism. Some groups, historically the Socinians and various modern sects, have held that the soul is unconscious between death and the resurrection, or that the wicked (and on some versions the intermediate state generally) simply cease to exist rather than persist in conscious blessedness or torment.8 Boettner answers that Scripture describes the intermediate state in terms of active, conscious fellowship: Paul reckons dying “far better” than continuing an already-blessed life in Christ (Phil. 1:23), a comparison that soul sleep would empty of meaning, and the souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9-11 cry out, wait, and are answered, which is not the language of unconsciousness.8

Objections and Responses

Scripture says no eye has seen and no mind has conceived what God has prepared, so any description of heaven is speculation. Paul’s statement that “what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined” (1 Cor. 2:9) describes what God has prepared as surpassing anything the natural, unaided human mind could arrive at on its own; in context Paul immediately adds that God has in fact revealed these things “through the Spirit” (1 Cor. 2:10), which is why Scripture can and does describe heaven’s blessedness at length, in Revelation 21-22 and elsewhere, rather than leaving it wholly unknown.

If believers are already “with Christ” at death, the future resurrection and new earth add nothing meaningful. A. A. Hodge distinguishes what belongs to man’s nature essentially from what awaits final change: the soul’s presence with Christ at death is real and immediate, but man remains “essentially” a compound of soul and body, so his blessedness is not complete until “spiritual bodies” take the place of the present ones and “the new heavens and the new earth… take the place of the present heavens and earth.”9 The intermediate state and the consummated new creation are two real stages of the same promise, not competing accounts of it.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 31, “Of the State of Man after Death and of the Resurrection of the Dead,” para. 1. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 32, “Of the Last Judgment,” para. 2. ↩

  3. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 32, “Of the State of Men after Death, and of the Resurrection of the Dead,” para. 1. ↩

  4. Charles Hodge, “The Concomitants of the Second Advent,” in Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 857-858. ↩

  5. Samuel G. Parkison, To Gaze upon God: The Beatific Vision in Doctrine, Tradition, and Practice (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2024), chap. 3, “A Cloud of Witnesses, Part One: Pre-Reformation Historical Witness,” 63. ↩ ↩2

  6. Parkison, chap. 3, 83-85. ↩ ↩2

  7. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 23, “The Intermediate State.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  8. Loraine Boettner, Immortality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), chap. 3, “The Intermediate State.” ↩ ↩2

  9. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 40, “Heaven and Hell,” 579. ↩