Going to Heaven: The Evangelical Sin

Yesterday, the boy who came back from heaven admitted in a letter that he made the whole thing up. Setting aside the prescience of the boy’s name (Malarkey), and the fact that this whole debacle is remarkably similar to the Boy Meets World episode in which Cory has to come clean about the fire he supposedly helped put out, there are actually some valuable lessons to be learned. Indeed, the boy’s letter is full of courage, humility, and good-sense.

At the end of the day, the issue has never been about whether one particular boy was lying or being truthful. Actually, the problematic issue isn’t even whether it’s possible to go to heaven and come back. The problem is with the culture which glorifies such heaven-encounters; a culture which places a higher premium on human experience than divine promises. The problem is a product of a church which has so conflated one’s “testimony” with the “gospel presentation,” that the wilder the story of “coming into the Kingdom of Heaven,” the more assurance one can have.

Ultimately, this subjective-experientialism is not a publishing problem; it’s a worship problem. We go to church and see baptisms which claim to have little to do with God’s covenantal promises to the one being baptized, and everything to do with man’s promises to God. The sacraments have become the rainbow we offer to God, promising to never flood Him with our betrayal. What’s more, we’ve traded songs about God’s immovable, great, mighty character for songs about our great, immovable, mighty affection for Him.

Of course, it’s appropriate to sing songs about our love for God; and the sacraments are certainly “communal,” thus have an anthropological dimension.  The problem, as B.B. Warfield might say, is that we’ve become a people who think of ourselves as saved by faith alone, rather than saved by faith in Christ alone.  Our hope has shifted from the object of our faith to the subjective experience of the object. Is it any wonder our children think they have to drum up a “heaven” experience to have any assurance of faith?

Naturally, there are many ways in which to answer the question, “how did evangelical worship get to such an anemic state in the first place?” One historian shows the line going back to the mid-20^th century:

“The leaders of the neo-evangelical movement of the 1940’s hoped to give new significance to the word and in so doing did not spend much time thinking about one aspect of the Christian life—namely, worship—that has remarkable power to unite believers across generations and cultures on a weekly basis. They relied instead on the repertoire of worship practices inherited from American revivalism, which depended heavily on music to rouse seekers to walk the aisle and believers to ratchet up their devotion.”[1]

In other words, through “rousing” and “ratcheting,” through experience, our worship became an attempt to emotionally go up to God in heaven, not experience Him coming down in word and sacrament. Certainly, adaptations of 19^th century revivalistic methods in the 20^th century are a good place to start. However, as far back as the 17^th century Matthew Henry was dealing with a church-culture trying to go up to heaven. Says Henry in his March 6, 1692 sermon:

“Believe the revelation of the Word concerning the riches of Christ and his readiness to give it out to us. Say not, ‘How shall I go to Christ into heaven?’ No, the Word is nigh you (Rom. 10:8). ‘Tis Christ in the promise that you are to be close with. Come to him as Joseph’s brethren, to him for corn, humbled, submissive. Receive Christ and his fullness, give up yourselves to him.”[2]

Of course, the problem is even older than the 17^th century. The problem goes back to the people Moses found when he came down from Mount Sinai. Unsure as to when he was coming down with God’s word, they built an idol to worship in the meantime. It goes back to Babel, when the people attempted to build a mechanism tall enough to reach heaven’s door. Indeed, ever since being banished from Eden, man has attempted various self-rescue projects.  Man is more comforted by his own efforts upward than God’s action downward.

So, what’s the solution to our “going to heaven” problem? Well, in the same sermon Henry offers the means of grace as a crucial component to the solution. He calls the “ordinances” the “golden pipes by which the oil of grace is conveyed.” The evangelical church must recover a liturgy which respects the ways in which God has chosen to commune with His people.

You see, we don’t need a vision of heaven, or even an incredible experience at a retreat, to have assurance. We can have assurance because God has come down to us. In His Son, God climbed down Jacob’s latter. Contra Plato, the solution to the human predicament was not physical flesh becoming an ethereal “word.” No, the Word became flesh.  We don’t go to heaven, heaven comes to us. To go to heaven, to be anointed with the oil of grace, one must stop trying to find golden pipes other than the ones God has provided. Until such reforms are made in our worship, we can only expect more Boy Meets World reruns.

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