Heaven comes to us
When Acts says Jesus is "taken up to heaven," this is not a spatial claim.
For many thoughtful Christians, meaningful language about heaven has fallen steadily from their grasp. In a scientific age, "heaven" as a place where God reigns and people go when they die has gradually slipped the moorings of plausibility. In 1941, Rudolf Bultmann, his sledgehammer poised against the foundations of the three-story cosmos, confidently said, "There is no longer any heaven in the traditional sense." The official 1930s hymnbook in my denomination included over a dozen hymns on heaven. The current hymnal's index doesn't even list the category.
Good riddance—at least according to an increasing chorus of voices. N. T. Wright recently argued that any thought that Christian hope is about "going to heaven" is biblically unsupported, theologically bankrupt and ethically corrosive. Jesus scholar Marcus Borg once told an audience, "If I were to make a list of Christianity's ten worst contributions to religion, on that list would be popular Christianity's emphasis on the afterlife."
More recently, media-savvy pastor Rob Bell published Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, in which he dismisses traditional evangelical notions of heaven and hell, calling them "misguided and toxic." When advance word leaked about Bell's new book, outraged conservatives pummeled him with what the New York Times called "a biblical hailstorm of Twitter messages and blog posts."
