A Christ-less Heaven
Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." John 14:6
Have you ever taken the time to consider the strange concept of a secular heaven? When an unbelieving friend tells you that a deceased loved one is now in “a better place…” we don’t normally take it seriously, we understand they are just grasping for something to say that is not utterly depressing.
As Christians, we obviously do not feel comfortable calling them out on the emptiness of their platitude right then and there as they are grieving, but the brutal truth is that a secular heaven is an oxymoron. There is no such thing as a Christless heaven. The secular world may try to cling to the hope of heaven while dispensing itself of Christ, but it is important for us to remember that the two are inseparable. There is in fact a logical paradox in the very notion of a Christless heaven: there is no way to get to such a place. This is not merely word play. Intellectually, you just can’t get there, there is no way.
You might be surprised to hear that the best example of expanding on this notion of a secular heaven is a TV show. The show in fact pursues the concept to its logical conclusion through an elaborate conceptualization of a secular heaven. It is called the Good Place, it aired for four seasons from 2016 to 2019. I should issue a spoiler alert right now I guess, I am about to blow through and spoil all 4 seasons in one fell swoop, because the whole concept of the show is fascinating.
The Good Place is what the creators of the show refer to as their Jesus-less heaven. In the show there is a good place and there is a bad place. The good place is an afterlife filled with pleasant surroundings and activities as a reward for those who led a morally righteous life. And the show creators went through a lot of trouble to define a morally righteous life based on many different theories of moral philosophy and ethics. They considered the works of John Locke, Tim Scanlon, Peter Singer, Derek Parfit… honestly everything from Jonathan Dancy's theory of moral particularism, to Aristotelian virtue ethics, Kantian deontology, and even moral nihilism. The show hired philosophy professors from Clemson and UCLA as consultants. They did their homework, they studied every textbook available, except for the Bible, but every possible secular resource. It is incredibly profound and deeply researched for a 22 minute Ted Danson and Kristen Bell sitcom.
Now, the twist at the end of the first season is that what the characters know as the Good Place, is actually the Bad Place. It is a Bad Place loosely based on the premise of Jean-Paul Sartre's play No Exit. The atheist Sartre claimed that "Hell is other people." In the play three people are trapped in Hell, represented as one room, where they torture one another psychologically by reflecting upon the sins that got them there. Back in the show, the characters are trapped in what appears to be heaven, tortured by the knowledge that they do not belong there because of their own understanding of the unrighteous lives they lived and their undeservedness of this cosmic reward.
At some point in the show, the characters hack the system of the cosmic bureaucracy that runs all good and bad places to find out exactly how to access the real Good Place. They discover that there is a complex point system by which the fate of each and every person is determined. Points are awarded for every good deed and points are deducted for every bad deed according to their impact. For example singing to a child grants you 0.69 points, whereas ending slavery grants you 814,292.09 points. On the flip side, ruining an opera with boorish behaviour will cost you 90.90 points, and committing genocide will cost you 433,115.25 points. It’s silly, yes, but there is consistency to the thought process. And the tricky part is that the net point value of any action is tabulated based on its ultimate impact. So for example, while you may gain a few points from drinking almond milk rather than contributing to the suffering of a cow, you may end up worse off if the almond farm is not environmentally sustainable. And so based on the unintended consequences of every micro decision ever made, they discover that in the entirety of human life, no one has ever reached the threshold of points required to make it into a real Good Place.
The conclusion of the show is that there is no way into the Good Place, because there is no way a human can meet the standard of righteousness required. The extraordinary logical conclusion of the show creators who entirely removed the Bible from their equation of righteousness is that none is righteous, no not one. Very few TV shows are as intellectually honest and logically consistent as this one.
And that is not the only logical conclusion the show derives from a secular premise that is surprisingly consistent with the Christian world view. By the end of the final season, when against all odds the characters do break into the Good Place, they discover that an eternal Jesus-less heaven is eventually unbearable. You could not possibly find peace, bliss or even contentment in spending all of eternity doing even what you enjoy most… An eternity of rounds of golf or of watching movies or of eating birthday cake is going to grow tiresome after a matter of days. That is no way to spend billions of years. So at the end of it all, these characters all decide to go through an escape hatch from their secular heaven into a permanent death. It’s a sort of mass assisted suicide. Again, very few TV shows are this intellectually honest. But without Christ, there is no life.
In the Gospel of John, we get to read a remarkable exchange between Jesus and Thomas. Jesus spends considerable time explaining to his disciples the reason for his upcoming crucifixion. And in John 14 he explains that his death is necessary to make a way for them to join him in heaven. When Thomas asks him to clarify how they will be able to join him, Jesus proclaims ““I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6) The very next day Jesus went to Calvary and He received the brutal punishment that we all deserve for our rejection of and rebellion against God so that he could forge that way. Jesus tells us he is the way, he creates the only way back to a reconciled relationship with God so that he can lead us back into his presence to live the life we were always meant to live in perfect communion with God the Father for ever and ever… It is forged in his blood.
The Christian’s hope is not anchored in our own ability to lead a perfectly morally and ethically righteous life based on the various and conflicting morality standards of a wide swath of human philosophers. Neither is our hope anchored in our own conception of what man-made heaven would be: whether an eternity of living on a cruise ship or drinking cocktails with umbrellas by the beach or living in a mansion filled with puppies… Our hope is anchored in being home with our God, in being reconciled with God and being able to live forever the way our God created us to live free from the looming threat of death and free from the curse of sin.
But where does that leave the secular world? The only word that captures the state of anyone apart from Christ is lost. Without Christ, we have no idea where we come from, no idea where we are going, no idea of how to get there... And huge swaths of the world, the vast majority in fact, are content with that… Ask them:
Where are you going after you die? Not sure.
How do you know you’ll make it? I believe I am good enough.
By what standard? I dunno. I’m not as bad as that guy…
What happens if you’re wrong? Uhhh… shrug
Drifting along according to the course of this world, being blown to and fro by every wind of the latest made up standard of morality is not going to lead to anywhere you want to end up. If that is your philosophy then your best possible outcome is the eternal darkness of the grave, but that is far from the worst case scenario. Because the fate that Jesus promises to those who reject him, is far worse than what the nihilists think is coming. Much worse than mere nothingness.
God demands righteousness and he demands it by his own standard, not yours, and you do not stand a chance by his standard of righteousness, you are not only lost, you are guilty, your sin condemns you to an eternity of pain and suffering. And while we may not have a perfect picture of what that is, we know it is going to be far worse than Jean-Paul Sartre’s anguish of a slight imposter syndrome.
No one should accept the world’s non-sensical, contradictory and illogical system of righteousness that promises that anything goes, consequence-free. As much as we may want to believe it, we simply know it is evil. We all crave God’s justice, we want God’s righteousness, we long for his beauty, his provision, his goodness, his kindness. We desire his holiness. We are desperate to be part of something grander and more meaningful than all this. Nothing of this world will ever satisfy our craving, so we should not settle for its putrid version of happiness, but come to know Christ, and put our faith in him.
Jesus took on the punishment we deserve for the mess we’ve unleashed, all of our unrighteous choices have led the world to its current state, filled with hate and violence and depravity: all of our sin. Yet Jesus, the son of God, left his home with God the father to live among us down here in the muck and show us a standard of living, by his deeds, by his life that is purely righteous by God’s definition of righteousness, perfectly sinless.
If you have not yet turned to Christ, do not set their minds on an eternal good place, or even a better place, but ask yourself this: Can you endure the temporary pain and suffering of this world and secure your eternal peace through Christ, or will you continue to lurch forward blindly to try to make the most of your temporal happiness here and now at the cost of your eternal torment?
For all of us who are in Christ, this is why we can withstand the worst pummeling this world can deliver, and we can do it with joy, because we know what awaits us. So keep your eyes focused on Christ’s return to lead you to eternal life in heaven in the glory of God.