LETTER TO JUDY

(Editor’s note: Several years ago I made the acquaintance of a kindly, if somewhat eccentric, gentleman who professes to care greatly about religious matters and supposes himself as ardent a student of sacred literature as his duties will permit. From time to time he discharges his stored up notions in letters to Judy, his inquisitive niece who lives “up north” and is beginning to ask embarrassingly direct questions about her religious heritage. In the belief that our readers might like to see a sample of this unusual correspondence, I print below a letter to Judy on the fascinating subject of the Christian heaven. If you should like to read Judy’s mail occasionally, you have only to let us know).

Dear Judy,

Your questions about the imagery which the New Testament uses to describe heaven are good ones. I am not surprised that you have decided against literal belief in golden streets and jasper walls, but I am pleased to find you curious about why heaven should have been pictured in exactly those figures of speech which one finds scattered through the book of Revelation. If you will forgive me for writing more lengthily than usual, I should like to share some thoughts about these “heaven images” with one of my favorite nieces.

Let’s begin by trying a brief experiment. You must imagine the most fantastic place your mind can conceive. Arrange it any way you like; furnish it as your wildest dreams dictate. When you have finished, notice this peculiar thing: every element in your creation is something already known to you. Any strangeness derives only from distortions or unusual juxtapositions. You see, Judy, it is impossible to dream or to imagine except by using familiar components. No matter how fantastic a thing you may create, you still must form it of elements you know about already.

The Martian men imagined by our science fiction writers, for example, may have three eyes and radio antennae instead of nice ears like yours, but the strangeness lies only in unusual number or bizarre placement. Eyes and antennae are things you know about already. You may increase the number, put them in odd places, or make them green with purple cilia sprouting from them, but you are still dealing with eyes and antennae and with color and tiny hairs that are perfectly familiar things in your world. But try creating a monster, or, for that matter, a paradise, by using components completely outside your present knowledge and you will find it simply cannot be done.

Now if you sit down and try to imagine, with no knowledge of New Testament imagery at all, what the perfect life and place would be — a heaven — what do you picture? Isn’t it true that you simply project into the future all the things that seem most blessed and valuable here? You may exaggerate these things, and lengthen the time for enjoying them, but they will all be recognizable as pleasures you already know about.

I happen to know, for example, how you prize yellow silk. It is quite conceivable that in furnishing the room you would inhabit in your “heaven” you would drape it with yellow silk — infinitely lovely yellow silk, to be sure, more rich and lustrous than any you had ever owned, but still yellow silk, a material you have had experience with.

What I am going to say to you is that the writers of the New Testament described heaven in the only way possible for them. They used imagery which sprang directly from their own experience. It would have been impossible for them to do otherwise. Whatever you understand, Judy, by the words revelation and inspiration, it must be clear to you that these men could not have written in word pictures that were completely unfamiliar to them. (And if they had, then of course no one would have understood them.)

This carries with it quite an implication. It suggests that had the description of heaven been made by other writers in another age and in another culture, the picture would almost certainly have been considerably different. The images used to express such notions as beauty, value, blessedness, joy, abundance—many of these would have been very unlike those you now know so well. Let me try to show you what I mean.

Take an Eskimo in the days before our American culture had impinged upon his. Let us suppose that, like so many other primitive peoples, he sometimes speculated on the possibility of a better life beyond this one. What form would these speculations have taken? What figures of speech would he have employed to express concretely his longings?

Well, the Eskimo often knew famine. He lived for the most part a marginal existence. Life was a never-ending struggle for survival. Food involved risk and all too often was in critically short supply. If the Eskimo projected his dream of a perfect life would he not think of a land of plenty?

But what kind of plenty? Fruit? Bananas, lemons, oranges, sweet potatoes, marshmallows? No, of course not, because he knew nothing of such things. He would think instead of seals and walruses and fish, all the food sources familiar to him. His “heaven” would doubtless be thickly populated with complacent creatures sleek with fat and waiting to be devoured by hungry Eskimos.

As for climate, can you doubt that his bitter experience with frightful cold might lead him to imagine a place where igloos are spacious and warm and where intolerable blizzards and unbearable cold never come? If he spoke to his children about this land, would he speak to them of mansions or of igloos? You know the answers, of course, but I must stress this point several times before I return to the New Testament.

I have been talking of natural factors, but let’s consider something a little more abstract: cultural conditioning. You saw the film “The Savage Innocents” and wrote me delightedly about it. Do you recall the pregnant young Eskimo girl whose mother told her that if she had a daughter she would have to take the baby outside quickly and stuff its mouth with snow so that it would die? The old woman knew that a girl was another mouth to feed and could not be tolerated until a boy, a potential hunter, came into the family. Can you not imagine, Judy, how ardently such Eskimos longed for boys in their family? Is it not likely that they would have pictured their “heaven” as a place where one would have many strong sons, swift, agile, mighty at the hunt?

We need not be in any real doubt about such projections of culture. You told me once of writing a paper on the use of herbs in primitive societies and how valuable some pages were from James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. That collection has many descriptions of how primitive folk imagined their heavens (and hells) and it corroborates what I have been telling you.

The Norse people lived a grim, harsh existence, fighting constantly to preserve their territory from marauders. Their heroes were not astronauts, but warriors, strong and resourceful. Their social values revolved around this concept. Is it surprising, then, that when they imagined their “heaven” they came up with the Valkyries, those marvelous women who swept down on mighty horses and gathered up dying heroes? Or that they imagined Valhalla, modeled on known Scandinavian practices and buildings?

Valhalla, you recall, houses warriors who fight all day long, hack one another joyously, and return at night to drink mead, eat enormous portions of meat, and be miraculously restored to go out and fight again the next day. Heaven to the Norseman was to be permanent, glorious warfare, with the added delight of having all infirmities and wounds cured each night so that the next morning found one again in the full flower of manhood.

Could the Norsemen have imagined heaven as a cool oasis in a desert? Could he have spelled our those symbolic dimensions given in our book of Revelation by use of the recurrent number, twelve? Impossible! He knew nothing of these things, nor would they have meant anything to him in the tales of another until he had been thoroughly instructed in the Jewish culture and its peculiarities.

When some American Indians imagined heaven they thought of it as Happy Hunting Ground. A swift and tireless pony, plenty of bison, and nothing to do but hunt. Nothing about mansions or walled cities or golden streets, because these things were foreign to them.

The Moslem, imagining heaven, saw himself with an abundance of delicious foods and drinks known in his culture, plus seventy-two beautiful girls to serve him through days of sensuous delight. You may be sure that the young ladies he imagined were beautiful in terms of his standards of beauty, too, and not in terms of ours.

I can almost hear you now, telling me that when I set out to make a serious point I hammer away at it until my poor victim is exhausted. So I will give you no more examples, but rather ask you now to consider the Jews themselves. It was out of their experience that the imagery of heaven derived in the New Testament. It is no coincidence that the book of Revelation also happens to be the book of the New Testament most deeply steeped in the images and dreams of the Old.

The Jews often lived a skimpy existence on their mountain ridge in Palestine and knew well the meaning of scarcity. It is no surprise, surely, that when heaven is described in Revelation 21 it should have a wondrous tree that grows twelve crops of fruit, one for each month of the year. The Jews and Jewish Christians knew fruits of many kinds, so their heaven provides that particular kind of food in abundance. What they envisioned strikes us as a sort of Polynesian earthly paradise where one needs only reach out and pluck what he wants.

You might consider the use of the number, twelve. Why twelve fruits? Why twelve months in heaven where, ostensibly, time is no more? Why twelve gates, twelve foundations, twelve thousand furlongs of distance around the city, and walls one hundred and forty-four cubits high (twelve squared)? These twelve are not accidental. They are the result of artifice. Not literal numbers, but symbolic ones, they are drawn from Jewish culture and express precious Jewish truths. That someone from a different culture might have supposed the walls would really be one hundred and forty-four cubits high probably never occurred to the writer at all.

The description grows more interesting. The Jew knew the preciousness of water as few of us, Judy, know it. His women went to the well daily, his men worried for fear the well might go dry. A spring was an immeasurably precious thing. The desert was always near, drouths happened often. Is it any surprise, then, that in envisioning heaven he saw that wonderful “river of the water of life, sparkling like crystal, flowing from the throne of God”? Or said that God “would guide them to the springs of the water of life”? If you had lived in Palestine, would it not seem unbelievably marvelous to have “living” waters—spring waters—flowing in abundance forever? And where else should a sparkling, inexhaustible river flow from if not from the throne of God Himself, maker and giver of all precious gifts?

You must pause now to contrast this with a different kind of environment. You read a report once to your eighth grade science class about some lake dwellers who build their huts on tall stilts over the shallow water and go everywhere over their “city” by rough-hewn boat. Do you suppose that when these people imagined the perfect existence they sang the praises of spring water and saw that as one of the most significant aspects of their “heaven”? Wouldn’t they have been more likely to accept water as a commonplace and yearn, instead, for things they never had in glorious abundance?

The Jewish-influenced picture of heaven in Revelation speaks of a life where thirst shall be no more. This makes perfect sense coming from a dry culture where parched tongues were all too often a reality, but it would have little meaning for an Eskimo whose environment provided him at any moment with snow or ice which he could melt on his tongue if he were thirsty. Do you see, Judy, how one’s total environment affects his yearning description of the perfect afterlife?

The Jew, again, had no intense cold to battle, but intense heat. It was not the frozen body that he often saw during a lifetime, but the heat-prostrated body. His Jordan valley temperatures would go as high as 125 degrees. No wonder he spoke of the welcome relief of a great rock’s shadow in a weary land! Is anything more to be expected than that the Jew, when he imagines heaven, will describe it as a place where “the sun shall not beat on them nor any scorching heat”? What could be better than that?

The Jewish people knew afflictions, but of course so have all peoples in greater or lesser degree. It was this element in his world that made him say with such poetic longing and beauty that in heaven “God will wipe away all tears from their eyes.”

Earlier, Judy, I spoke of cultural conditioning. Let’s return to that theme for a moment with respect to the Jews. What would it mean to an Eskimo or Polynesian to have Jesus called the Lamb of God? Only in a shepherd-sheep culture would this image make good sense. Some meaningful equivalent would have to be found if one wanted to carry this idea across from one culture to another. Nor is it inevitable, Judy, that Christ should have been viewed as seated responsibly near his Father’s throne. Persons who never knew kingship and thrones, with their panoply and hierarchy, would necessarily miss much of the connotative value of this image. I should think, too, that the images of washed robes and the heavenly temple would both have little meaning for, say, an Arctic social milieu.

One of the most intriguing examples of cultural conditioning, however, is found in Revelation 21:1 where we read in connection with heaven that “there was no longer any sea.” Have you ever wondered why the sea should have been singled out so conspicuously? A new heaven, a new earth, but “no more sea.” Why not mention the absence of lakes, or rivers, or endless grassy plains, or venomous snakes, or flies? What was it about the sea, in short, which caused the writer to conceive of heaven as a blessed place where the sea would be missing?

There is, I think, a perfectly sensible answer to this, but its roots go deep into Semitic mythology. (Don’t be frightened, Judy; when I say Semitic myth, I do not mean to imply that the Jews we read of in the Bible still believed in this particular mythology I am about to describe. I only mean that it was part of their heritage, part of the mental furniture in their heads. Just as Greek myth is for you, although you don’t believe in it any more as a thing literally true).

You may read about this old myth in a dozen scholarly places, Judy, but I want to put it in popular terms for you. It went something like this: an ancient belief which is often alluded to in the Old Testament held that the Creator had to conquer an opposing force, Chaos, before he could bring order and shape to the world. The Chaos monster, once overcome, was banished to the depths of the sea. There may be one last awesome resurgence of his power, but if so he will be permanently defeated and there will never be any more danger that Chaos will vanquish Order.

This fascinating myth, which you may pursue for hours by starting with notes in The Interpreter’s Bible, I, 451 clearly lies behind the other wise inexplicable statement that in heaven, at the time of final victory, there will be “no more sea.” The longing for perfect security, absolute victory, finds expression in lovely poetry, but one must know the Jewish cultural background in order to respond properly.

Well, you have had more than enough this time, Judy. This may help you to understand why devout believers like Dante and Milton felt no hesitancy in changing the Biblical descriptions of heaven and hell into images of their own creation. It is, in other words, quite as sensible to see God in the form of the medieval heavenly rose, as Dante does, as to see Him seated on a throne beneath which water gushes to nourish fruit-bearing trees. There is no such thing as “orthodoxy” when it comes to actual description of heaven. We possess a book which employs Jewish symbolism, but no man is bound to limit heaven to these descriptions of it. It is the projection, in part, of man’s eternal longing for a life better than this one, and wherever men have come close to God and known His abiding glory they have framed their dream of heaven in whatever language and with whatever symbols made sense to them in their own culture.

You may do the same, Judy. You are free to speculate widely on what heaven may be like. I only hope that the beauty and power of this age-old dream will cause you to treat it with reverence. No lovelier idea has ever gripped mankind than this undying hope of final union with God in a world free from all the shackles of this one.

Your Uncle,        

robert meyers