Living In Heaven Today: A Meeting of Newman and Kline on the Subject of Holiness

July 14, 2008

On Mondays, in contrast to Wednesdays and Fridays, we will be pursuing a more topical sort of study. Today we’ll look at the intersection of some ideas between a sermon by John Henry Newman (known for his spectacular conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, and for his noble explanation of that move in the book Apologia Pro Vita Sua) and a book called God, Heaven, and Har Magedon by Meredith Kline (known for his careful biblical-theological studies, especially his work on the nature and history of covenants).

Newman’s sermon, which is called “Holiness Necessary for Future Blessedness”, is a simple meditation on Hebrews 12:14b. The whole verse reads, “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord”. Newman, however, focuses only on the statement that without holiness no one will see the Lord. One suspects, given Newman’s personal history, that he may be emphasizing that one side of the issue without acknowledging the righteousness and holiness imparted to Christians from the life of Jesus; but even if he leaves this out, what remains is true, holiness is a condition for standing in the presence of God.

Newman suggests that, to an unholy man, heaven would not be a very enjoyable place. This is because the beauties and pleasures of heaven are said to consist in the presence and praise of God; but to an unholy man, this presence and these praises would be changed to terror and cries of fear. Newman even says:

I will venture to say more than this;–it is fearful, but is right to say it;–that if we wished to imagine a punishment for an unholy, reprobate soul, we perhaps could not fancy a greater than to summon it to heaven. Heaven would be hell to an irreligious man. [...] How forlorn would he wander through the courts of heaven! He would find no one like himself; he would see in every direction the marks of God’s holiness, and these would make him shudder. He would feel himself always in His presence. He could no longer turn his thoughts another way, as he does now, when conscience reproaches him. He would know that the Eternal Eye was ever upon him; and that Eye of holiness, which is joy and life to holy creatures, would seem to him an Eye of wrath and punishment.

The sermon as a whole, despite some deficiencies (such as an extreme lack of biblical citations, which would cause any discerning congregation to investigate the orthodoxy of their pastors opinions), is a powerful call to seek personal holiness, both as a mark of the work of grace in one’s own life and also in order to be “the instruments, but we are only the instruments, of our own salvation.”

For Meredith Kline, on the other hand, the subject of heaven is in the foreground and holiness in the background. In the beginning of his book he discusses the nature of heaven, most excitingly, in such passages as this:

In theological reflections heaven is sometimes considered to be a place outside the cosmos, out beyond our universe. Or if it is regarded as within our space-time-matter-energy continuum, it is thought of as a separate part of the cosmos, at some distance from the environs of planet earth. There are biblical indications, however, that suggest otherwise. For instance, in Isaiah 2 the heaven-temple (vv. 1,4) is identified with the whole earth (v.3). And there are those episodes reparted in Scripture when the eyes of earthlings have been supernaturally opened to perceive heavenly phenomena and they discover that the very spot where they are is the gate of heaven (Gen 28:16,17) or that it is filled with heavenly beings (2 Kgs 6:17). Heaven, it would seem, is not remote from us but present right here, even though unseen. Also, there does not appear to be anything in Scripture that would contradict the assumption that the invisible heaven is coextensive with the visible cosmos in its entirety.

Passages like this one elevate one’s sense of the sacredness of daily life. If heaven is “present right here, even though unseen” and we keep that idea present in our minds, one’s own bedchamber becomes holy ground, the route to the mailbox takes on a whole new light, and every place seems suffused with an invisible radiance, an image in our minds for the omnipresence of God. But Kline adds a breathless new dimension to this idea, when he comes to speak of the end of time and the “new heavens and new earth”. He says, for example:

While the catastrophic termination of the present world order will not constitute a complete break between this world and the world to come, it obviously will result in discontinuity of some kind. Elements of this world will be destroyed, never again to appear in the post-consummation world. As to this dross that will be eliminated when the Lord comes as a refiner’s fire, there is good biblical reason to identify it with the products of fallen man’s history. It will be the outward technology, material paraphernalia, and all external expressions of man’s present cultural life that will be done away with (cf. 2 Pet 3:10).

The idea of a hidden, holy heaven bursting forth upon the world it has already inter-penetrated, with a force destructive of all unholy things, prompts precisely the same interest in holiness that Newman tried to inculcate through his sermon. What use spending time, energy, and passion upon things which will “be destroyed, never again to appear in the post-consummation world”? The coalescence of these various ideas from such dissimilar but penetrating authors, should prompt the following reflections:

That we must view our life on earth something like we would view our preparation for the explosion of a bomb or the catastrophe of an earthquake in our immediate vicinity. We must live so as not to become attached to, or worse, deeply involved in, things that will be destroyed before long. We must take part in such things–like, for example, the accumulation of wealth–only insofar as it is necessary, or as it subserves a more permanent object. Second, we must make sure that we are becoming attached to and involved in those things that will survive into the eternal post-consummation world. The “invisible” things, the character that will make us fit to be citizens of heaven, the proficiency in doing, thinking, and saying all to the glory of God that will comprise the perfect course of our post-consummation lives. Viewed in this light, holiness becomes the practice of making our present life as consistent with our eventual post-consummation life as possible–the practice of living, already, as in heaven.

Posted in Heaven, Holiness

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• Psalm 15: Three Uses of Ethical Holiness
• The Historical Ubiquity of Moralism
• Psalm 19: Declare Me Innocent from Hidden Faults
• Faith: A Drama of Definition (Pt. 3)