MacArthur ponders whether visits to heaven are for real

I am not a fan of John MacArthur or Answers in Genesis, but I came across this article when a Facebook friend shared it this week and found points of agreement and disagreement that I think are valuable to point out. This is how MacArthur opens the discussion:

In recent years, Christian booksellers have inundated the evangelical world with testimonies from people who say they visited heaven in near-death experiences. Their stories are full of specific details about what heaven is like, who is there, and what is happening in the celestial realm. But when we compare their claims with Scripture, it becomes clear that they are merely figments of the human imagination, not true visions of heaven as it is described in God’s Word.

And why is that? He goes on to say that if you had a true vision of heaven...

You would be preoccupied instead with the majesty and grace of the One whose glory fills the place. Sadly, undiscerning readers abound, and they take these postmodern accounts of heaven altogether seriously. The stratospheric sales figures and far-reaching influence of these books ought to be a matter of serious concern for anyone who truly loves the Word of God.

I agree with his basic point despite his blaming of postmodernism (and other red herrings ad nauseum). What are we to make of these experiences people have when they nearly die (or medically speaking when they do die)? I think that on biblical grounds we can largely dismiss these accounts as not actually referring to the place Christians call heaven, which is where God can be fully beheld in glorious light causing those experiencing these visions to fall down in awe. These near death experiences (NDEs) are highly subjective and often sound more like a temporary and partial loss of vision (a tunnel with a light at the end), experiences similar to a dream, and encounters with known persons or objects. I am personally unconvinced that any NDE reveals details about heaven.

MacArthur goes on to discuss what the Bible says about heaven and ends with this little nugget: "Not one biblical person ever gave any recorded account of his or her postmortem experience in the realm of departed souls." First, I completely agree that the Bible never mentions anything of these sorts of experiences. But second, why do we think anyone goes to heaven when they die based on this truth claim? If the Bible never mentions anyone having any experience of heaven after death then why should we think that anyone goes to heaven when they die in the first place? I think MacArthur is spinning his wheels at this point.

Until recently I also held that people go to heaven when they die, but I now strongly doubt and tentatively reject that concept altogether. The full explanation is long, but the first thing that lead me to make this radical change was that the Bible is even more silent on the subject than I've already asserted above. The fact is that the Bible never once says that anyone goes to heaven when they die. Let me say that again. There is no explicit claim that anyone goes to heaven at the moment of death. I'm sure this fact and my admission comes as a shock to some readers, but I'll do another series of blog posts on this subject at some point soon to break up the series on Creation. The short version is that, along with William Tyndale and Martin Luther, I tentatively hold the minority position of Christian Mortalism, which holds that when people die they are in 'soul sleep' until the resurrection.

Like MacArthur, I do believe in heaven and that the Bible speaks of it as a spiritual reality and the place where God dwells. However, when he wraps up his entry speaking about the glories of heaven, what he really means is that we are to look forward to dying and being in heaven forever, and that the earth is a bad place to be avoided. He says that our citizenship is in heaven, we are strangers on earth, and that the heavenly Jerusalem city is the capital of heaven where we will live forever. The problem I have with this is, it seems to be purely non-physical,  rejects creation, and seems to ignore key pointers as to the direction of what goes where in the final state of all things. For example, we await Jesus from heaven, the heavenly Jerusalem will come down from heaven to the earth, and that paradise (which I think is clearly the new creation) is also fiercely physical and earthly, and in some sense congruent with present experience. I think MacArthur pushes too hard in his rhetoric, clings to a gnostic leaning tradition of escaping earth to a harp-filled golden city on a cloud, and ultimately misses the full redemption of all things in creation. Along with many theologians, I think that the final state involves some sort of merging of heaven and earth into a transformed reality that involves a renewed, physical creation.

Some people refer to a physical place, even a physical earth, when they use the word 'heaven' to denote the final state. If we use the word in this way, then in the end perhaps the NDEs are more like the real 'heaven' than MacArthur is ready to admit.