Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy

by Jerry L. Walls

The Christian doctrine of heaven has been a moral source of enormous power in western culture. It has provided a striking account of the ultimate good in life and has for two millennia animated the hope that our lives can be fully meaningful. Recently, however, the doctrine of heaven has lost much of its grip on the western imagination and has become a vague and largely ignored part of the Christian creed. Not only have our hopes been redefined as a result, but our very identity as human beings has been altered.

In this book, Jerry L. Walls argues that the doctrine of heaven is ripe for serious reconsideration. He contends not only that the orthodox view of heaven can be defended from objections commonly raised against it, but also that heaven is a powerful resource for addressing persistent philosophical problems, not the least of which concern the ground of morality and the meaning of life. Walls shows how heaven is integrally related to central Christian doctrines, particularly those concerning salvation, and tackles the difficult problem of why faith in Christ is necessary to save us from our sins. In addition, heaven is shown to illumine thorny problems of personal identity and to be an essential component of a satisfactory theodicy. Walls goes on to examine data from near-death experiences from the standpoint of some important recent work in epistemology and argues that they offer positive evidence for heaven. He concludes that we profoundly need to recover the hope of heaven in order
to recover our very humanity.

Genres: Theology, Philosophy

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Jerry L. Walls (PhD, University of Notre Dame), a world-class expert on the afterlife and a sought-after speaker, has written for Christianity Today, First Things, and Christian Century. He has appeared on NPR’s Talk of the Nation and in the documentary film Hellbound? Walls, professor of philosophy and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University in Houston, Texas, is the coauthor of Why I Am Not a Calvinist and the Christianity Today Book Award Winner Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. He has authored or edited a dozen books, including a trilogy on the afterlife—Hell: The Logic of Damnation, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation, and Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy—and is a senior speaking fellow for the Morris Institute for Human Values.

Reviews

[W Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the sequel and needed flipside to Walls' earlier work Hell. In Heaven, Walls defends the Christian notion of a heavenly afterlife as being not just coherent but necessary to Christian doctrine. He paints a picture of beatitude as consisting in total character transformation, often by way of Purgatory, and he deals with the problem of "irredeemable evil". In the latter case, he advocates for a view in which the eternally blessed regret the loss of the eternally damned without eternally sorrowing over them, so that they respond to both the damned and to the presence of God with appropriate moral seriousness. This is a well-written book, and was a helpful complementary source in my study of universalism.