Prosaic Afterlifes

One thing I remember from when I first read New Wine for the End Times was a sense of simplification in me about the question of the afterlife. I didn't realize this before reading the book, but I had some uncertainty about it, I suppose about whether I would go there. Heaven was something nebulous, uncertain, or poetic, a dream. But the Millennium is guaranteed to almost all (except extreme ethical anti-theists). And it is a more or less prosaic place / time, somewhat different from this life, but recognizably similar. Just like in this life, where we have to learn to be in tune with God, so it will be in that life. Both this life and the next are places of work, and there is a degree of risk in both places -- the risk of hardening.

I think Christians sometimes have trouble believing in heaven, because it's so dream-like or poetic. They know themselves to be made of prose, not poetry. How can a prose-being live in the world of poetry? Can a prose-being be turned into a poetry-being? At best, it is uncertain whether we can really exist in the world of poetry.

Perhaps some people can believe in poetry, that it is real. But I think by default, poetry seems like a dream. It is a beautiful, unreal thing for the imagination. So if heaven is poetic, it's a beautiful, unreal, imaginary place. Only where there is prose, there is real life.

Some Christians have a hard time thinking about the afterlife, and who goes there, because traditional Christian soteriology doesn't make sense to them ("Do children who die before they profess Christianity go to heaven?" "What about my very nice friend who isn't a Christian -- or the one who is sort of on the line between Christian and non-Christian?" "What about people in uncontacted tribes in the Amazon basin?") The New Wine System makes more sense (the answer to all four questions in the previous parenthetical are "they will be resurrected to the Millennium and hopefully, over the course of the Millennium, will mature to the point of going to heaven"). With the New Wine System, people can face the afterlife and see it as real.

Given this, believers are freed from the despair that accompanies the belief in the transitory life. They can shift their focus away from survival and enjoyment (get what you can in this life) and toward ethics and God (try to work toward becoming close to, and like, God in this life and the next). New Wine Christians might look at death as "falling asleep" the way Jesus and the early church did, something relatively mundane and lightweight, rather than a tragedy mixed with a celebration as Christian dying can be seen under modern Christianity.

In New Wine or MSL thinking, is heaven a prosaic place? If we take the Bible of New Wine Christianity literally, it sounds like heaven (the New Jerusalem) is a giant cubical spaceship made out of weird, beautiful materials, which actually floats in heaven (the sky). I don't think modern people would make up that heaven, it wouldn't speak to them as normal beauty, so it doesn't work the same as modern poetry or imagination. It's too weird to be a beautiful dream (at least to me). It seems sort of orthogonal to my tastes, which perhaps is appropriate. That it doesn't fit with my desires gives it the taste of reality. Heaven isn't about what we want, it's about what God wants. Still, while it doesn't sound like my fantasy of heaven, it doesn't sound 100% prosaic either.

Should we assume that Revelation (the source of the New Jerusalem image) is literally true? My first thought is, no, it's explicitly a vision, and visions don't have to be literal. I guess it could be, but we should consider whether it's not. In that case, maybe Jesus saying that in his Father's house, there are many rooms (or words to that effect) gives us some idea.

(I'm not sure all of where Jesus could be seen to be talking about heaven. Here's the passage I was thinking of in the previous paragraph (John 14:1-4):

14:1 "Don't let your heart be troubled. Believe in God. Believe also in me. 14:2 In my Father's house are many homes. If it weren't so, I would have told you. I am going to prepare a place for you. 14:3 If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and will receive you to myself; that where I am, you may be there also. 14:4 Where I go, you know, and you know the way."

Jesus' description is very plain and is consistent with a prosaic heaven. It does not rule out a poetic heaven. Without Revelation, I would default to thinking either prosaic or a plain kind of poetic heaven.)

MSL (which is apart from the Bible) doesn't commit us to any particular view of heaven, but it does commit us to a view of humans as being mature when they go there. When we are mature, will we need a heaven of magic, wonder, and maximal pleasure? Or will our tastes have changed? MSL does indicate that, unless somehow nobody hardens / rejects God, there will be an undercurrent of sorrow for the people who are not there. And even for those who are there, some of the truth of their existence there will involve how they got there, from lives of hardship and (temporary) enmity with God. I don't think that heaven will be a place of pure happy feelings, but overall tempered with sorrow. That is what love of people and the truth call for. I suppose that heaven may involve qualitatively rich or new, otherworldly experiences, which speak to a sort of Sehnsucht (as C. S. Lewis uses it?) or Lewis's image of heaven as being like the world you know but five times bigger (I think he said something like that), but we won't need it to.