Scot McKnight shows in this book that the vision of Heaven the Bible gives is precisely what we need for a vision of what life should be on earth through Jesus by the gospel through the church.

If you want a book recounting traditional teaching from scripture on Heaven, you need to look elsewhere. But if you want a book that moves toward breaking new ground and is potentially a paradigm changer in one’s faith, you’ve found a great book here.

McKnight begins by considering how the subject has been approached, and how it ought to be approached. McKnight’s writings seek to be true to what the Bible says. In McKnight’s understanding, the reason Heaven matters is because God promised it to us. Thus, it’s as good as the God who promised it. And the promise of Heaven relies on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Heaven is a resurrection world.

The most important part of the book is the groundwork McKnight lays from scripture, listening and challenging tradition. Orthodoxy is often much wider than many seem to acknowledge. The important thing is to remain faithful to the spirit and truth of the gospel.

Heaven is essentially the promise from God in and through Jesus and Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. What will be true of Heaven? God will be God, Jesus will be Jesus, Heaven will be the utopia of pleasures, Heaven will be eternal life, Heaven will be an eternal global fellowship, and Heaven will be an eternal beloved community.

What will the first hour of Heaven will be like? McKnight’s view is a stark contrast from the traditional Roman Catholic view of Purgatory. His emphasis is not on human cooperation but on God’s grace. Entrance into Heaven will be a transformation that will leave no stones unturned, including the need for reconciliation in what was left of very broken relationships on earth.

The issues addressed near the end of the book are near-death experiences, rewards in Heaven, who will be there, the fairness of God, whether our children and even spouses still have a special relationship to us, children who die, cremation, purgatory, pets in Heaven, and why one should believe in Heaven in the first place. Be ready for some surprises, and to be challenged as to what scripture actually teaches on some things. McKnight places an appropriate emphasis on the hope and the wideness of God’s mercy without resorting to universalism.

The two great views of Heaven in the church, that it is an ecstatic worship experience largely between gathered individuals and their God, or that it is a time of great communion in love and work and service in the kingdom end up being joined together in God’s vision of Heaven from scripture. Heaven is a dynamic, not static existence.

I would commend this book as a good model to help us think biblically. This book helps us see that the vision of Heaven is related to the entire Story found in scripture. Our view of Heaven directly impacts our view of earth and life in the present, since Heaven is destined to come down to be joined to and become one with earth in Jesus. God’s will is to be perfectly done on earth as it is in heaven.

Reviewed by Ted Gossard

Engage Further:

“Scot McKnight Answers Questions on the Topic of Heaven – The Heaven Promise” [Vimeo]

Scot McKnight, “10 Things I Wish Everyone Knew About Heaven: Who will be there? Are near-death experiences reliable? And more on eternal life” On Faith (October 6, 2015).

Scot McKnight, “The Heaven Promise Podcast” Jesus Creed (November 5, 2015).

Preview The Heaven Promise: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Heaven_Promise.html?id=JHYlBgAAQBAJ

Publisher’s page: http://waterbrookmultnomah.com/books/236717/the-heaven-promise-by-scot-mcknight/

Luke Timothy Johnson is a first-rate biblical exegete and a Roman Catholic. He takes the reader through Luke and Acts, seeing in both the fulfillment in Jesus of the prophetic in the messianic role of prophet, priest and king. Unlike a majority of scholarship grounded in the modern discipline of critical study of the text and background, Johnson sees Luke and Acts as complementary, in fact amounting to what Luke intended to be a single read, or at least read together. Jesus comes and fulfills the Torah in a way that seems to turn Torah on its head. This is contrary to how the Pharisees do Torah, who Johnson sees as seeking to fulfill it in more of a straightforward way.

Johnson sees Jesus’ radical fulfillment of the prophetic in Luke as continuing on in the church in Acts. What Jesus began to do in Luke he continues to do in Acts by the Spirit through the church. And Johnson sees the church’s fulfillment as being even more radical. Jesus began that step toward what was fulfilled later in the church and continues on to this day.

Johnson argues for a prophetic emphasis in both Luke and Acts, which he shows is demonstrated well in the texts themselves. He sees this emphasis grounded in certain prophets of the old covenant: Moses, Elijah, Elisha. Jesus was not like the writing prophets such as Isaiah, but like the prophets who by the Spirit spoke God’s word and embodied, enacted (signs and wonders, etc.) and witnessed to that word, a witness that resulted in suffering. The prophets listed in Luke-Acts is impressive: “Moses, Samuel, David, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, John, Simeon, Anna, John, Jesus, and those followers of Jesus through whom the spirit of the resurrected one did signs and wonders” (p. 67). The prophetic word and work is to point to and give something of God’s vision ultimately for the world.

I find the thesis that Luke and Acts underscore the prophetic which is fulfilled in Jesus in calling the church back to its true mission and vocation healthy. Yes, the church is prophetic by nature in its calling and constitution. Johnson sees the Pentecostal/charismatic church as important in keeping alive the manifestations of the Spirit seen in Acts.

F. LeRon Shults and Andrea Hollingsworth, The Holy Spirit (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 150 pages, ISBN 9780802824646.

This book makes a significant contribution to the “Eerdmans Guides to Theology” series and helps us understand the place of the Holy Spirit in the faith and practice of the church over the centuries and today. This book by Shults and Hollingsworth does this in a compact (150 pages) and accessible way.

F. LeRon Shults is a Reformed theologian committed to the belief that the church must ever be reforming. Once professor of theology at Bethel Theological Seminary he is now professor of theology and philosophy at the University of Agder in Norway. He has written a number of other books, including Reforming the Doctrine of God and Reforming Theological Anthropology (both Eerdmans).

Andrea Hollingsworth is a Ph.D. student in constructive theology at Loyola University Chicago. Her research interests include spirituality and pneumatology, and she has published book reviews and essays in journals, including Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies.

The authors see pneumatology as “the attempt to interpret the transforming experience of the Spirit” (p. 2). And this is “implicitly or explicitly, always…within the context of trinitarian discourse” (p. 6). In the introduction we are given a succinct, refreshing account of Scripture’s witness to the Spirit. From there we move to some highlights of the church’s witness to the Spirit up to the present day.

The church has often sought to defend and promote the faith in a philosophical context, but philosophy has often not been kind to a biblical understanding of spirit. The dualism of Middle Platonism and neo-Platonic philosophy defined spirit in a way that devalued matter. This meant that the teachings of the healing of the body—even the incarnation itself—were in danger of being undermined or denied altogether. The church fathers sought to undo this influence in the Councils of Nicaea (325 A.D.) and Constantinople (381 A.D.). The focus was primarily on Christ as being one person undivided with two natures and speaking of God as Trinity, one God in three persons. Constantinople significantly added to the Creed what had developed from the Cappadocians’ theological work on the church’s understanding of the Spirit.

Augustine of Hippo’s work and analogy of Trinity as Father-memory, Son-intellect, and Spirit-will, along with Boethius’ definition of person as “an individual substance of rational nature” (p. 91) had a profound impact on Western theology in particular. In this formulation, substance had priority over being “in relation.” The Western filioque addition to the recitation of the Nicene Creed, “from the Son,” in describing the procession of the Spirit (influenced by Augustine’s writings), contributed to the eventual split between the East and the West of Christianity. The Eastern Church saw the Father as the eternal source or fountain of the Son and the Spirit, while the Western Church insisted on the Spirit’s procession from both the Father and the Son. But there have been some breakthroughs in recent times toward resolving this impasse.