So, what do Christians do in heaven?

June 7, 2022 6:00 PM

It's my understanding that for Christians, after they die, they go to heaven and live there for all eternity, that's the belief system correct? I'm not knocking it, simply trying to understand it better. But what do the people do in heaven, once they're there? Is that mentioned anywhere? Does it vary among denominations, like the Lutherans believe X, while Methodists believe Y? Yes, I'm totally serious with these questions and mean no disrespect, just looking for understanding of what the Christian faith believes people do while in heaven.
posted by Brandon Blatcher to Religion & Philosophy (22 answers total)

The best I can recall (Lutheran upbringing) is that you’ll be reunited with your loved ones, possibly including pets. You’ll be pain free and…uh, blissed out on the Lord, I guess. Then you can “watch over” those left behind. I’m not sure who really qualifies as “loved ones.” I can think of a few people who have gone before me that I certainly wouldn’t want to see again.
posted by amanda at 6:06 PM on June 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I am a very devout Christian, but from a non-demoninational church (not Lutheran, Methodist, Catholic, etc.).

From my understanding of the Bible, the angels in heaven praise God continually. If that's all there is, I'm stoked and ready to join in.

The Prophetic books of the Bible - Revelation is a good example - describe a physical city of Jerusalem, but in a perfect environment where nothing decays, nothing rusts, there is no hunger, and there is no sadness. If that's the case I'm still stoked and look forward to experiencing a perfect utopia.

Amanda mentioned being reuinted with loved ones and maybe pets, but I don't see that anywhere in the Bible. In fact, if that was the case, surely we'd "miss" the loved ones who didn't go to heaven and there would be sadness. I don't think we will see identity the same way and I don't think we will care about what happened here on earth.

Imagine Plato's Cave where someone only sees a shadow of what is happening in the real world. I think the spiritual realm is like that and after we die we will see things as they really are and it will be so mind-blowing that all thoughts of this crappy life, full of pain and misery, will disappear.
posted by tacodave at 6:26 PM on June 7, 2022 [15 favorites]

Best answer: One of the few details: Jesus says there is no marriage in heaven in answer to a question about widows remarrying.
posted by SemiSalt at 6:38 PM on June 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

if that was the case, surely we'd "miss" the loved ones who didn't go to heaven and there would be sadness

This is a central principal of US fundamentalist Christianity and a pretty common form of abuse in which children/less powerful family members are subject to all sort of manipulations and tantrums so that they won't burn in hell for all eternity. The saved will go to heaven and Jesus will make them not feel bad about whoever's missing.

There's a LOT of stuff not in the bible that people believe.
posted by Lyn Never at 6:43 PM on June 7, 2022 [8 favorites]

I think the idea is that all our worries and bothers will go away. We don't need to worry about "what to do" in heaven because we'll finally be free of the human mortal bother of being bored. Boredom won't exist now anything else we can think of that could bother us now. So the question does not compute.
posted by Tandem Affinity at 6:47 PM on June 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

Best answer: I've heard it explained as: your soul is fulfilled and complete from being so close to God, after being unsettled and distressed from being far away from God all your life. It's like a baby who cries and cries because mom is far away, and then finally mom picks up the baby and holds the baby close to her. "But what will the baby *do* once it gets picked up by the mother and feels utterly content being held close to her?" is an unimportant question. The closeness is all that matters. Just as a baby has no concept of time and no experience of boredom after being picked up, only total peace, so will heaven soothe and satisfy the faithful dead.

I've been an atheist for many decades and I'm not even from a Christian culture. But this conception of heaven, gosh, it sounds kind of awesome to me, tbh! I can totally see the appeal.
posted by MiraK at 6:54 PM on June 7, 2022 [33 favorites]

I was raised Lutheran and have been to a few other churches (pentecostal, evangelical, Presbyterian, Methodist, Catholic, Unitarian) and one of the things I recall is that some (most?) pentecostal churches only believe you'll go to heaven after the apocalypse. Never got the deets about what happens in the middle. This is, I think, also mentioned in Revelations.

The nearness to God thing MiraK mentions is a good description of what the more "thinking" versions of Christianity believe (you know, the versions where writing and thinking about God occupied a large number of people's lives, for hundreds of years). There are a large number of churches that are more "charismatic", or of the "born again type", that embrace a more individual interpretation of scripture where it's common to say heaven is being around God all the time, free of want.

Most conservative Christians don't believe animals go to heaven because animals can't accept Jesus as their savior. This is one of the reasons I decided to not be Christian as a child, but you know, kids be kids.
posted by fiercekitten at 7:22 PM on June 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Karoline von Günderrode's "Apocalyptic Fragment" from 1804 offers this: "But now, I thought, my desire is also to return to the source of life. And, as I thought of this, and felt more life than in all my past conscious being, was suddenly my mind embraced as by overwhelming mists; but they vanished soon. I seemed no more myself; my limits I could no longer find; my consciousness I had transcended; it was greater, different, and yet I felt myself in it. I was released from the narrow limits of my being, and no single drop more; I was restored to the all, and the all belonged to me. I thought and felt, flowed as waves in the sea, shone in the sun, circled with the stars; I felt myself in all, and enjoyed all in myself." I'm an atheist with no more than vague background familiarity with the topic, but if you read the whole fragment, I think she's picturing eternal life but only following a universal resurrection, itself part of some sort of millennial or postmillennial eschatology.
posted by Wobbuffet at 8:01 PM on June 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Is that mentioned anywhere?

Biblically, description of capital-H Heaven—indeed, afterlife at all—is really pretty thin. Christ famously argues that God is the God of the living, not the dead, and that in the resurrection we are as angels, though that's rather more him describing the role of God, and defying bad-faith logic-traps set by his critics. Elsewhere describes it as being easier for camels to pass through the eyes of needles than for the rich to enter the kingdom of God; but it's more his comment on wealth than death. The Book of Revelations describes at length the return of Christ and the judgement of the living and the dead, and the establishment of the Kingdom of God and a whole new Heaven and a new Earth, but to put it mildy, that book is open to multiple interpretations. The core concept of the Revelation, that the resurrection will be an apocalyptic one-time event of salvation-and-damnation, which will necessarily involve the destruction of everything, is in conflict with almost all widely-held Christian cultural tropes about the afterlife: that heaven and hell are places people immediately go to, and e.g. face punishment, or 'watch over' the living. That's Christianity for you!

So whatever the cosmology early Christians had, whether they believed, as in the creed, that God created heaven and earth (the sky and the ground, meaning, 'everything'), and that heaven was literally the sky into which Jesus ascended, modern Christians have to, at some level, maintain that 'heaven' is a metaphor for oneness with God, or a future salvation and resurrection involving the Apocalypse, or something of both. And the whole history of Christianity is also the history of Christians in practice developing folk beliefs about what 'salvation' is (once again, very ambiguous in the New Testament), which range in scope from local cultural belief, to sect practice, to Church doctrine, to major works of world literature (cf. Dante!) and then regularly having to dispute what the core doctrines actually are.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 8:02 PM on June 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

Audio Adrenaline, a popular American Christian rock band of the 1990s, had a hit song in 1993, "Big House" that was popular with teens of the day:

Come and go with me
To my Father’s house
Come and go with me
To my Father’s house

It’s a big, big house
With lots and lots of room
A big, big table
With lots and lots of food
A big, big yard
Where we can play football
A big, big house
It’s my Father’s house
posted by rogerroger at 8:05 PM on June 7, 2022

And "Big House" is a riff on this passage from the evermystical Gospel of John (chapter 14):

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.”

Evangelicals love nothing more than to take John's word as literal truth, so no doubt many believe that heaven has a literal house that everyone will live in that has a great many rooms.
posted by billjings at 10:33 PM on June 7, 2022

The novel "The Great Divorce" by C.S. Lewis is an extended analogy on heaven and hell based on the notion the difference is whether a person is willing to give himself to God or not.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:30 AM on June 8, 2022

As far as I can tell most of the Christians I know believe that Heaven will be a perpetual perfect family reunion, and that yes, you will be throwing sticks for the dog and enjoying barbecue in the backyard with everyone you ever really liked, with the kids running through the sprinkler and your beloved old Chevy '72 parked in the driveway. There will be beer and there will football and there will be teenaged girls in summer dresses blushing prettily when some teenaged boy talks to them. Nobody will ever do anything nasty or unkind because they can't because they will never, ever feel the urge to do so, being so happy all the time.

The music will be whatever kind of music is special to us. It might be Country and Western, or Fifties Rock or John Lennon. If you ask they will allow that of course there will be a lot of the music they hear and maybe sing in church, but unless they are evangelical they probably are more likely to mention Merle Haggard and Elvis than name hymns.

The problematic people in your life will all be there, but because they are in heaven they will be changed into a wonderful and loving version of themself. The people you don't like won't be there because they don't deserve to be, or if they are there they will be somewhere else repenting how awful they were, so voluntarily staying out of your way. Changed you know.

They actually believe it will be pretty much like this, complete to having the material objects they are attached to, and without puzzling over why the kids running through the sprinkler will be kids in heaven when they actually grew up and got old before dying. They don't consider the the logical conundrums because we can't understand how it works here on earth, so we will find out once we get there. Questions like how dogs get to heaven are quickly waved away - It wouldn't be heaven without Ruffles and Patch, so Ruffles and Patch are going to be there. Your collection of Beanie Babies will make it to heaven somehow too.

If you want an idea what it looks like in Heaven, check out the illustrations in the Jehovah's Witnesses magazines. The light breaks through the clouds a lot and everyone is smiling and it never rains and people who used to be handicapped have perfect incorrupt bodies of the age that is most appropriate to their relationship with you. So grandma will still look much older than you, and so will your minister but you yourself won't be any older than about forty, and maybe you'll look around twenty, depending on if you loved being that age or not, and if being twenty means it would be weird to not be older than the kids and grandkids.

The minister believes this too, but mentions a lot more that it is a mystery how it is going to turn out this way in order to forestall the awkward questions about specifics. The minister secretly believes that people who ask questions about whether Beanie Babies will make it to heaven or not, are actually weak in their faith, and doing so just to be obstinate and difficult, because yes, all good things will be in Heaven, and stop asking the same troublesome questions already.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:58 AM on June 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I am a practicing Lutheran. The Bible tells us that when Christ returns to raise the living and the dead to him, the earth will be destroyed and there will be a new earth where we will live and a new Heaven. Until then the souls of the dead worship at the throne of God in Heaven.
posted by manageyourexpectations at 6:06 AM on June 8, 2022

Although the Bible does not say so, many theologians have said that witnessing the torments of the damned in hell will be part of the joys of heaven. It was a big part of Jonathan Edward’s sermons. Sorry to add to the schadenfreude.

Here’s the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on Christian philosophies of Heaven, I think you should find it interesting.
posted by Hypatia at 7:01 AM on June 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I went to a Catholic university and was a drama major, and also an atheist. I couldn't reconcile the idea of a place where everything was good and everyone was happy. There is literally no room for drama there, and theater and literature are what I do to try to better understand myself and other people. I love reading, including fiction. When I read good works, I feel like I have better insight into people, and that makes me happy.

For heaven to work, that couldn't happen. And if that's the case, then I wouldn't really be me. And if I'm not really me, how could you argue that it's heaven for me? It's not. It's heaven for some shell of me, but not me. So as much as I'd like to live in that place forever, it couldn't work.
posted by nushustu at 7:11 AM on June 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

What do the people do in heaven, once they're there? Is that mentioned anywhere?

Since nobody's ever come back to tell us what it's like there, one person's conjecture is as valid as any other person's. Diane Keaton made a film in 1987 (with the obvious title) where various people describe what they believe it will be like. (trailer)
posted by Rash at 8:20 AM on June 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

tacodave's first interpretation was the one I grew up with, from a few different US churches I attended as a kid. I was told there would be singing of praises specifically, and I liked singing... but I thought it sounded really boring doing it all the time! (I'm still kind of surprised nobody could come up with something more imaginative and inticing and also widely accepted after 2000 years.)
posted by the liquid oxygen at 9:17 AM on June 8, 2022

I think the "heaven is boring" theme has been explored a lot in literature -- e.g., Paradise Lost and a small anecdote in Huck Finn.

(I was Googling for Huck Finn and found some links by Christians addressing this point, which also address your question.)
posted by redlines at 9:55 AM on June 8, 2022

I love this question. All we were told in Catholic Sunday school was that in heaven there'd be a lot of angels in choirs, we'd see our dead relatives and pets again, and no one would be sick or in pain. We were discouraged from thinking too much about it (as was the norm at Sunday school).

I remembering asking if we could like, travel through time and watch Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids being built and was told no. And there would be no drinking fountains that dispense chocolate milk instead of water.
posted by Stoof at 1:53 PM on June 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I was confirmed in the United Church of Christ, a liberal mainstream Protestant denomination, formed by merging the Congregational Church and a few others. In our class, someone asked the pastor who was instructing us, "What happens when you die?" The pastor said, "No one knows." He also explained that some Christian thinkers had suggested that our individual identities might not persist after death --- that Jesus had promised we would join God in heaven, but that might mean our souls would merge with God and our individual egos would disappear.

Looking back, I think that was a pretty deep idea to suggest to a bunch of ninth graders. But that was almost sixty years ago, and I never forgot it.
posted by JonJacky at 9:11 PM on June 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

I don't know if Mormons count as Christian for purposes of this question, but they identify as Christian, and they believe they'll have lots to do in heaven. First, they preach to the spirits of people who died and went to spirit prison. Think of it as missionaries with black name tags knocking on the doors of souls in purgatory. The goal is to convince those people to accept baptisms done on their behalf in Mormon temples.

Then after every knee bows and every tongue confesses, in the highest level of heaven, married couples, or men plus multiple wives, beget and bear spirit children who then populate other planets, like how God is the spiritual father of humankind on Earth. These gods and goddesses will be very busy answering planets full of their spirit children's prayers, and helping them progress to be able to give them spirit grandchildren and so on. People in the lower levels of heaven are ministering angels, doing administrative work making sure everyone is tended to spiritually. Prompting people to care for each other, warning people not to go out in a storm, announcing that God has a purpose for someone's life, plus a lot of witnessing and recording of human events, and singing in choirs.

If some family members on Earth end up in one level of heaven, while other family members end up in another, visitation will be allowed, meaning people at all levels will be visiting family or hanging out with visiting family sometimes.

To be clear, I don't share those beliefs, but I'm familiar with them. I have family members who have promised to visit me in my lesser kingdom.
posted by Former Congressional Representative Lenny Lemming at 5:35 PM on June 9, 2022 [1 favorite]