Joy is the serious business of Heaven. ~ C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm
God made this world of space, time, and matter; he loves it, and he is going to renew it. ~ N. T. Wright, Simply Good News
Editor’s note: For his fascinating book Seeing the Supernatural, Lee Strobel interviewed some of the most brilliant scientists and philosophical thinkers in the world on topics of apologetics and faith. Enjoy this excerpt of his interview with Scot McKnight.
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Scot McKnight is a highly influential and prolific New Testament scholar, with particular expertise in historical Jesus studies, the Gospels, early Christianity, and contemporary issues involving the church. Having grown up as the son of a Baptist deacon in Freeport, Illinois, he came to faith in Christ as a youngster and later had a transformative experience with the Holy Spirit at a church camp.
Asked about his career in theology, he told me, “That’s all I ever wanted to do my whole life.”
He earned his master’s degree from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and his doctorate from the University of Nottingham, where he studied under the eminent scholar James D. G. Dunn. After serving as a professor at Trinity and North Park University, he now teaches at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Lisle, Illinois.
McKnight has become a force in Christian culture through his highly successful blog, Jesus Creed; through media exposure on television and in such magazines as Time and Newsweek; and through his lectures in places around the world, including South Korea, Australia, and South Africa.
Among the more than eighty books he has authored are the award-winning The Jesus Creed, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible, The King Jesus Gospel, commentaries on various New Testament books, texts on how to interpret the New Testament generally and the Synoptic Gospels specifically, and even a book on Jesus’ mother called The Real Mary.
It was McKnight’s book on the afterlife, called The Heaven Promise, that prompted me to get together with him near Chicago, not far from where he and his wife, Kristen, a psychologist who was his childhood sweetheart, have resided for years.
With a fringe of graying hair and wire-rimmed glasses, McKnight has a professorial demeanor, though not in an off-putting way. His smile is quick, his eyes are inquisitive, and his manner is engaging and empathetic — in short, he seems like the kind of professor who would hang out with students at a coffee shop to chat about their lives outside of the classroom.
I began by asking McKnight why he believes in an afterlife with God. Like any good theologian, he laid out his thoughts crisply and systematically, saying he had nine reasons in all.
“First,” said McKnight,
“I believe in heaven because Jesus and the apostles did. Jesus said, ‘For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.’1
Peter promised his churches they would ‘receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.’2 As for John, he said, ‘And this is what [God] promised us — eternal life.’3 Paul talked about our frail bodies, saying, ‘For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.’4 If all of them believed in heaven, then it’s good enough for me.”
“What’s your second reason?” I asked.
“Because Jesus was raised from the dead — to me, that’s the big one,” he replied. “Not only was he resurrected, but people saw his body; they talked with him; they ate with him; and then he returned to the Father with the promise that he will come back to consummate history. This gives great credibility to an afterlife — and as N. T. Wright said, ‘The resurrection of Jesus is the launching of God’s new world.’5
“My third reason for believing in heaven is that the overall Bible believes in it.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “The agnostic scholar Bart Ehrman says the earliest biblical books don’t teach anything about heaven, and he seems to suggest that the concepts of heaven and hell were simply made up over the centuries.”6
“Well, let’s look at some facts,” responded McKnight. “It’s true that there’s very little interest in heaven or the afterlife in the Old Testament. It speaks of death — or sheol — the way that other Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures did at the time, which is that death seems to be permanent. Sheol is a dark, deep, and miry pit. In fact, the Old Testament’s only statements about the afterlife are found in its latest books.7
- It’s the New Testament that ushers in a new hope for eternal life and heaven.”
“Should that bother Christians?” I asked.
“Not in the slightest, because this is how divine revelation works. It unfolds over time,” he explained. “The Bible’s major themes develop and grow and expand and take us to the very precipice of eternity. It’s like watching a play, where the whole story isn’t clear until the end. Once we get to Jesus, and especially his resurrection, the Old Testament’s images of sheol give way to his glorious teachings of immortality, eternal life, and the kingdom of God.”
Beauty, Desire, Justice, Science
“What’s your fourth reason for believing in heaven?” I asked McKnight.
“Because the church has taught it consistently,” he said. Christian theology from the very beginning has believed in an afterlife, especially because of the resurrection. There has never been an era in which the church hasn’t believed in heaven.
“Then there’s my fifth reason for believing in heaven — because of beauty.”
That sounded intriguing. “How so?”
“Even atheists get awestruck by the grandeur of the world — visiting the Grand Canyon, strolling among the California redwoods, hearing Bach, or seeing a painting by van Gogh. These point us toward something beyond. You see, many of us believe in heaven because we see in the present world a glimpse of something far grander — the world as we think it ought to be. Where do we get that sense of ought? Could it indicate a future reality — a new heaven and a new earth?
If God made a world this good, doesn’t it make sense he would make a world where it will all be even better?”
McKnight let that question linger for a minute. Then he moved on to his next reason for believing in heaven — namely, because most people do. He cited statistics showing that 84 percent of Americans believe in some kind of heaven, with nearly seven out of ten convinced that it’s “absolutely true.”8
Indeed, Todd Billings points out that even a third of those who don’t believe in God still believe in life after death. In fact, he said, “belief in the afterlife appears to be on the rise” over recent years in America.9 Said a researcher at San Diego State University, “It was interesting that fewer people participated in religion or prayed but more believed in an afterlife.”10
McKnight told me, “Essentially, humans down through history and across the spectrum of religions and philosophies have always believed in an afterlife. Why is that? Is there something inherent in humans, a kind of innate intuition from God, that there’s life beyond the grave? The Bible says God has ‘set eternity in the human heart.’11 I believe the history of human belief in heaven is an argument for believing it’s true.”
“What’s your seventh reason?”
“Because of desire,” he replied. “C. S. Lewis said, ‘If we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us.’ He said this is a desire that ‘no natural happiness will satisfy.’12 Elsewhere he explained, ‘If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.’13 As philosopher Jerry Walls put it, ‘A good God would not create us with the kind of aspirations we have and then leave those aspirations unsatisfied.’14
“I believe that the ongoing lack of fulfillment in possessing what we desire — the love of another, family, beauty, work — indicates there is a true home that will ultimately satisfy all our desires fully — and that home is heaven. In other words, the fleeting satisfactions of this world point beyond us toward a place of final and lasting fulfillment.”
With that, McKnight went on to his eighth reason for believing in heaven — the desire for justice to be done.
- “This world reeks of injustice. We’ve been told since childhood that life isn’t fair.”
He gestured in the direction of the city of Chicago. “Not far from here, innocent kids in the inner city are getting shot. Sexual abuse and exploitation flourish around the world. When I was in high school, I thought racial discrimination would end in my generation, but it obviously didn’t. We seem to have an innate sense of what’s right and wrong, and we long to see justice done.
“I believe in heaven because I believe God wants to make all things right. He wants justice to be finally and fully established. That means victims of injustice will someday sit under the shade tree of justice and know that God makes all things so new that past injustices are swallowed up in the joy of the new creation.”
“And what’s your final reason?”
“Because science doesn’t provide all the answers. We have an empirical mindset today. A lot of people believe scientific knowledge is superior to any other form of knowledge. But that’s simply not true. Science can tell us how the world works and behaves, but it can’t probe meaning and purpose. It can map brain function, but it can’t explain love.
“The point is that science can’t prove heaven, but not everything has to be subjected to scientific scrutiny. For instance, we have excellent historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, and that ought to be sufficient to point toward the reality of an afterlife with God.”
1. John 6:40.
2. 2 Peter 1:11.
3. 1 John 2:25.
4. 2 Corinthians 5:1.
5. N. T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2015), 99, italics in original.
6. See Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), xxi.
7. See Isaiah 25:6–10; 26:19; Hosea 6:1–2; Ezekiel 37; Daniel 12:2–3. Scot McKnight said to me, “In God’s providence and in the unfolding of revelation and redemption, we only learn about a new life beyond death in the final sections of the Old Testament—the Prophets.”
8. See Rodney Stark, What Americans Really Believe: New Findings from the Baylor Study of Religion (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008), 69–74.
9. Billings, End of the Christian Life, 151; see Maggie Fox, “Fewer Americans Believe in God—Yet They Still Believe in Afterlife,” Today, March 21, 2016, www.nbcnews.com/better/wellness/Fewer-americans-believe-god-yet -they-still-believe-afterlife-n542966.
10. See Fox, “Fewer Americans Believe in God.”
11. Ecclesiastes 3:11.
12. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (1949; repr., San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2001), 29, 32.
13. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1943; repr., New York: Macmillan, 1960), 120.
14. Jerry Walls, Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 31.
Excerpted with permission from Seeing the Supernatural by Lee Strobel, copyright Lee Strobel.
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Your Turn
In truth, we don’t have to have proof to believe in Heaven. Scot McKnight provides compelling thoughts about it, but what do you think? Do you believe that God is preparing a place for you after you die that’s better than you can possibly imagine? ~ Devotionals Daily
