As the world’s Christians prepare to commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a debate over heaven is not as sexy or politically charged as other familiar battles in the American culture wars. It’s hard to argue for more air time for eschatology than for contraception, but the theological and cultural conflict over heaven is, in the end, arguably more important than most such battles, for it is about how Christians view the purpose of life.
The conversation about the nature of heaven that we tackle in the new issue of TIME (available to subscribers here) is challenging popular piety. “Heaven is a new state of affairs in which God’s grace, God’s love, God’s mercy is coming into the present situation,” Christopher Morse, professor of theology and ethics at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, told my colleague Elizabeth Dias. “It is breaking in and breaking up all that opposes love and freedom in the world.”
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