“[Humankind] finds itself in the middle, knowing neither the end nor the beginning, and yet knowing that it is in the middle.” (Bonhoeffer, Creation & Fall)

These are the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his winter semester course of lectures (1932-33) on Genesis 1-3. Outside the window of his Berlin lecture room the brown shirts were busy building the Third Reich on piles of burning books. Bonhoeffer, with characteristic astuteness, identifies the disturbance, or even the threat, posed to the human being by any authoritative depiction of our beginning. He insisted, we meet this threat by taking comfort in the lie that we always were and always will be. Against this Bonhoeffer boldly counters, “No one can speak of the beginning but the one who was in the beginning.” If this is true of the beginning, and much of the popular enmity between Christianity and science in the Modern period has been focussed on just such a question, must it likewise be true of the end? That is, could a valid and reliable voice be found to testify to our end because he was there? The conceptual difficulties involved in such a notion are many and, at least at the surface, obvious. For while a voice may call to us from the past about our beginning, our ordinary experience does not allow for someone to speak of the future in the past tense – “I was there at the end which is to come!”

The issue of testimony to the end of the world seems all the more poignant in the current climate. Historically such testimony has been the vocation of prophets and/or mystics. For its part, the modern secular state looks instead to computer models. However, since the end is something to which all of us feel closer when compared to a beginning lost in the mists of time, how could one voice claim absolute certainty above and beyond all others? Consequently, it seems only appropriate for us to maintain a far more democratic approach to the end – especially at an individual level. This, by and large, is the assessment of Lisa Miller in her recent release, Heaven: Our enduring fascination with the afterlife. (NY: Harper Collins, 2010)

The book’s genesis was a moment of personal truth for journalist Miller – when asked by an early-morning TV anchor, “Do you believe in heaven?” she had no answer. Considering the interview was focussed on Miller’s recent cover story entitled, “Why We Need Heaven,” the irony was palpable. The obvious implication was that the religion editor of Newsweek maintained her perfect objectivity via one of secularism’s more odious hypocrisies – it takes an agnostic to talk honestly about faith. Consequently, and very much to her credit, Miller embarked upon a six year journey to produce her current monograph. The result is an engagingly written genealogy of heaven in contemporary American culture. Though restricted to the “Abrahamic faiths” and launched from the common rooms and kitchens of east coast intellectuals, Miller’s quest spans the continent encompassing moderates of every ilk be they Muslim, Jew or Christian.

This social history of heaven for Americans unfolds largely by way of accounts of the many conversations in which Miller has engaged. Denying any authority as a scholar or a religious apologist, Miller states her goal is, “to write a book that might guide people through the thicket of their own views about heaven by holding up a mirror of others people’s beliefs, both current and past.” The path towards this goal follows three parallel tracks, the first being the wide range of contemporary American views of heaven. The second track is the extent to which these views do or do not reflect adherence to official Jewish, Christian or Islamic teaching. Finally, the reader is presented with Miler’s conclusion that any question about heaven that could be asked, has been already, and further, that the answers to these questions have been debated fractiously and perennially over the course of twenty centuries with common themes (these make up the chapter titles of the book) but without consensus.

Always urbane in her scepticism, Miller tends to favour romantic imagination in her conversation partners. Hence it is the rich sensuality of the Islamic vision with its culinary delicacies, the deep bonds of familial history amongst her Jewish kin and the vivid poetry of Dante’s Christian Paradisio that receive most favourable attention. From these heights her esteem descends through various levels of prophets, poets, priests and philosophers ultimately saving her only explicit disdain for a New York spiritualist she describes as “trafficking in grief.” Along the way Islam is relieved of the burden of obsessing with heavenly sex, the Sadducees win out against a general resurrection of the dead and the audacious hope of Christianity is found to lie in a Democratic agenda, provided it maintains liberal amounts of Catholic self-deprecating humour.

For her part, the end of Miller’s quest is a “radical hope” in a heaven described as “a place that embodies the best of everything – but beyond the best…what’s most beautiful, most loving, most just and most true.” Neither transcendent nor metaphysical, for Miller God “is the word I use to describe what is miraculous about this life, the aspect that is awesome and defies rational explanation [metaphorically speaking of course].” Consequently, in this scenario, heaven is “a constant hope for unimaginable perfection even as we fail to achieve it.” While it is as attractive as it is middle-class, Miller’s materialist pantheism has a good deal more humility than the cultured despisers – Harris and Hitchens – whom she chastises for burning a straw effigy of God. On the whole, Miller’s analysis of the mosaic that is the American dream of heaven is empathetic without being patronising. The author is agnostic enough to hear others’ aspirations towards a particular notion of the afterlife and respond with disagreement but not dismissal.

The author’s final acknowledgements concede that though thorough, the book is by no means comprehensive. The most dissatisfying omission for this reader was an inevitable consequence of the “pro-democracy” style of enquiry into the afterlife. The necessarily cultural portrayal of Christianity was largely oblivious to the radical claims of the risen Jesus as Lord and Messiah. As such, his person and work are both a radical promise of God’s favour towards those we might deem unworthy of any kind of heaven and, at a the same time, a radical challenge to our middle-class aspirations of perfection. As the crucified Messiah, Jesus is God’s choice to save us from ourselves. As the bodily risen Lord, Jesus is God’s promise to transform us for a new world free from sin, death and evil – for heaven.