The book is 533 pages long, so I decided to just call [Randy C.] Alcorn at his ministry in Oregon. He’s one of the foremost non-dead experts on heaven, having also written “50 Days of Heaven,” “In Light of Eternity: Perspectives on Heaven” and “Heaven for Kids.” Alcorn said that a few outraged people had shown him my Venti cup. It made him laugh. “Not because I thought it was silly, but because I believed it, in essence,” he said. “Hey, I agree. The Christian church has communicated an extremely boring view of heaven. I think it’s wrongheaded and flat unbiblical.”
The clouds-and-harp version came about for two reasons, Alcorn told me. One is Satan. The other is the early church fathers who tried to blend the Bible with Greek philosophy and wound up with a Platonic version of the afterlife stripped of the physical. In the heaven in Alcorn’s book, he imagines we’ll be riding on the backs of brontosauruses and throwing baseballs with Andy Pettitte. This does not sound like it will be heaven for brontosauruses or Andy Pettitte.
But that’s actually the heaven on Earth that only gets going after the return of Christ. Until then, our souls are hanging out in intermediate heaven — a place a lot less physical and awesome — and much of our time is spent watching events on Earth. Which sounds pretty boring. “If you didn’t have the promise of resurrection and new Earth, and all you had was this unnatural state, I would say that, yeah, by our present standards, that doesn’t sound exciting to us,” Alcorn said. And remember, some Christians have been in intermediate heaven for about 2,000 years. The brontosaursuses maybe a few thousand years longer, depending on your views on science.
Angel-Retentive Personality:
Descriptive of one who maintains a (usually sentimental) belief in angels, whilst rejecting other creeds and traditions that historically formed the context of belief in angels.
I dunno, present with the Lord doesn’t sound at all boring to me, even though our souls will long to be clothed with our bodies again until the Resurrection.
But Randy Alcorn, IIRC, has a pretty solid orthodox reputation among evangelicals, and this and his other books seem more focused on lifting our eyes out of our mundane earthly existence to catch a tiny crack of light from both our time spent with the Lord after our bodily death and from the new heavens and the new earth where believers and the whole physical creation are redeemed than focused on angels.
In Scripture can be found..” absent from the body, present with the Lord..” isn’t that simple enough?? Nuff said!!