In one of my first theology classes in divinity school, my professor the late Sallie McFague asked: If there were no heaven, would you still be a Christian?
The question stopped me – and most of my classmates – in our tracks. Hmmm. It never occurred to me that there might not be a heaven. And isn’t the point of being Christian about going to heaven when we die?
There’s a lot going on in McFague’s question. What happens when we die? Is the end just the end? The question is also asking about why people are faithful. Is it just for a promised reward? Or to escape an otherwise inevitable form of eternal punishment?
I wasn’t raised with strong language around fire and brimstone, and my home church was very oriented towards community service and social justice. So I assumed heaven, but I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about avoiding hell. I spent more time thinking about how to make things better for people on earth. This is one reason why I find a home in Black and womanist liberation theologies. And in Ifa.
These ideas became clearer in my June lecture at IARPT where I mentioned that finitude isn’t as big a problem for Ifa practitioners as it is for Western Christians. Throughout most of Western philosophy, human finitude is an issue. Philosophers seem deeply bothered by human mortality. Even my favorite philosopher of process thought, Alfred North Whitehead identifies avoiding loss as the central issue in religion: “The most general formulation of the religious problem is the question whether the process of the temporal world passes into the foundation of other actualities, bound together in an order in which novelty does not mean loss.”[1] In other words: How do we become something new without losing? How do we evolve without death?
I agree that we cannot become something new without losing or letting go of some part of the past. But I just don’t think that the end of life on this plane is the end. My little STEM-loving kid understood this as the first law of thermodynamics – energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. The eternality of our souls seems obvious to him. Ifa assumes belief in ancestors. There are variations in ideas about what a “good ancestor” is and whether we need to or how to “elevate the spirit of an ancestor,” and how we interact with ancestors. But we assume ancestors. And we assume ancestors without being tethered to an idea of a heaven and a hell.
Many of my colleagues in American religious and philosophical thought were intrigued. So much of naturalism is built around denying a heaven and afterlife or questioning it or at least asserting that we cannot confirm its existence. I believe this comes from pushing back against a Western religious tradition that emphasizes an afterlife as a way of evading issues we deal with on earth. And I’m all about pushing back on that.
What if finitude isn’t a problem? No one wants to die early or young or painfully. I get that. But what if that isn’t the big problem of religion? Might we be developing strong character just to be a good force on the planet? Might we “do the right thing” because we believe it’s “the right thing” without any need for reward or fear of punishment? Might we be propelled and excited by trying to creatively transform our world?
When faced with McFague’s question about heaven, I internally said, “yes.” I’m Christian largely by accident of birth. I was born and raised in a Christian household and family in the United States. But whether or not I stayed Christian and what kind of Christian I became – I got to make those decisions as an adult. For me, those decisions had nothing to do with heaven, but it was about “the good news.” And what is touted as radical good news to gospel writers seems to be a core assumption of Ifa: the end is not the end.
Dr. Monica
