FINALLY HOME (Review)

Finally Home – The Christian View of Heaven by Dane Ortlund is written in beautiful and delightful prose. Having reached three score and ten, and having just lost an older brother, I have begun thinking a lot more about heaven! Says Ortlund, “We may feel that we are suddenly being summoned to the king’s throne room when we realize we’re about to die. But our whole life has been the summoning.  This life is fleeting. We are wise to know it, and to feel it.” p. 10.

Many writers are quoted, from CS Lewis to Herman Bavinck. Indeed, many recognizable and dependable theologians are invited to speak, including many Puritans. “The Reformation and especially Puritanism refocused the church’s vision back on Christ himself as the blazing sun of heaven, in whose light all of heaven is bathed and without whose presence heaven is no heaven at all. “So great is the brightness of Christ,” writes Calvin, “that it easily extinguishes all the glories of the world.” p. 24.

For Ortlund there is none of this souls with harps and haloes sitting forever on thin, wispy cirrus clouds somewhere up there. Rather, he speaks of those same “Solid joys and lasting treasure / None but Zion’s children know” of John Newton. Ortlund speaks of, “An opulent new earth, solid as ever, bright and renewed – as Bavinck later puts it, “brilliant in unfading splendor.” p. 83.

However, the reader needs to be aware that Ortlund follows the popular idea that things in heaven may not be what we ordinarily think of as something solid. He seems to think that “The risen Christ … can walk through walls…” p. 96. “A body that walked through walls…” p. 99. I have often wondered where this idea came from. Ortlund says that “Thomas Aquinas developed this line of thinking regarding our future bodies … Subtilty – our bodies will, while remaining fully physical be uninhibited by physical constraints (such as locked doors to Christ in John 20).” p. 104.

This is a no straining of gnats’ issue as perhaps some may think. In heaven, we Christians are looking forward to a solid manly hug from Jesus. He is our Rock. It is worth quoting Calvin on the “locked doors” issue at length, “We ought to believe that Christ did not enter without a miracle, in order to give a demonstration of His Divinity …  The Evangelist does not say that He entered through the shut doors, but that He suddenly stood in the midst of His disciples, though the doors had been shut, and had not been opened to Him by the hand of man … Away, then, with that childish trifling, which contains nothing solid, and brings along with it many absurdities! Let us be satisfied with knowing that Christ intended, by a remarkable miracle, to confirm His disciples in their belief of His resurrection.” John Calvin and William Pringle, Commentary on the Gospel according to John, vol. 2 (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010), 256–257.

Let us not, therefore, run the danger of confusing the two natures of Christ by ascribing attributes to His human nature that belong only to His Divine nature. Let us keep His two natures distinct “for ever.” Westminster Larger Catechism Q. 36. “Who is the Mediator of the Covenant of Grace? A. The only Mediator of the Covenant of Grace is the Lord Jesus Christ, who, being the eternal Son of God, of one substance and equal with the Father, in the fullness of time became man, and so was and continues to be God and Man, in two entire distinct natures, and one Person, for ever.”

Let us therefore follow Ortlund where he says, “We must shed once for all the notion that our final future is somehow less solid and physical than the present life. Our final future is Eden restored.” p. 80.

So, apart from the walking through solid doors caveat, Finally Home – The Christian View of Heaven is a great book and a definite must read for all who are looking forward to embracing a solid Jesus in a solid heaven.