Review: Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy by Jerry Walls

In Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy, Jerry Walls has four goals: (1) to argue that heaven is plausibly real (based on the existence of near death experiences—henceforth NDEs) (2) to defend the concept of heaven against various objections (3) to demonstrate the central role that heaven plays in Christian theology and (4) to show how fruitful a philosophical concept heaven is. Rather than writing at length on (1), I will simply point the interested reader elsewhere[1]. For the sake of completeness I will briefly address (2) before spending the bulk of the review on (3) and most of all (4), both because (4) is of most interest to me personally and is, I think, an underexplored area in philosophy of religion. As will be seen, there are tight links between (3) and (4).

Defending heaven against objections. In regards to (2), a couple of prominent ‘counter-Heaven’ objections and their rebuttals are as follows. One involves the complaint that Christ made failing to hold a belief (Christ is the Messiah) a sin that carries the consequence of eternal damnation. With disarming simplicity, Walls explores what it means to be in Heaven—namely, to be in the direct and loving presence of God. T he upshot is that Heaven won’t be Heaven for someone who is not already in love with God.[2] Walls then turns to a discussion of soteriology, broadly speaking.[3] Throughout, he plumps for a broadly orthodox form of inclusivism[4]. What is unique about Walls (although it is not central to this particular work[5]) as an evangelical scholar is that he does not hesitate to invoke the possibility of purgatory[6] to answer many of these issues.