The Problem with “Heaven Tourism” Books

For example, Don Piper describes heaven as having something like pearly gates and says of the streets, it was like a city with paved streets. To my amazement, they had been constructed of literal gold. If you imagine a street paved with gold bricks, that’s as close as I can come to describing what lay inside the gate. But when the Bible uses this kind of imagery, it doesn’t seem as literal as just gates made of pearls and streets made of literal gold. Revelation 21, 21 says of the new Jerusalem in heaven, the 12 gates were 12 pearls. Each of the gates made of a single pearl and the street of the city was pure gold, transparent. As glass notice, the gates aren’t made of pearls. They just are a pearl, and the gold is like transparent glass, which is not like the gold that we know in this world.

This shows that while the Apostle John was given special knowledge about heaven, he wasn’t writing heaven tourism. Instead, he was writing a unique genre of literature about what God revealed to him that has multiple layers of interpretation. That’s why I’m skeptical of heaven tourism books that collapse this mystical imagery into mundane pedestrian descriptions of heaven. The Bible does use earthly imagery like wedding feasts or golden cities to describe heaven, but the catechism says this mystery of blessed communion with God and all who are in Christ is beyond all understanding and description. According to Pope St. John Paul ii, the heaven or happiness in which we will find ourselves is neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but a living personal relationship with the Holy Trinity. And that’s how you can tell which visions of heaven are more authentic. When you read heaven tourism books, they usually focus on details like seeing dead loved ones or heaven being clouds and harps and golden streets or things that Jesus tells us Instead of the glory of worshiping God, face-to-face.

Compare heaven tourism books to the descriptions of heaven from the saints. People like St. Faustina who said the following, I saw how all creatures give ceaseless praise and glory to God. I saw how is happiness in God which spreads to all creatures making them happy. St. John Bosco said of his vision of heaven, all was blue is the calmest sea. Though what I saw was not water and he heard music most sweet he said of people singing salvation, honor and glory to Almighty God and Father. And of course there’s St. Paul who said in two Corinthians chapter 12 that he was taken up in some way to heaven. But that quote, he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter. And while descriptions of heaven from the saints after the giving, the deposit of faith can be helpful. We have to take everything in balance because none of those private revelations constitute public revelation about heaven that we must accept, but they can help us meditate on the joy of heaven not being what is there, but who is there simply God and his infinite majesty that never ceases to bring us joy and happiness.

Heaven will not be boring because just as there are an infinite number of numbers, there is an infinite degree of happiness we can have in heaven with God. Every day will be better than the previous day, just as every number can be greater than the previous number. Moreover, boredom is an evolutionary bug in our fallen world, it’s not a part of God’s ultimate design for us. Human beings that suffered boredom were more likely to seek out better living conditions and thus survive longer in our history. Boredom is like fear and jealousy. They’re imperfect feelings that help us survive in this fallen world, but they’re not going to be needed in heaven. We’ll be perfectly happy and free from those feelings in the next life. So my concern is that heaven tourism books treat heaven more as a cool place for this kind of objection to fester that it’s not going to be cool enough to make us happy.

Remember, it’s not about what is there but who is there that matters. And I do have another concern that involves how this genre of literature can exploit children. In 2010, Kevin Malarkey published the book, the Boy Who Came Back from Heaven and it was also adapted into a film about how his six-year-old son Alex, claimed to have visions of heaven during a near death experience that took place after a car accident. In Alex’s vision, heaven also has a hole that leads to hell and Alex saw the devil a being with three heads, moldy teeth and fire for hair. The book was a bestseller and Alex’s father, Kevin, got full rights to the royalties. Tragically, Alex remained paralyzed after the accident and he and his mother claimed that his father, who is divorced from his mother, didn’t give them money from the book sales. What’s most heartbreaking though is that Alex says he made the story up and that his father embellished what little he did.

Describe. In a 2015 blog post, Alex wrote the following, please forgive the brevity, but because of my limitations, I have to keep this short. I did not die. I did not go to heaven. I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention when I made the claims that I did. I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies and continue to, they should read the Bible, which is enough. In other interviews, Alex revealed that his first encounter with an angel or what he thought was an angel was waking up in the hospital where it was dark and he was groggy and saw his father talk to someone he thought was an angel but was actually a nurse. Now, I commend Alex for coming forward and what happened to him was understandable. A 6-year-old child whose injuries were described as being an internal decapitation is going to have a hard time processing everything that happened to him.

So I do not blame him for the events that transpired, not at all. However, I do blame his father, Kevin malarkey for using the tragedy to exploit his son for money and sell us a bunch of well malarkey. With all due respect, that’s a bunch of malarkey. But even when the people involved sincerely believe the account of going to heaven or seeing heaven, very young children have a tenuous grasp on earthly realities, let alone heavenly realities. You can see this in the book, heaven is for Real by Todd Burpo, which was also adapted into a film. It tells the story of BPO’s 4-year-old son, Colton, who said that he experienced heaven during an emergency surgery after having acute appendicitis. Colton talks about how he saw his mother and father during the surgery as well as other people. Colton allegedly could not have known about like an unborn sister miscarried by his mother or a great grandfather who had died 30 years before Colton was even born.

Many of the book’s, descriptions of Heaven mirror common misconceptions that are shown to children in coloring books and cartoons, things like Colton saying that he saw Jesus riding a rainbow colored horse. I don’t blame Colton for thinking this because even many adults have misconceptions about heaven. For example, Colton says that the people in heaven have wings and they have halos on their heads. Alex malarkey gave the same detail when he was six years old saying that there were pure white angels with fantastic wings in heaven, but the Bible never describes either angels or human beings as having wings in heaven. The practice of describing angels this way began in the fourth century to distinguish angels from humans and frescoes and to show how angels traverse God’s creation. The idea that human beings in heaven have wings probably comes from the common error that human beings become angels when they die.

In fact, some representations of angels only show their face and wings to symbolize that angels don’t have physical bodies. Angels only appear to have bodies when they interact with human beings and they don’t have wings when they do that. People even mistake angels for humans, which would be hard to do if they had wings as can be seen in Hebrews 13, two, which says, do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers. For thereby, some have entertained angels, unawares heaven. Tourism stories also can cause alarm when we invest too much authority into the person telling these tales. For example, Colton said that he learned while he was in heaven that there’s going to be a war and it’s going to destroy this world. Jesus and the angels and the good people are going to fight against Satan and the monsters and the bad people.

I saw it. Colton also said this war would happen soon because he saw his own father fighting in it. These kinds of stories take our focus off of heaven and onto the seer or the visionary or the returning visitor, and it contempt us to want to just follow these lurid details he tells. It’s kind of the reverse. My concern in the previous episode I did called, it’s not always demons where excessive curiosity about hell and demons can lead us away from pursuing holiness and into an unhealthy fixation on knowledge about the dark part of the afterlife that God never meant us to have. So let’s pull all this together. Hell is real, heaven is real, and God may allow some people to have visions of these realities without necessarily taking them there. And those visions may be given in accord to the person’s understanding and not meant for the rest of us to take it literally, especially if the vision is given to a small child. The most popular depictions of heaven on the New York Times bestseller list are probably the last place you should go to get information about heaven. The Bible and the catechism of the Catholic church are a great place to start. The latter of which says the following heaven simply is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme definitive happiness. For more about heaven, I recommend Peter Cree’s book, heaven the Heart’s Deepest Longing. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.