A Brief History of Heaven
This is a brief history of how the idea of heaven got from the Hebrew scriptures to modern American evangelicalism and Kirk Cameron.
This post is lovingly dedicated to Small Town Tourist, who commented this on my TikTok yesterday after I mentioned I wasn’t sure I believed in a literal heaven:
A Brief History of Heaven
Confession: When I was an evangelical kid, I grew up thinking Heaven would be a never-ending worship service.
If you went to the church I did, you’d understand why I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it.
But alas—better than physically burning in conscious torment forever. So I’d take it.
I held out some hope that it could be fun. Maybe my pets who passed would be there.
(Until the pastor said in a sermon that no animals go to heaven because only humans have souls.)
Well, at least my grandparents would be there.
(Unless… they weren’t baptized the right way. So—hell for them too.)
Sigh.
As I got older, I never really found a way to be happy about the Christian heaven I was told awaits me after death. Escaping hell seemed more important.
And then, all hell actually broke loose for me.
After Bible college, I decided to do something novel: I read the Gospels. Closely.
And what I found in Jesus’ message was very little emphasis on the afterlife.
When he talked about heaven, it seemed to cling to earth more than anything else.
And at times, he said it was already here.
So early on in my deconstruction—or maybe what you’d call my pre-deconstruction—I decided to figure out what heaven actually meant in the Bible.
And how it evolved into a never-ending hymn singalong with no dogs or grandparents.
So here it is:
A Brief History of Heaven.
In the Beginning… There Was No Heaven (Sort Of)
The Hebrew scriptures don’t give us anything close to the modern idea of heaven.
There was no “eternal life in paradise,” no glowing clouds, no harps, no reunions with Grandma. And definitely no reward-based afterlife for the faithful.
Instead, there was Sheol.
Sheol was the default. Everyone went there. Good, bad, faithful, wicked—it didn’t matter. It wasn’t a place of punishment. It wasn’t a place of reward. It was… a place.
Dark. Quiet. Shadowy.
A pit. A grave. A memory hole.
Sometimes people there are described as sleeping. Other times, they're “shades”—half-alive echoes. Either way, the general vibe was not singing I Love You Lord with angels.
But What About Enoch and Elijah?
In Genesis 5:24, we’re told:
“Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him.”
And in 2 Kings 2, Elijah is famously swept up in a chariot of fire, disappearing into the sky.
To later readers, these might look like early “raptures.” But to the original audience? These weren’t maps of the afterlife. They were mystical exceptions.
Special cases. Divine mysteries. Not instructions.
Stories like these show up in other cultures too—Babylonian, Greek, Persian. The idea that a great man was “taken” or “lifted” wasn’t new.
It just wasn’t normal.
Ghosts, Witches, and Afterlife Loopholes
Then there’s 1 Samuel 28, where King Saul visits the “Witch of Endor” and asks her to summon the dead prophet Samuel.
And it works.
Samuel rises from Sheol, annoyed he’s been disturbed, and reminds Saul his fate is sealed.
So yeah... the Hebrew Bible has ghosts too.
Elsewhere—in Job, Psalms, Isaiah—you find people asking:
Can the dead praise God? Do they remember anything? Is death the end?
The answers? Mixed. Vague. Unsettled. Nobody knows.
The Hebrew scriptures weren’t unified in their afterlife views or eschatology.
Just haunted by the same questions we still ask today.
What Changed? Empire, Exile, and Outside Ideas
As Israel lived under Babylonian, Persian, and Greek empires, new ideas crept in.
Babylonians imagined a bleak underworld.
Zoroastrianism introduced cosmic dualism—heaven vs. hell, light vs. darkness.
The Greeks gave us Plato, who taught that your soul is eternal and your body is just a temporary cage.
By the time of Jesus, Judaism had split into factions:
Sadducees didn’t believe in resurrection at all.
Pharisees did.
Apocalyptic sects imagined fiery judgment and vindication for the righteous.
In other words: there was no clear Jewish view of the afterlife.
There were many.
Jesus Didn’t Preach Heaven as the Afterlife
(At least not the way we were taught.)
Jesus didn’t show up with a fully formed theology of the afterlife.
What we see—especially in the Synoptic Gospels—is a prophet announcing that the Kingdom of Heaven (or God) is here. Now. Among us.
It wasn’t about flying away.
It was about justice breaking in.
It was liberation. Healing. Mercy. A reversal of power.
Heaven was not a reward.
It was a reality trying to get through the cracks.
But What About the Afterlife References?
Yes, Jesus sometimes talks about the afterlife.
Like when the Jesus of Luke tells the thief on the cross:
“Today you will be with me in paradise.”
But “paradise” wasn’t synonymous with heaven.
It was a temporary resting place for the righteous dead—closer to a peaceful Sheol than a golden mansion.
Same with parables like the rich man and Lazarus or the sheep and the goats.
They’re not really afterlife roadmaps. They’re moral punches. Stories meant to shock, not systematize.
(If you want more on this, here’s my article: A Brief History of Hell.)
Resurrection, Not Escape
What Jesus and the early Christians hoped for was resurrection—a renewed body, a renewed earth, a future where heaven and earth finally become one.
N.T. Wright calls it the “heaven-earth combo pack.”
Not life after death.
But life after life after death.
The Earliest Christians: Resurrection, Not Rapture
One of the most important things to remember when reading early Christian texts is how little time these people thought they had.
They weren’t writing for posterity.
They didn’t think they were building a religion.
They thought heaven was about to break in—fully and finally.
Not in centuries. In months. Maybe even weeks.
And one of the clearest windows we have into that mindset comes from a short letter written around 50 CE—just twenty years or so after Jesus was executed.
It’s called 1 Thessalonians, and it’s widely considered the earliest surviving Christian writing.
It’s not systematic theology. It’s a letter.
Urgent. Grieving. Apocalyptic.
And it contains a line that ended up shaping centuries of speculation:
The dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are still alive… will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. (1 Thess 4:16–17)
If you were raised in evangelical circles, that probably sounds familiar.
It’s the foundation for most modern rapture theology.
But here’s the thing:
That’s not what it meant at the time.
What’s Really Going On Here? (IMO)
Paul (the writer) is drawing from Roman imperial culture—specifically, the image of a city welcoming a visiting ruler.
When an emperor or king approached, the people would rush out to meet him and then escort him back into the city in triumph.
The Greek word Paul uses for “meet” (apantēsis) literally refers to that kind of welcoming party.
So this isn’t about flying away.
It’s about meeting someone on their way in.
The vision here isn’t escape.
It’s arrival.
Not: “We’re leaving.”
But: “Something’s coming.”
What They Were Hoping For
However you feel about resurrection or end-times theories, it’s clear that the people writing these early texts weren’t imagining heaven as a place you go when you die.
They were imagining the world being transformed—soon.
They talked about resurrection.
Justice.
Creation made whole.
A new kind of life breaking through the cracks of the old one.
They weren’t waiting to get out.
They were waiting for something to arrive.
When the World Didn’t End: Plato, the Soul, and the Shift to Heaven
But Jesus didn’t return right away.
And as time passed, the church had to find a longer-term theology.
They found it—conveniently—in Plato.
Plato said your soul is eternal. Your body is the problem. Salvation is escape.
And slowly, that idea seeped into Christianity.
Origen, Gnosticism, and the Birth of the Escape Plan
The first major theologian to really articulate this soul-over-body idea was Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–254 CE).
He believed the soul pre-existed the body.
That the body was a consequence of the soul’s fall.
And that salvation was about returning to God in a pure, disembodied form.
Around the same time, Gnostic movements were saying something similar:
The material world is a prison.
Salvation is secret knowledge that helps your soul escape it.
The Church officially rejected Gnosticism.
But it absorbed a lot of the same anti-body worldview.
Then came Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE), who added another layer:
The doctrine of original sin.
In his view, we’re not just fragile or imperfect—we’re born corrupted.
And our bodies, especially their desires, are part of the problem.
Something to resist.
Maybe even escape.
The Middle Ages: Heaven Becomes the System
Fast forward a few centuries and heaven wasn’t just the hope.
It was the engine of the entire Christian system.
From infant baptism to last rites, the church built a pipeline to heaven—complete with toll booths.
Godparents to vouch for you
Confirmation to seal your faith
Confession and penance to keep you on track
Purgatory to burn off the extra sin
Indulgences to speed it all up
What began as a message of good news became a transactional system—where heaven was the reward for staying on script.
The Reformation: Heaven Rebooted (Sort Of)
If you’ve read my Brief History pieces on hell and Christian nationalism, you already know the pattern:
The Reformation reformed a lot—but not everything.
Same with heaven.
Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the other Reformers flipped over tables when it came to indulgences, papal authority, and church corruption. But when it came to heaven and the afterlife?
They mostly kept the blueprint.
They just changed who had access to the door.
What the Reformers Did Reform
Let’s give credit where it’s due.
The medieval system was spiritually exhausting—and economically exploitative.
The Reformers called that out.
They got rid of:
Selling indulgences for a quicker path to heaven
Prayers for the dead as transactional
Priestly gatekeeping of grace
Instead, they emphasized:
Salvation by faith alone
Grace as a gift, not a wage
Direct access to God—no spiritual middlemen required
Heaven, in their view, was still the end goal. But now it wasn’t something you had to earn through rituals or payments.
It was something God granted freely to those who believed.
That’s a major shift.
What They Didn’t Reform
But even with all that fiery protest, the core heaven story stayed intact:
Heaven is where the soul goes when you die.
Earth is temporary.
Salvation is primarily about the next world.
They ditched purgatory (at least in Protestant circles), but they didn’t ditch the soul-escape model.
The idea of bodily resurrection? Still technically part of the belief system.
But like in medieval Catholicism, it got sidelined in favor of a simple binary:
Die → Heaven or Hell.
No “new earth.”
No “heaven coming here.”
Just: believe now, go up later.
And Then... We Built New Bureaucracies
Ironically, even without Rome, Protestants eventually created their own systems:
Doctrinal statements instead of indulgences
“Sinner’s prayers” instead of infant baptism
Church membership and altar calls instead of sacraments
Same framework. New management.
Heaven still functioned as the prize.
You just didn’t have to pay for it anymore.
The Main Thing to Know
The Reformers cracked the system wide open—but didn’t change the destination.
They protested how people got to heaven.
But not why that was the point in the first place.
The core assumptions stayed in place:
Heaven is “up there.”
You want to go there.
Everything in this life is just prep for the next.
Jesus said heaven was here.
The medieval church said heaven was over there.
The Reformers said: yes—and now we’ve got a better map.
The Modern Evangelical Remix: Heaven Gets Marketed
After the Reformation, the heaven story stayed basically intact for the next few centuries.
Even in early American Christianity—Puritans, revivalists, early Baptists—the assumption remained:
Life is short. Death is near. The goal is to be ready to fly upward when the time comes.
But in the 1800s and beyond, something new started to emerge—something uniquely modern, uniquely American, and uniquely marketable.
Revivalism: The Birth of the Spiritual Sales Pitch
As the Great Awakenings swept across America, preachers didn’t have time for nuanced theology. They had tents, pulpits, and a crowd of sinners to save right now.
The message became simple:
“If you died tonight, do you know where you’d go?”
Heaven and hell became binary options, and belief became the switch you had to flip before time ran out.
Complex theological frameworks got reduced to altar calls and sinner’s prayers.
Heaven was the product.
The preacher was the salesman.
And urgency was the close.
Enter: Dispensationalism and the Rapture
In the 1800s, a new end-times view burst onto the scenes: Dispensationalism.
Popularized by John Nelson Darby and later baked into the notes of the Scofield Reference Bible, this framework introduced the idea that Jesus would secretly rapture believers into heaven, leaving the rest of the world behind for a seven-year Tribulation.
This idea exploded in American evangelicalism.
Books. Sermons. Prophecy charts. Movies.
Eventually: Left Behind.
Because nothing sells heaven like the fear of being left out.
By the time most of us were born or converted into evangelical churches (from the 1970s through the early 2000s), dispensationalism had already won the cultural war—even if many of us didn’t know the word.
But this was a very new idea in the grand scheme of Christian history.
It didn’t come from Jesus.
Or Paul.
Or the Church Fathers.
Or the Reformers.
It came from John Nelson Darby... in the 1800s.
That means over 90% of Christians throughout history never believed it.
And yet, by the late 20th century, it was on billboards, in sermons, and baked into how millions of us imagined heaven, hell, and the end of the world. And there were many versions of it…
A Quick Glossary: Which End Times Story Did You Inherit?
Here are a few versions of dispensational thinking you might recognize:
Pre-Trib Rapture
Jesus secretly returns before the Tribulation and takes the faithful to heaven, leaving everyone else behind for seven years of chaos.Mid-Trib Rapture
Same idea, but believers are taken halfway through the Tribulation.Post-Trib Rapture
Believers go through the full Tribulation and are raptured just before Jesus returns visibly.Pre-Wrath Rapture
A slightly softer version—Christians face some trials, but not God’s full judgment.Classic Dispensationalism
History is divided into distinct “dispensations.” We’re in the Church Age. Next comes the Rapture, then a literal 1,000-year reign of Christ on earth.Progressive Dispensationalism
A modern attempt to tidy all this up with a bit more nuance—but still keeping the core ideas intact.
Or Maybe You Grew Up Like Me…
Not everyone grew up with charts and timelines.
Some evangelical traditions—like the Independent Christian Churches / Churches of Christ, where I came from—were mostly amillennial, meaning we didn’t believe in a literal 1,000-year reign of Christ on earth or any kind of rapture at all.
But let’s not pretend we were more enlightened.
We didn’t focus on escaping the Tribulation—we focused on avoiding hell.
It was still about getting your soul right now, because you could die any minute.
And like most other groups, we were pretty sure our version of the end was the right one.
If you believed differently? You were either naive, deceived, or “not really biblical.”
Billy Graham and the Heaven Formula
By the mid-20th century, Billy Graham made the heaven-or-hell decision the centerpiece of American Christianity.
Massive stadiums. A single clear message:
“God loves you. Jesus died for you. You can go to heaven if you believe.”
And while it appeared Graham’s heart was sincere, the simplicity of that message turned the entire Christian life into an afterlife transaction.
Say the prayer. Get the ticket. Go to heaven.
No need for resurrection hope.
No mention of a renewed earth.
Just you, Jesus, and the ultimate destination.
Getting to heaven had modernized and gained simplicity and efficiency. Just believe and say the prayer. You’re in.
It had also gone from Jesus saying, “Heaven is among you,” to us saying, “It’s later—the point of life isn’t so much what happens now, it’s about waiting to die to experience eternal bliss.”
Heaven became less about transformation and more about transaction.
Less about the kingdom breaking in, and more about you checking out.
So… What Do I Think Now?
I only know two things for sure:
First, the concept of heaven I was given didn’t come out of nowhere.
It evolved—shaped by other ideas, some of them completely at odds with the version I was taught.
Second, I don’t know what happens when we die.
I don’t believe anyone does.
Though most people seem pretty confident they do.
I hope there’s something.
I hope there’s peace.
I hope love wins.
But these days, I’m less focused on what comes later—and more drawn to what’s already possible now.
That’s partially why I still identify as a Christian.
I resonate with Jesus’ teachings on heaven breaking in.
I like the way it makes me think about today.
Heaven might not be a place we go.
It might be a reality we glimpse from time to time.
In forgiveness.
In beauty.
In justice.
In ordinary moments that feel like they don’t belong in this world—but somehow still do.
Eternity might be a cosmic now.
More than a forever then.
Maybe heaven is what happens when we stop trying to escape one life for the next one…
And start fully living the only life we know for sure that we have.
"Eternity might be a cosmic now" that's something to chew on.
Joe, great article! I appreciate the reordering of your cosmology. I agree that Christianity is an “end times” Jewish religion. Jesus was an end times prophet. He envisions a golden age (the year of God’s favor) where the creation is renewed & peace is established on earth. John calls this the millennium or 1,000 years. It’s not literal. It’s a symbol of God’s reign upon the earth.