Heaven is for the Good
Thoughts on tolerance and dogma
I saw a comment on Twitter on a fellow Latter-day Saint’s tweet. It was the typical anti-Mormon tripe: Mormons aren’t Christian—they’re going to hell. Joseph Smith, the founding Prophet of Mormonism taught us that God is more broad-minded than most of us think. Paraphrasing Brother Joseph, God looks at us like a kindly parent, with compassion and longsuffering. We believers go out of our way to find fault with one another and condemn our fellow believers to hell because they don’t comport themselves in accordance with our doctrine. Joseph said we would be surprised by who we willl find in heaven, once it’s all over and done.
One of the things that attracted me to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was this openmindedness, which is reflected in our views of the afterlife. Perhaps I should invert that and say that it is the revelations about the afterlife that create that openmindedness. We send missionaries out to the world with a message that God has spoken again in our time, and that he has invited everyone to receive a message that will bring them to the highest degrees of glory in eternity. This message includes no condemnation of other people or their faiths.
We don’t believe in a literal “lake-of-fire” hell. That language in the scriptures is figurative. Hell, according to the revelations, is self-imposed. The unrepentant can’t abide God’s glory. They exile themselves from God because of their sins. Being in his presence would be excruciating. The pains of conscience are like a lake of fire, a personal torment that is far more personal and exquisite.
We recognize that all people are sinners and we rely on God’s grace and mercy for forgiveness. It is faith in that mercy that impels us to do good. Good people go to heaven and there are many heavens. Good people don’t go to hell. Many evangelicals have twisted scripture to tell us that a serial killer who calls on Jesus on his way to the gallows will be saved while a good non-Christian, like Ghandi would be tossed into the lake of fire. This is false doctrine. It comes from John Calvin and preachers like Jonathan Edwards. Edwards said, in his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” that God sees us as no more than a spider and thinks no more though of tossing us into the fire than we would for an insect. That’s a horrible, cynical view. God, who loved us enough that he sent his Only Begotton Son to die for us, doesn’t see us as mere insects.
I didn’t grow up in a Latter-day Saint world. I lived out in the world my whole life, where Mormons were the minority. My closest friends have been non-members. One of my best friends is a Baptist minister. Another friend, who passed away a few years ago, was an Odinist. Yet another is a quasi-Buddhist pantheist. At my work, I am friends with several Turks, all of whom are Muslims. All of these people are good people. They are kind, charitable, caring, and compassionate. They are honest and they serve their fellowmen in various ways. You see it in their career choices. The Odinist was a nurse who worked with troubled youth. The Muslims are devoted schoolteachers. They raise their children to be moral people. They sacrifice their time and means to do good in the world around them. They inspire me to try to do better. There’s no way God is sending any of them to hell.
If there isn’t a hell, in the sectarian Christian sense, why would anyone repent or have faith? My response to that is that the good are drawn to the light. There are evil people who cling to a faith to escape hell, without the intent to do good. Jesus condemned scribes and Pharisees in the New Testament, calling their faith a “[cloak] for their sins.” They are not drawn to the light. To them, religion is a “get out of jail free” card. Not coincidentally, people of this orientation are the ones who are often violently intolerant of other religions. It is as if the presence of an alternative view threatens the eternal security they have manufactured for themselves. They don’t do good and they condemn others who do good, saying that they’re trying to “work their way into heaven.”
Why then, would anyone choose to be a Latter-day Saint, if good people go to heaven regardless of their faith. The answer to this is that there are many heavens. We divide them into three categories: celestial, terrestrial, and telestial. In the celestial kingdom, we know there are three different degrees. We don’t know if there are degrees in the terrestrial. The telestial kingdom has a myriad of different degrees of glory, in the same way that stars show almost infinite variation in magnitude of brightness. All of these are heavens. People will end up in the heaven that they believe in.
A Baptist dreams of a heaven where he will be in glory with Jesus. That’s a good definition of the terrestrial kingdom. He doesn’t believe that marriage lasts beyond the grave and thus, he doesn’t expect it in his heaven. That’s not a part of his heaven because, partly, he didn’t believe in it or seek to obtain it. His rejection of the teaching eliminates it as a possibility for him. A Latter-day Saint believes in a heaven with family, exaltation, and the possibility of becoming co-creators of kingdoms with God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost. Because the latter-day saint believe in it, they seek the blessing, and God reveals the ordinances and authority to receive it. A non-Christian may believe in reincarnation or escaping from the wheel of Karma. He has no expectation to live in a heaven with Jesus, thus his heaven doesn’t include that blessing. He is as happy as he expected to be, enjoying the glory he was willing to receive.
Our expectations influence the observances of our faith. For us Latter-day Saints, God has provided ordinances like temple sealings and baptism for the dead to provide the way for us to obtain the celestial glory. We seek after those ordinances and strive to live up the covenants associated with them. We know God expects us to live the gospel, not merely believe it. If we are successful in obtaining those blessings, it is because we sought after them with desire, intention, and action. For those who inherit lesser degrees of glory, I don’t know that they will ever have any knowledge of what else might have been available to them. They will have the happiness they desired, based on their faith and good works.
For those who are wicked, their eternal reward in the telestial kingdom probably isn’t much different than the world we live in now. It will be populated by people who were wicked and unrepentant. They will feel natural there. They would feel uncomfortable among the more righteous souls in the higher kingdoms. The scriptures tell us that the current condition of the Earth is telestial. The temple ceremony tells us that the telestial kingdom is the world in which we live. I don’t know, but perhaps birth is a type of resurrection into the telestial world. Those who desire to transcend this world and seek something better will find it. Those who don’t seek anything more remain in a level of glory commensurate to that of the Earth.
It will be our desires and our actions that determine where we go. There is a progression involved. Let’s say there is a wicked man who begins to regret his evil ways. His conscience leads him to repent and he ends up in a church that teaches him about Jesus. He decides to commit his life to this new faith and he accepts Jesus as his Savior. Let’s say that the example of Jesus leads him to reform his life and he becomes honest, faithful, patient, peaceful, and kind. He does good in the world because of his faith. This man would have moved from a telestial state to a terrestrial one based on his expectations and his actions. Some time later, he encounters missionaries who teach him that there is something more. They tell him that he can have a personal revelation from God and learn that the Book of Mormon is true. He learns about the degrees of glory and the possibilities of exaltation, including eternal marriage. If this sparks a desire in his heart to receive these blessings, he may take the steps to obtain them; namely, baptism by proper authority, priesthood ordination, and temple ordinances. If he rejects those possibilities, he obviously will reject the ordinances that lead to them. He chooses to end his progress, depending on what he will accept as true.
Similarly one might ask, is there a “gay heaven?” No. Are there gay people in the various heavens? Yes. It has to do with faith, acceptance of truth, and receiving gospel ordinances. A gay person who violates the law of chastity is no different than a heterosexual person who violates it. The description of the telestial world in Doctrine and Covenants 76 tells us that “These are they who are liars, and sorcerers, and adulterers, and whoremongers, and whosoever loves and makes a lie.” Unrepentant sinners constitute the population of the telestial worlds. For those individuals with homosexual tendencies who keep the law of chastity, yet refuse baptism by proper authority, abide in the terrestrial kingdom with the “honorable men of the earth who were “blinded by the craftiness of men” (D&C 76: 75). For those who struggled against this weakness, repented, received baptism by proper authority to join God’s Church, and lived a chaste life—but did not receive make the covenant of celestial marriage (which can only be between a biological male and a female)—their reward can be the first degree of the celestial kingdom. They cannot be exalted. Exaltation cannot occur for same sex couples because procreation is impossible for them. Exaltation is “eternal increase,” which means an eternal posterity of spirit children. They enjoy the blessings of living in God’s presence eternally because they were good, sought the essential gospel ordinances, and made the necessary covenants, but they cannot have increase. Their “lifestyle” choices exclude them from the covenant and ordinance that leads to exaltation. It’s about what you DO.
President Russell M. Nelson talks frequently of the “covenant path.” What I just described is the covenant path. It involves receiving and embracing gospel truths, accepting ordinances administered by those who hold the keys of authority, and living the gospel, with a penitent heart, always seeking to draw closer to God. We make covenants when we receive the ordinances. The Doctrine and Covenants tells us that it is through gospel ordinances that the power of godliness is manifested to us in the flesh (D&C 84: 20-21). At every step, it us our choice to move forward and closer to God. At each step, unbelief or sin can stop our progress.
Now, what I’m about to write next is my own speculation. It’s not revelation. It’s not doctrine. It’s just my opinion and you can just take it as that. We assume that assignment to kingdoms is eternal. Once you have been resurrected to a degree of glory, that’s where you stay—forever. Meanwhile our scriptures include a tantalizing bit of revelation that might provide some insights into what that means. The Lord admits in Doctrine and Covenants 19 that he uses emphatic language “that it might work upon the hearts of the children of men, altogether for my name’s glory.” He explains in this section that “endless punishment” and “eternal punishment” are called this because he is Endless and Eternal. Verses 11 and 12 expressly tells us that “Eternal punishment is God’s punishment” and “Endless punishment” is God’s punishment. The Lord clarifies that “Nevertheless, it is not written that there shall be no end to this torment. . .” (See D&C 19:6). With this in mind, when we read in Section 76, that the people who inhabit the telestial kingdom cannot come into the presence of the Father and the Son “worlds without end,” is this also emphatic language, as we have in Section 19? I reason that no unclean thing can come into the presence of God, thus the telestial kingdom’s inhabitants are unclean—because they are still unrepentant. Once a soul becomes repentant, is it possible for him to progress from the telestial kingdom?
I have not written this with the intent to condemn or judge anyone. That’s way beyond my “pay grade.” The Lord can save and exalt whosoever he wishes. I’m just trying to understand scripture and share what I understand. I may be wrong, but I have a hard time believing that God limits eternal progression of those who seek it. He blesses us according to our desires and our actions. Desire leads to action. Righteous desires lead to righteous actions. Repenting of sin and turning toward the light is a righteous action. Entering into and staying on the covenant path leads to exaltation. I can imagine God has a plan for the progression of resurrected people from the telestial kingdom and that it has something to do with that phrase, “worlds without end.” It probably has something to do with the differences in the nature of resurrected bodies in the various kingdoms.
Joseph Smith said that God never condemned a person for believing too much. He said that Jesus chastened followers for not believing enough. God calls to us to invite us to step up and to seek him. He won’t turn us away, but he won’t compel us either. He has prepared heavens commensurate with the faith and works of his children. The covenant path is the sure way to exaltation, if that’s what we truly desire.