God's mystery begins where our curiosity ends

Heaven is a catch-all.

I’m sorry, but that’s the conclusion I’ve come to after twenty-one years in evangelical circles. Intricacies, mysteries, and genuine problems can all be explained away by uttering that single word. Heaven.

As I was growing up, I had a lot of questions. Questions about God, questions about people, questions about the way the world worked. Sometimes I was given answers, or better, a trailhead from which to explore from. Sometimes I was honestly told “I don’t know.” But other times, I was dismissed with a comment like this: “I guess we’ll never know until we get to heaven.”

This might be true.

Some things are a mystery, I’ll happy concede that. But when God's mystery only begins where our curiosity ends, I think we do enormous damage to ourselves and others by cheapening the mysteries of God. Mystery should never be used to stifle exploration. And heaven is anything but a cop-out.

I don’t think that the people along the way were malicious in their answer. Often enough, they had good intentions. They wanted to be sure I didn’t do something terrible, like disagree with them. But I think their assumptions were wide of the mark. And well-intentioned or not, the response had negative implications. Convictions, even when honestly held, have practical implications in life. It is vitally important that orthodoxy and orthopraxis are not separated, and if your doxa isn’t leading to orthopraxis, it might not be as ortho as you think.

What is subtly caught-and-taught in this kind of environment is that everything is primarily assessed by its compatibility with a particular paradigm, namely, the one you already assume to be true. Exploration is okay – until it crosses some mysterious line into the uncomfortable, at which point one can be condemned for searching out inexplicable mysteries, or worse, having the hubris of trying to understand the workings of God.

Here are some examples:

• It’s okay to explore evolutionary theory – as long as it is how Ken Ham presents it.

• It’s okay to ask why bad things happen to good people – as long as you don’t question penal substitution – or worse – still have nagging doubts despite having “straightforward answers.”

And ironically this type of thinking can even make its way into beliefs about heaven and the afterlife. Serious questions about the fate of everyone can just be put off until we “arrive.”

I think this is disastrous. The mysteries of God are huge, unfathomable. We can never plumb their depths. And that is exactly why they are worth exploring.