Heaven

A pop-philosophical defense, not just of heaven but of the whole Christian ethos, for troubled believers and tender-minded seekers. Kreeft, who teaches philosophy at Boston College, sounds here like a C. S. Lewis redivivus, with his passionate nostalgia for God, his commonsensical arguments, and his crisp debater's prose. And he leans very heavily on the Anglo-Catholic school (George MacDonald, Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien, etc.), of which Lewis was the brightest apologetic light. If you happen lo be susceptible to the appeal such writers make to your "naturally Christian" psyche, well and good. But skeptical readers are going to raise objections. Thus, Kreeft writes in a typical passage, "What you will find in your heart" - i.e., if you can spare a few moments for quiet introspection - "is not heaven but a heavenly hole, a womblike emptiness crying out to be filled. impregnated by your divine lover." This is Lewis' famous Sehnsucht, the haunting desire for something (or rather Someone) beyond all mere earthly good, the longing for a joy that transcends happiness. Kreeft insists, along with Augustine. Pascal, Lewis, and others, that this fundamental human nisus can only be fulfilled in the eternal possession of God, in other words in heaven. The problem, of course, is that the existence of a need doesn't necessarily imply the existence of the means to satisfy it. To infer heaven from our hopes for it is simply to rework the ontological argument, which, as Kant showed, may be denied with impunity. So this vigorous, often eloquent sermon will only touch those primed for it. This audience will also enjoy the way Kreeft weaves a colorful skein of literary references into his text. Apart from some dubious generalizations (e.g., the death of God leads directly to the rape of nature) - a pious, but intellectually responsible answer to Gauguin's questions, "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" (Kirkus Reviews)