Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived

interpretations, and attitudes that should be rejected. Perhaps they simply came to a point where they refused to accept the very sorts of things that Jesus would refuse to accept.

So when people ask, “What will we do in heaven?” one possible answer is to simply ask: “What do you love to do now that will go on in the world to come?”

The ancient sages said the words of the sacred text were black letters on a white page—there’s all that white space, waiting to be filled with our responses and discussions and debates and opinions and longings and desires and wisdom and insights.

Nor did John, Peter, James, or the woman who wrote the Letter to the Hebrews. So if that’s it, if that’s the point of it all, if that’s the ticket, the center, the one unavoidable reality, the heart of the Christian faith, why is it that no one used the phrase until the last hundred years or so?

When people use the word “Jesus,” then, it’s important for us to ask who they’re talking about. Are they referring to a token of tribal membership, a tamed, domesticated Jesus who waves

who has walked among us and continues to sustain everything with his love and power and grace and energy?

Heaven is both the peace, stillness, serenity, and calm that come from having everything in its right place—that state in which nothing is required, needed, or missing—and the endless joy that comes from participating in the ongoing creation of the world.

How great is God? Great enough to achieve what God sets out to do, or kind of great, medium great, great most of the time, but in this,

the fate of billions of people, not totally great. Sort of great. A little great.