I don’t believe heaven has gates

What you think heaven will be like affects what you'll do to get there.

Nowhere in the scriptures is there a detailed description of what heaven looks like.

And that’s okay. I assume we don’t have those details because it doesn’t really matter what the celestial kingdom looks like.¹ I’m not even clear it’s a place, in the normal sense. There are much more important parts of our theology than, you know, heaven’s decor.

But it matters deeply what each of us thinks heaven will be like, in a metaphorical sense. That affects how we understand the gospel, and how we live our lives.

Paul Tillich, an influential theologian and philosopher, developed the concept of the “ultimate concern.”² Your ultimate concern is the thing that matters most to you. It’s the thing your heart is most interested in, the object of your devotion and worship. Your ultimate concern is what you will give up everything else to get.

For some people, that might be something that doesn’t seem religious in nature, like money, power, acceptance, etc. But Tillich would argue that if your ultimate concern is one of those things, then that is your religion. That makes it impossible to not be religious; even if you’re an atheist, there is something that means more to you than anything else. That’s your religion.

And that guides your actions. If your ultimate concern is money, then you’ll do whatever it takes to acquire more of it. It might mean working crazy hours to launch a startup, to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It might mean entering shady real estate deals or Ponzi schemes. Or it could mean theft, straight up. The point is that whatever your ultimate concern is, you’ll do what it takes to achieve it.

A simpler way to think about this is this scripture: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21).

Why it matters

That’s what I mean when I say it matters what you think heaven looks like. If heaven is something specific to you, that’s what you’re going to work toward in this life. For example…

Do you think heaven is small, with only a handful of people there? If so, all your effort has to go into being one of those people. Your job is to outrun, outlast, and outrighteous the people sitting next to you on the pews. It’s a zero-sum game. There are limited tickets to get in. Someone reads the scriptures fifteen minutes a day? You’ll read for thirty. Someone pays a generous fast offering? You’ll double it. You’ll go to the temple every day. It may be that the only way to get to heaven is by stepping on others along the way, and if that’s the heaven you aspire to, you’ll do it.

Do you think heaven is right here, with the earth having received its paradasiacal glory and becoming the celestial kingdom (as in Doctrine and Covenants 88:17–20 and 130:9)? Then it might be important to you to take care of this earth. Maybe the Earth isn’t just a pool of resources to be strip-mined and depleted, maybe it’s not just a holding tank for our waste and pollution. If we believe that the earth will be with us in the next life, then we’ll treat it as something that will make it into the next life with us.

Do you think heaven is a place where we’re in a constant attitude of worshipping God? Maybe it is. And if so, you’d better figure out what worshipping really is. Maybe you look into self-abnegation and self-flagellation and other ways to prostrate yourself before God. If that’s what heaven is, then you need the practice. Other people become somewhat unnecessary in this view of heaven.

What do I think? I think heaven is big. I think we’ll be there with loving Heavenly Parents, and the company of all our spiritual brothers and sisters, the whole of the human family. I think our Heavenly Parents love all of us—their children—so deeply that Their plan makes it possible for us all to get back to them.

Popular depictions show St. Peter at the pearly gates, deciding who will get in, whose testimony is tall enough to enter. I don’t think heaven has gates. I think God is trying to bring us in, not keep us out.

That’s what heaven looks like, to me. Maybe it looks different to you.

Which is why I think it matters a great deal how we treat other people now. Are we in a race against the people around us, or are we on a journey with them? In this life, we share a common humanity that binds us all together. But we also share a divine parentage. Being children of God, every one of us, ties us together in ways deeper than living on the same street or having our children go to the same school.

That’s why I talk and write about love—because I’m trying to become that person who can love everyone, no matter how dumb or bad at driving they are. And that’s not because I think I can score more Afterlife points by loving my neighbor, it’s because the points don’t matter and loving each other is how we become more like God.

Seeing heaven differently is why we sometimes seem to be on a different page than others around us, even at Church. If I see heaven as having room for all of us, and the person one pew over sees heaven as exclusive and small, then we’re going to see the world differently. I might put more weight on kindness to others, and they may put more weight on exact obedience. Is one of us wrong? I guess we’ll find out when we get there. But importantly, we’ve both aligned our beliefs and actions to our ultimate concern. And we can understand each other better when we know that.

This also affects the way we understand the gospel itself. It affects what scriptures we like best—they’re the ones that reinforce our ultimate concern. It affects what we hear and take away from general conference.

What that looks like

There’s been chatter lately about the Parable of the Ten Virgins.³ I used to always view the story from the standpoint of believing heaven to be full of people who have earned the right to be there; people who have met rigorous behavioral qualifications to enter. The five wise virgins were prepared to pay the price of entry into the bridegroom’s presence; they had oil in their lamps. I understood that to be symbolic of having a sufficient quantity of testimony, or perhaps of obedience, to be admitted into the celestial kingdom.

But other interpretations are floating around, and they better fit my view of heaven now. Instead of the five left-out virgins being foolish because they didn’t have any oil, they were foolish because they thought the bridegroom cared how much oil they had. Or to put it better, here’s Nadia Bolz-Weber:

They were foolish because they listened when voices other than God’s tried to tell them who they were. They listened to those whispering voices telling them that they can only approach the groom if they have already met all their own needs first…

The foolish bridesmaids weren’t foolish because they didn’t bring back-up oil, they were foolish because instead of trusting that the light of Christ was enough to shine the way, they wasted all that time and energy and money trying to get their own because someone shamed them into thinking they could never approach the Lord with their lack.

This reading of the parable makes the bridegroom, representing Jesus Christ, into a much different character—and one much more in line with the Jesus of the New Testament (and the Book of Mormon). Rob Bell adds this:

Could God say to someone truly humbled, broken, and desperate for reconciliation, “Sorry, too late”? Many have refused to accept the scenario in which somebody is pounding on the door, apologizing, repenting, and asking God to be let in, only to hear God say through the keyhole: “Door’s locked. Sorry. If you had been here earlier, I could have done something. But now, it’s too late.”⁴

Do you see how different this looks through the different lens? The gospel becomes an entirely different pursuit, a different journey, when the Savior’s invitation to us holds strong regardless of how much oil we have. I don’t think God is going to lock the door on us. I don’t believe heaven has gates.⁵

For a lot of us, the ultimate concern we had growing up isn’t something we chose. It was taught, explicitly or implicitly, by those who raised us. We learned it in Primary and youth classes. Maybe we saw a loving God modeled by parents who loved us unconditionally, or maybe we imagined a harsh, disciplinarian God because that’s what our parents modeled for us. Maybe heaven sounded like a joyous place where we could be with our families forever; maybe heaven sounded like an unwelcoming place where we would be forced to be with our families forever.

But later in life, we get to choose these things. We learn what beliefs are deep inside us. I grew up learning a gospel of rules and retribution, where the onus is on each of us to perfect ourselves as much as we can, and see if we qualify for grace to pick up the slack. But in recent years, I’ve stopped picturing a heaven with few people and locked gates, and instead seen a heaven where our Heavenly Parents want all of us to be there.

That has made all the difference for me. We won’t know what heaven looks like until we get there. But I know what I’m preparing for now.

1. The few physical details we have are probably symbolic. In Revelation, John describes streets of gold, walls decorated with precious stones, and God sitting on a throne. Joseph Smith’s vision of the celestial kingdom is similar; there’s a beautiful gate to enter, a blazing throne, and streets of gold. But this can’t be literal. With all the glory and infinite-ness of God and the heavens, it seems unlikely that the streets there are made of a metal that can be gaudy on earth. Or that there are even streets, in the same sense.

2. See Tillich, Paul, Dynamics of Faith (HarperOne, 2009).

3. Please check out Episode 140 of At Last She Said It, which you will discover I am drawing from generously here.

4. Bell, Rob, Love Wins (HarperOne, 2012), 108.

5. You may point out that the five unwise virgins were still left out, at the end. The idea here is not that they were excluded by the bridegroom, but that they chose to not be there when he had invited them to be.

I’ve heard people speculate that the numbers matter here; for instance, I’ve heard that half of the virgins didn’t have oil, representing roughly half of members of the Church that aren’t active. You can interpret parables however you want—that’s the point of parables—but that’s a little finger-pointy for me. I don’t take this to mean that a full 50% of humankind won’t return to God’s presence in this life; I don’t think a loving God would create a plan that allows that to happen.