"Our sacred books give us some account of the object [of our transtemporal desire]. It is, of course, a symbolic account. Heaven is, by definition, outside our experience, but all intelligible descriptions must be of things within our experience... heaven is not really full of jewelry any more than it is really the beauty of nature, or a fine piece of music. The difference is that the scriptural imagery has authority. It comes to us from writers who were closer to God than we, and it has stood the test of Christian experience down the centuries. The natural appeal of this authoritative imagery is to me, at first, very small. At first sight it chills, rather than awakens, my desire. And that is just what I ought to expect. If Christianity could tell me no more of the far-off land than my own temperament led me to surmise already, then Christianity would be no higher than myself. If it has more to give, I expect it to be less immediately attractive than "my own stuff."
- C. S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory"
As a Christian I consider my broadly in the conservative camp. I hold the Bible in extremely high regard and that God's message given to us is something we can understand. I do not think that the Bible is all symbolism and full of hidden mystery knowledge (the more Gnostic approach that some take). For me, Lewis reminds me that not everything described is EXACTLY as it is and he makes the case that this is a good thing. If the object of heavenly desire is only what I can create in my own imagination then what I am getting from Christianity is no more than what I already have and the desire is limited only by my desire for what I already have in mind. But heaven is so much more. The writers of scripture under the guidance of the Holy Spirit are trying to relay information in terms we can understand. In fact, I think think it is more of something like this "Imagine a place where streets are made of gold, gates each made of a single pearl (see for example the passage in Revelation 21). Awesome right, the most precious things on Earth. Well Heaven is more than that." Here I start hearing echoes of Anselm's ontological argument for God's existence ("Now image something greater than anything else that could ever be imagined...").
The important thing is a warning against arrogance. If I believe I can think everything out then what scripture has to tell me is no more than what I can already reason out. But if I realize there are just some things that I cannot work out in my own mind, that is just something that indicates there is more out there than meets the eye. In fact, it is so fantastic that right now I can't even fully imagine what it is, so my desire to find out is inflamed even more.
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