No Courtroom in Heaven

Then there are those who think that confession was never appointed to be made here — not in this setting of earth, not during this present span of life, not in front of men who share the nature we all share. What a notion that is. It runs against the whole order of things as we actually meet it: in these lands, in this life, under human authorities. [a]

No doubt it works like this. Once the souls have left their bodies and begin to be put on trial floor by floor up through the heavens — examined about the pledge under which they came to Jesus, and questioned about the heretics’ hidden mysteries — then they will have to make their confession before the real powers and the real men: Valentinus’s Teleti, that is, and his Abascanti, and his Acineti.

For even the Demiurge himself, they say, did not think uniformly well of the men of our world. He counted them a drop from a bucket, and dust from the threshing floor, and spittle, and locusts, and set them on a level with the beasts. Yes, that is written. But it does not follow that there is some other kind of man besides us — a kind that, on their showing, has managed to take on both the marks of our race and a property all its own without spoiling the comparison between the two. Even if the life was tainted, so that being condemned to contempt it could be likened to contemptible things, the nature was not thereby taken away, as though there were another nature going under its name. The nature is preserved; it is the life that blushes. And Christ knows no men other than the ones he is speaking of when he says, “Who do men say that I am?” and “As you would have men do to you, do the same to them.” Ask yourself whether the race he has kept in being is not exactly this one: the race he looks to for testimony about himself, and the race made up of the people he tells to deal justly with one another.

But if I pressed for a description of these men in heaven, Aratus would more readily sketch me Perseus and Cepheus, Erigone and Ariadne, among the constellations. And what stopped the Lord from laying it down plainly that men’s confession likewise has to be made where he plainly announced his own would be made? He could have put it: “Whoever confesses in me before men in heaven, I too will confess in him before my Father who is in heaven.” He ought to have saved me from this mistake about confessing on earth — a mistake he would not have wanted me to fall into, if the confession he commanded was in heaven. For I knew of no men but the ones who live on the earth; up to that point man had not so much as been sighted in heaven.

And how believable is the rest of it? That after death I am raised to heavenly places and only then put to the test up there — where I would never have been carried unless I had already passed the test; that I am tried up there over a command I could not reach the place to obey, but only to be let in. Heaven lies open to the Christian before the road to it does. There is no road to heaven except for the man to whom heaven lies open, and the man who gets there will go in.

What powers on guard at the gate are these you tell me about, in the manner of Roman superstition, with a certain Carnus, and Forculus, and Limentinus? What powers do you post along the railings? If you have ever read in David, “Lift up your gates, you princes, and let the everlasting gates be lifted up, and the King of glory will come in”; and if you have also heard from Amos, “He who builds his way of ascent up to the heavens, and is such as to pour out his abundance of waters over the earth” — then know this: that way of ascent was afterward levelled flat by the footsteps of the Lord, and an entrance was afterward opened by the power of Christ, and no delay and no inquiry will meet Christians at the threshold. There they are not to be sorted out from one another but acknowledged, not put to the question but taken in. And if you think heaven is still shut, remember that the Lord left the keys of it down here, to Peter and through him to the church — and everyone who has been put to the question here, and has made his confession, will carry them with him.

But the devil insists loudly that we have to confess up there, so as to talk us into denying down here. Fine credentials I shall be sending on ahead of me! Fine keys I shall be carrying — my fear of those who kill only the body and can do nothing to the soul. It will do me great credit to have ignored this command. I shall make a good showing in heavenly places, having failed to make one on earth. I shall hold out against the greater powers, having given way to the lesser. I shall deserve to be let in at last, having been shut out now.

One more remark suggests itself: if it is in heaven that men have to confess, it is there too that they have to deny. Where the one is, both are; contraries always keep company. So persecution as well will have to be carried on in heaven, since persecution is the occasion of confession or denial.

Why hold back, then, you utterly shameless heretic? Move the whole apparatus for terrifying Christians up into the world above. Above all, put the hatred of the name there — there, where Christ rules at the Father’s right hand. Will you plant up there the Jewish synagogues too, those wellsprings of persecution, before which the apostles took their floggings? And the pagan crowds with a circus of their own, no doubt, where they all take up the shout: “How long are we to put up with the third race?” You are bound to produce in the same place, besides, our brothers, fathers, children, mothers-in-law, daughters-in-law and members of our households, whose appointed part it is to hand us over; and kings and governors and armed authorities, before whom the case has to be fought out.

There will certainly be a prison in heaven as well — either cut off from the sun’s rays, or else full of a light nobody thanks it for — and fetters made out of the celestial zones, perhaps, and, for a rack, the very axle that spins the heavens round. Then, if a Christian is to be stoned, hailstorms are close by; if burned, thunderbolts are on hand; if butchered, Orion with his weapons will do the work; if finished off by wild beasts, the north will send out its bears, and the Zodiac its bulls and its lions. And whoever endures these assaults to the end, that man will be saved. Will there be, then, in heaven, an end, and suffering, and a killing, and a first confession? And where will the flesh come from for all this? Where is the body — the only thing men are able to kill?

It is unerring reason that has told us to set these things out even in a joking way. And nobody will knock aside the bar we have put up in this objection: he cannot avoid having to move the whole array of persecution’s machinery — everything that has been provided for handling this business — to the place where he has set up the court in which confession is to be made. Confession is drawn out by persecution, and persecution comes to its end in confession. So there is bound to be present alongside them, at the same time, the machinery that settles the way in and the way out — that is, the beginning and the end.

But the hatred of the name is here; persecution breaks out here; betrayal produces men here; interrogation applies force here; torture rages here; and confession or denial finishes this whole procedure on the earth. So: if the other things are here, confession is not somewhere else; and if confession is somewhere else, then the other things are not here either. The other things are certainly not somewhere else. Therefore confession is not in heaven either.

Or if they insist that the heavenly examination and confession work in some other way, then they will certainly also have to invent a procedure of their own, of a wholly different kind, set against the method the Scriptures point to. And we shall be able to say: let them look to it — provided the earthly procedure of examination and confession keeps faith with itself, the procedure whose source is persecution and whose charge is disturbance of public order; and provided we must believe exactly as it is written, and understand exactly as it is spoken.

Here on earth I go through the whole business, and the Lord himself assigns me no other quarter of the world for it. For what does he add, once he has finished with confession and denial? “Do not think I have come to send peace on the earth, but a sword” — on the earth, beyond question. “For I have come to set a man against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law. And a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.” And so it comes about that brother hands brother over to death, and father his son, and children rise up against their parents and have them put to death. And the one who endures to the end — let that man be saved. So this whole procedure that belongs to the Lord’s sword, which has been sent not to heaven but to earth, puts confession there too, on the earth: a confession that by enduring to the end is to come out in the suffering of death.

In the same way, then, we hold that the rest of what he announced also has to do with the state of martyrdom. “Whoever,” Jesus says, “will value his own life more than me is not worthy of me” — that is, whoever would rather live by denying me than die by confessing me. And: “Whoever finds his life will lose it; but whoever loses it for my sake will find it.” So the man who does find it is the one who denies in order to win his life — and the man who thinks he wins it by denying will lose it in hell. The man who is killed for confessing, on the other hand, loses it for the present, but he is also going to find it for everlasting life. Governors themselves, in fact, when they press a man to deny, say, “Save your life,” and “Don’t throw your life away.” How else would Christ speak, except to match what the Christian was actually going to face? [p]

When he forbids worrying beforehand about what answer to give at a judgment seat, he is getting his own servants ready for what lay ahead of them, and giving them the assurance that the Holy Spirit will answer through them. When he wants a brother visited in prison, he is ordering that men who are about to make their confession be looked after. And he is easing their sufferings when he declares that God will avenge his own chosen ones. In the parable, too, of the word withering after the green blade had come up, the picture he is drawing has to do with the scorching heat of persecution.

If these announcements are not to be understood as they are made, then beyond doubt they mean something other than they sound like, and there is one thing in the words and another in what the words mean — as happens with allegories, with parables, with riddles. So whatever wind of argument these scorpions may catch in their sails, however subtly they come at us, there is now a single line of defense: an appeal to the facts themselves — do they happen as the Scriptures represent that they would? For the Scriptures will mean something else only if the very thing they seem to mean is not found in the actual facts. What is written has to come to pass. And what is written will have come to pass, provided that something different has not.

But look: we are hated by everyone for the sake of the name, just as it is written; we are handed over by our own closest relatives too, just as it is written; and we are brought before magistrates, and examined, and tortured, and we make our confession, and we are killed without mercy, just as it is written. This is what the Lord appointed. If he appointed these events to be otherwise, why do they not come about otherwise than he appointed — that is, as he appointed? And in fact they do not come about otherwise than he appointed. Therefore, as they come about, so he appointed; and as he appointed, so they come about. They would never have been allowed to happen otherwise than he appointed, and for his part he would never have appointed them otherwise than he wanted them to happen.

So these passages of Scripture will not mean anything other than what we recognize in the actual facts. Or else — if the events that were announced are not yet taking place, how is it that events are taking place which were never announced? Because the events now taking place have not been announced, if the ones that were announced are different and not these. Well then: since the very occurrences that people believe were put in words with some other meaning are the ones met with in real life, what would it come to if they were found to have happened in some other way than the way they were revealed?

But that is what a wayward faith does: refuse to believe what has been shown, and take for true what has not been shown. And here is one more objection I will put to that waywardness. If these events, which happen just as it is written, are not the very ones that were announced, then the other events — the ones supposedly meant — ought not to happen as it is written either. Otherwise they too, following the example of these, run the risk of being ruled out, since there is one thing in the words and another in the facts; and what is left is that even the events which were announced go unrecognized when they occur, if they were announced otherwise than they have to occur. And how will events be believed to have come to pass which will not have been announced in the way they come to pass? So heretics, by not believing what was announced in the way it has been shown to have happened, end up believing what was never announced at all.