Meeting in Heaven: Modernising the Christian Afterlife, 1600–2000 by Bernhard Lang (review)

This book can be read as a supplement to Bernhard Lang and Colleen McDannell’s much valued Heaven: A History (London, 1988). The key to that work, as to this one, is the distinction between anthropocentric and theocentric notions of life everlasting, the latter concentrated primarily or even exclusively on the vision of God, the former on views of life after death as encompassing communality—especially the reunion of families, love, and work—in an environment not radically different from that in which we now live.

Twentieth-century theology may be characterized by an increasing diffidence about elaborating upon the nature of life after death. Until the end of the seventeenth century, it was dominated by a theology of the afterlife focused on the beatific vision and the worship of God. Lang’s significant contribution to the history of the afterlife both in this work and in his previous one is to draw attention to the development within Western religious thought since 1600, but especially in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both at the “popular” and “elite” (although occasionally esoteric) levels, of an afterlife typified by the progress and development of the individual, and by the re-union in heaven of persons with their loved ones.

This work comprises a series of essays around the theme of the modern anthropocentric heaven published previously in whole or in part. These include a somewhat inchoate essay on the modernization of life after death from 1644 to 1791, an enjoyably provocative reading of the second part of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as suggesting an anthropocentric heaven with an interesting reading of William Blake’s engraving of The Marriage of a Family in Heaven as influenced by it, an essay on opposition to the modern heaven in Spanish writing, and an exploration of American heavens via cemeteries from 1740 to 1850.

However, the focus of the book is the two essays on the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), the first giving a most useful summary of his cosmology, including his elaborate angelology and his views on heaven and hell; the second on the European reception of Swedenborg with particular reference to John Wesley, Robert Hindmarsh, and Robert Hartley (his first English translator). These are important reminders of an eighteenth-century theologian sufficiently important in his own time to be ridiculed by Immanuel Kant.

Lang recognizes that his modern idea of heaven has precursors to Swedenborg, however differently nuanced, in the history of Christianity, beginning with Cyprian’s treatise On Mortality (AD 252/53) and with Origen (c. AD 185–254). But in Heaven: A History, Lang and McDannell claimed that the modern heaven surfaced in the writings of Swedenborg. It is a matter of regret that neither in that work nor in this one does Lang take the opportunity to engage in a more complete intellectual genealogy of the thought of Swedenborg nor, granting the claimed centrality of Swedenborg, to provide a more extensive argument of his influence on those proponents of the anthropocentric heaven who succeeded him. Nevertheless, Lang’s reprising of the modern heaven in this work continues as a valuable reminder of a view of the afterlife that—although no longer, if ever especially, influential in elite theological circles—continues still to dominate popular Western views of immortality.