Heaven is a Place on Earth: Why Everything You Do Matters to God
Michael E. Wittmer
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Zondervan (May 1, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0310253071
ISBN-13: 978-0310253075
Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
Buy Here: amazon.com

One of the verses I have struggled with comes at the end of 1 Corinthians 15:

“So, my dear brothers and sisters, be strong and immovable. Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless.” (v. 58)

Why the confusion? Because this is how Paul ends his argument for the reality of the resurrection. The reason our work is not useless is because Christ has risen. What does the resurrection have to do with how we go about our day-to-day lives? Our vocations, our leisure, mowing the grass- it all matters, according to Paul, but why? My two favorite books from last year spoke to this- “Surprised by Hope,” by N.T. Wright, talks of the new heavens and new earth as the Christian hope. He focuses on the eschatological realities. “Culture Making,” by Andy Crouch, talks about the reality of our creative calling to produce culture, not just critique it and ignore it, but that we should actively engage it.

Michael Wittmer’s book “Heaven is a Place on Earth: Why Everything You Do Matters to God” takes the best of these two books and puts it into one- and oddly enough it was written 4 years previous to the other two. Wittmer argues for the “tremendous dignity and value of everyday life” by “taking you from Creation to the Fall, to Redemption, and to glimpses from the book of Revelation” (book description on the back). Wittmer’s goal is to get us to view all of life through the Christian worldview. That is, to view everything through the lens of Biblical Christianity. The result is one of the best books on “the Christian life” that I have read to date. Wittmer gets it.

Introduction and Part I

The book is divided into 12 chapters in 4 parts. The first chapter, “What you see is what you get,” is a primer on what exactly a world-view is, and specifically what is the Christian world-view. The first part of the chapter serves to introduce the book as a whole, speaking, much like Wright, on the Christian hope. It is not a disembodied experience- forsaking the physical world to be with Jesus in the clouds- but life, on a renewed earth, in our physical resurrected body, with Jesus forever. It is the view that we just need to escape the world and our bodies and get to heaven that causes us to forsake the majority of our lives as being “unimportant.” If the Christian life is only about quiet times, bible reading, and other such things (important as they are!), then “[Christianity] does not address most of our lives at all” (pg. 20), and is fairly useless in helping us how to understand how to live out the majority of our lives. Wittmer gives a great illustration here, using sex and marriage. If Marriage is only about sexual intimacy, he asks, “why do the world’s most beautiful people have so much trouble staying in love?” The answer is because, though intimacy is vital to marriage, it is not all their is to it. “In the same way,” he argues, “Christians succeed when they learn to honor God in every area of life” (pg 21, emphasis mine). This introduction leads into a discussion on the concept of “world-view.” World-view, as I stated above, can be understood as “the lens through which we see the world” (21). This, along with chapter 2, are the most difficult chapters in terms of concept and terminology, because they are both fairly philosophical in nature. Wittmer handles the concepts wonderfully, however, and one of the great strengths of this book is the way in which he makes his writing so accessible. Great illustrations, clear language, and relevant explanations make this book an absolutely joy to read. After the introduction, we move into Part One: “What is this place? Creation in Genesis 1-2.”

Chapter 2, the second of the two explicitly philosophical chapters entitled “Where Lies the Great Divide?” discusses the issue of God’s transcendence by introducing the idea of ontology- the idea of being. God’s “being” is different than our “being” because our existence, and all of creation’s existence, is dependent on God’s eternal existence. Modern Christians place the division of being between matter and spirit, instead of putting the division between God and creation as a whole as it should be. This leads to the escapist attitude- the spirit is good, physical material is bad. Wittmer rightfully explains that this is not a Christian idea by a pagan one. In order to understand creation, we must rightfully understand this distinction between God and creation. This is foundational to understanding the story of creation, and God’s value judgment of it.

Chapter 3, “Where are we?” seeks to understand this value judgment of creation. Starting here is vital to understanding the rest of the story, because just as if we “miss the earlier plot development of a story and you have little chance of understanding its ending” (pg 53). To put it another way, “to the extent that we misunderstand the story of creation we will also be confused about the gospel.” The “modern” mistrust of the material world is actually a form of an ancient heresy called Gnosticism. Gnostics viewed material things as evil, and wanted to escape them at all costs, yet “this is not authentic spirituality, for true godliness will respect and appreciate all the works of God, including the physical world that he has made” (pg 56). So how should we view creation? Genesis 1 points us to the correct answer- God calls his creation good no less than 7 times in the opening chapter of the Bible. The problem, Wittmer says, is “not this earth, but our sin” and so “the solution to remain engaged in the world, leading fully human lives as we follow the perfect human, Jesus Christ, who came to this world to cross out our sin and save the planet.” But how, then, do we make sense of all the verses that seem to speak about the world in a negative sense? “We must continually ask ourselves whether the author is speaking ontologically [see above] or ethically” (pg 65). Wittmer looks at those verses which speak of the world in a negative manner, and shows that the authors usually follow this up by speaking against sins- they are using “world” here in an ethical sense meaning the world system, not the creation itself. The conclusion? “So rather than run from creation, we will run from sin as we stay plugged into creation” (pg 65). We cannot run away from the reality, and global scope, of the Fall (which will be discussed later), but we must realize that we can “never take our sin more seriously than we take the goodness of God’s creation” because “God’s actions always outweigh our own” (pg 60). We cannot undermine God. The result? “No one should enjoy the outdoors as much as a Christian…. no one should enjoy a good book, painting, or symphony like a Christian” (pg 66). Why? Because these things come from God, his creation, and his giving us of his attributes.

Having discussed where we are, Wittmer moves to “Who we Are” in chapter 4 looking at Genesis 1-2. We were made for this creation- ontologically, but because of the fall, we don’t belong here ethically. This chapter focuses on what it means to be made “in the image of God.” It is this which separates us from the rest of creation. The fall caused us to lose part, but not all of, this image. So how should we understand what it means to be made in the image of God, and what does it mean that we have lost part of it? Again, the ontological/ethical distinction is vital here. The part that remains is ontological, it’s the “distinctively godlike capacities on people, such as our higher intellect, free will, conscious, and ability for logic and language” (pg 80-81). The part that is lost is ethical – “how we use our capacities” just mentioned. This still hasn’t told us what it means to be “in the image of God.” In order to understand this, Wittmer looks to Genesis 1:27-28, which says:

“So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.”

This presents us with the “three-fold” image of God:

(pg 81)

It is these three categories, God, Relationships, and Creation, that Wittmer seeks to develop in Part Two, “Why Are We Here?” which takes up chapters 5 – 8. We will take up Part Two in the next post.