# Heaven

Heaven as scripture’s cosmic tent—from Hebrew firmament to divine dwelling—where theology meets earth and God’s will descends to transform humanity’s world.

[Image: Genesis describes the firmament as “Heaven,” the lofty vault where celestial luminaries are set (Genesis 1:1, 8).]

Heaven, in its first scriptural sense, is the sky: the lofty vault above the earth, where birds fly and the lights of day and night are set. The Hebrew *shamayim*, plural in form and traced to a root meaning “to be lofty,” stands beside the earth in the Bible’s opening line, and on the second day “God called the firmament Heaven” (Genesis 1:1, 8). The firmament, *raqia’*, derives from *raqa’*, “to beat out,” the verb used when the tabernacle’s artisans “did beat the gold into thin plates.” The Greek *ouranos* likewise names the vaulted sky before it names the dwelling of God. Popular piety has since relocated heaven to an immaterial elsewhere entered at death, whereas scripture enlarges the word to God’s abode while keeping it fastened to the earth.

## The Firmament as a Tent

The Psalmist appears to divide the cosmos between its proprietors: “The heaven, even the heavens, are the Lord’s: but the earth hath he given to the children of men” (Psalm 115:16). Isaiah, however, pictures them as a dwelling pitched over the human world, for the Lord “stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.” Exodus narrates the tabernacle’s completion in the language of the creation week, as students of the temple have often remarked, making the sanctuary a small cosmos. Hebrew strengthens the correspondence, since the firmament takes its name from the verb that beats out the sanctuary’s gold. In this light, heaven is God’s tent spread over the earth, and the tabernacle is that tent brought down into the camp.

The Savior taught his disciples to pray for such a descent: “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). The petition presumes that heaven is where God’s will is already done and asks that its order extend to the ground beneath the disciples’ feet. The Anglican scholar N. T. Wright has called the familiar picture of souls departing to a distant heaven a “distortion and serious diminution of Christian hope,” observing that the Bible closes with “the new heavens and the new earth joined together.” Restoration theology presses further still, describing with unusual concreteness both the population of heaven and the world on which it dwells.

## A Society of Embodied Persons

Joseph Smith taught in 1843 that when the Savior appears, the Saints “shall see that he is a man like ourselves,” and that “that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory” (D&C 130:1-2). Terryl L. Givens describes the Restoration’s heaven as “constituted really out of a set of exalted relationships,” which are familial but “also extend to friends.” Lincoln Cannon characterizes the same heaven as embodied, material, and social, and intended for the living, so that the word ceases to serve as a euphemism for death. The families and friendships of mortality are carried forward into glory, and their present sociality becomes the pattern of the heavenly one.

The same revelation places that society on a world. The angels “reside in the presence of God, on a globe like a sea of glass and fire,” God’s dwelling “is a great Urim and Thummim,” and “this earth, in its sanctified and immortal state, will be made like unto crystal and will be a Urim and Thummim to the inhabitants who dwell thereon” (D&C 130:7-9). Because the Urim and Thummim served as a visionary aid, the celestial earth becomes a world through which its inhabitants perceive all things, and the revelation adds that “this earth will be Christ’s.” The tenth Article of Faith expects the earth to receive its paradisiacal glory. Cannon states the doctrine plainly: “Heaven is the future of the Earth.”

## Zion Taken Up and Returned

Enoch “beheld, and lo, Zion, in process of time, was taken up into heaven,” and the Lord promised that when a New Jerusalem is gathered on the earth, “Then shalt thou and all thy city meet them there, and we will receive them into our bosom … And there shall be mine abode” (Moses 7:21, 63-64). The two cities, the passage continues, will fall upon one another’s necks. John’s Apocalypse completes the movement: he saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” the holy city “coming down from God out of heaven,” and heard that “the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them” (Revelation 21:1-3). Sky, tabernacle, and city are thus one dwelling, drawn progressively down to earth.

Enoch’s people were called Zion because they were of one heart and one mind and had no poor among them, so the city was a society on earth before heaven received it. Cannon draws the present implication: “Heaven is something we must make.” The Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation anticipates the “renewal of this world, and the discovery and creation of worlds without end,” and Cannon’s New God Argument infers that a compassionate superhuman civilization probably created our world. Gregory L. Smith objects in the *Interpreter* that “God did not need to await human technical mastery” to bring about the resurrection. Moses 7 accommodates the objection, reserving the glory to God while leaving to the people the building of the city that God receives.

## Engineered Paradises

The roboticist Hans Moravec imagined a mind transferred, neuron by neuron, from a brain into a machine, and the scholar of religion Robert M. Geraci has argued that such hopes for uploading recapitulate the apocalyptic heavens of Judaism and Christianity in computational form. Wright quotes the physicist and priest John Polkinghorne, for whom “God will download our software onto his hardware until the time he gives us new hardware,” an image that still ends in a body. 

Scripture’s heaven begins as the sky stretched over this earth and ends with the tabernacle of God among embodied people on a sanctified world. A heaven worthy of Mormon transhumanist labor would carry bodies, neighbors, and the earth itself into that glory, held in common by a Zion with no poor among them.

*See also*: [Celestial](/topical-guide/celestial), [Celestial Kingdom](/topical-guide/celestial-kingdom), [Degrees of Glory](/topical-guide/degrees-of-glory), [Exaltation](/topical-guide/exaltation), [Glory](/topical-guide/glory), [Hell](/topical-guide/hell), [Holy Ghost](/topical-guide/holy-ghost), [Immortality](/topical-guide/immortality), [Liberty](/topical-guide/liberty), [Mercy](/topical-guide/mercy), [Paradise](/topical-guide/paradise), [Peace](/topical-guide/peace), [Prayer](/topical-guide/prayer), [Quantum Archaeology](/quantum-archaeology), [Resurrection](/topical-guide/resurrection), [Soul](/topical-guide/soul), [Theosis](/topical-guide/theosis)