No Eye Has Seen

"No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him," Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:9.  There are actually great ironies in this, including how the Bible later goes into fairly specific details about what New Jerusalem looks like.  John has a vision that concludes with a summary of what New Jerusalem looks like with exact measurements near the end of Revelation.  Moreover, out of all the logically possible aspects of a blissful afterlife that someone could think of, either some of them would in part be incorporated into the Biblical heaven or it would be possible to think of these things even though one does not know if they are part of the Christian afterlife.

After all, it is of course the case that some things about any possible afterlife are knowable, such as that it would would have to be consistent with logical axioms and that, if the Biblical afterlife exists, that heaven is a distinctly physical place (the description of the city of New Jerusalem alone affirms this).  The scope, the intensity, and the penetrating, soothing nature of such an afterlife, however, would be so different than human life on Earth that it would be, as Paul says, as if in our sensory lives we are but looking through a glass dimly (1 Corinthians 13:12).  In this sense, the paradise of God could of course be alien and yet alluring to humans, very similar to this life in some ways (and governed by the logical necessities that all things must be consistent with either way) while still being so far removed from our experiences in other ways that it is easy to have never really thought about all of its splendor.

Since some authors of the New Testament who claim to have seen this eternal city or state--such as John specifically--would have seen some aspects of heaven if the Bible is true, by the time the last Biblical book was penned, it would also literally no longer be the case that "no eye has seen" what God has in store for those who choose him unless their visions were illusions.  There is simply no way that absolutely nothing about heaven has been perceived or understood by some people by the time the Bible was fully written if the Bible is true, although it would have been true at the time of writing.  Even for such people as John, to glimpse the glory of a sinless, eternal dwelling place would probably only inspire a longing to "depart and be with Christ," which Paul calls "better by far" than even the heights of this life (Philippians 1:23).

The Biblical heaven, as I like to emphasize, is not an empty space, devoid of matter, where consciousnesses forever live without bodies, nor is it some endless mass worship service.  It is a city where humans are free to go about to and from its gates to engage with God, other people, a wondrous universe that even more directly evidences God's power than this one (the illumination is said to literally come from God himself and not from a sun in Revelation 22:5), and every philosophical truth, including the necessary truths of reason that Christianity is consistent with and which could not have been any other way, unlike scientific laws, moral obligations, or certain other theological matters.  When many Christians talk about New Jerusalem, they are clearly not describing something that resembles even the relatively few details provided in Revelation 21-22!

Without actually clarifying much about what eternal life in God's paradise will be like, 1 Corinthians 2:9 itself suggests far greater excitements, joys, and contentment than anything on Earth can inspire.  The verse presents its (in some ways) foreign kinds of pleasure and bliss as far eclipsing the present life.  As Paul writes when seemingly speaking of eternal life in New Jerusalem, it will be as if someone who has only been looking at a marred, obscured reflection in a mirror suddenly can "see face to face" (again, 1 Corinthians 13:12).  The Biblical heaven not only is logically possible and is part of the Christian worldview that has much evidence pointing towards it, but it is also perhaps the best example in all philosophical systems of a positive "eldritch" thing: it is so very different from Earth that is is in one sense distinctly alien and yet it is only experienced in a continuation of this life where one is free from the effects of sin.