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Dane Ortlund, Finally Home: The Christian Hope of Heaven (Crossway, October 2026)
Writing about heaven is different from writing about other Christian doctrines. Some books on the new heaven and new earth are so imaginative and speculative that they become untethered from biblical reality. Others are not imaginative enough; they make lots of accurate statements but lack the fusion of poetry, consolation, metaphor, wonder, and joy that characterize the apostles and prophets. Dane Ortland’s new book, Finally Home, gets the balance just right more than any other modern book I have read on the topic. It is clear, solid, robust, and orthodox, but it is also soaring, evocative, comforting, and beautiful. It will be my go-to book to recommend on heaven from now on.
Much of the ground covered is what you would expect. Death, the intermediate state, the resurrection of the body, righting of wrongs, the renewal of creation, and the beatific vision are all here, described with clarity and presented with delight. Ortlund has not just read, but pondered and internalized, the great works of Augustine, Dante, Milton, the Puritans, and C. S. Lewis on this subject, and it shows. A pastoral care and an evangelistic warmth to his writing fire the heart, and he has an admirable simplicity to his overall framework.
There are some wonderful surprises as well. I did not expect the book to start with a chapter on how short our life is. Nor was I expecting a list of the careers that would (and would not) continue in the resurrection, or a chapter on how we will judge angels. I had never noticed the prominence of glory in Romans or thought about the new creation in terms of the calming of the wind and the waves. These are just some of the rich insights that are sprinkled throughout this marvelous book. Highly recommend.
Michael Zigarelli, Evidence for Heaven: Near-Death Experiences and the Mounting Case for the Afterlife (Baker Books, 2026)
This short book presents three claims of escalating significance. Each of them is reflected in the title and subtitle. The simplest and most defensible claim is that near-death experiences (NDEs) are much more common than many of us realize: They are experienced in all sorts of different cultures and are increasingly the subject of serious academic research.
The next claim is a bit stronger, namely that these experiences are so widely attested. Despite the wide range of cultures from which they come, NDEs have so many overlapping features—the departure of the soul from the body, heightened senses, overwhelming love, brilliant light, a journey through a tunnel, gaining special knowledge, a transformed life afterward—that they represent a growing body of evidence for the afterlife, in which the soul continues after the death of the body. The third claim, as per the title, is that they actually represent evidence for the Christian doctrine of heaven, on the basis that they witness to a place of perfect peace, light, love, and joy after death, and in some cases a being from whom these things emanate.
Readers may appraise these three arguments differently. The first is relatively uncontroversial, although the widespread reality of NDEs is worth noting in light of the famous examples of overhyped and even fraudulent testimony. The second is obviously more contentious. Some will prefer materialist, naturalist interpretations of these phenomena (REM intrusion, hallucinations, and such), while others will see them as more compatible with spiritual explanations and another reason to reject the idea that the mind and the brain are identical.
But what of the idea that NDEs are evidence for “heaven”? At this point, ironically, the universality of the experiences becomes a problem. Given that people from all kinds of cultures and religions have such similar encounters, it seems hard to conclude that there is anything specifically Christian about them. So I must admit that when Zigarelli claimed that “the NDE evidence invites a fresh conversation about God’s grace, the scope of salvation, and how to interpret Jesus’s teaching about the narrow gate,” he lost me.
Dante Alighieri, Paradiso (Penguin Classics, 2008)
Nobody has written about heaven like Dante. The Paradiso is the third and final part of his Divine Comedy (1308–1321), following the Inferno and the Purgatorio, and it describes Dante’s ascent through the heavens into the presence of God. For the most part, the Paradiso is not providing a factual description of heaven (like Ortlund), let alone an evidential defense of it (like Zigarelli); it is an allegorical poem, full of virtues and saints, contemplation and purification, planets and concentric circles.
But it culminates in an astonishing vision of light, love, joy, and God himself, which is surely the greatest description of these realities outside of Scripture. (I may just be saying this because I first read it while on holiday in Florence, but I suspect Dante’s influence speaks for itself.)
Paradoxically, the poetry is at its best when describing the indescribable: “So many streams of happiness flow down / Into my mind that it grows self-delighting / At being able to bear it and not drown.” Or, “I saw, above a thousand thousand lights / one Sun that lit them all, as our own sun / lights all the bodies we see in Heaven’s heights / And through that living light I saw revealed / the Radiant Substance, blazing forth so bright / my vision dazzled and my senses reeled.”
Or the famous conclusion: “Here my powers rest from their high fantasy / but already I could feel my being turned— / instinct and intellect balanced equally / as in a wheel whose motion nothing jars— / as by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.” Glorious.
Andrew Wilson is teaching pastor at King’s Church London and author of Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. Follow him on Twitter @AJWTheology.
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