THE VAST majority of people in our world has retained some kind of conviction, however shadowy, in the immortality of the soul. “Well, wherever he is now, I’m sure he’s happy,” people might say at a funeral (or a “celebration of life”). This conviction is the legacy of centuries of a Christian (i.e., Catholic) social order that no longer exists. Very few Westerners believe in reincarnation or total oblivion.

However, most also believe that it is only just and fair that someone who is basically decent should be happy in the afterlife. By basically decent, I mean someone who fulfills many duties to family and friends, never breaks the law, has defects but is good-hearted and likeable. It greatly offends modern sensibilities to suggest that this kind of niceness and decency is not necessarily rewarded by God with eternal happiness or that the person could even be punished.

The problem with the presumption that everyone nice goes to heaven is, it’s not what God has revealed about eternity. It substitutes human judgment for divine reason.

It also doesn’t make sense.

Heaven is not earth. It is a supernatural state. In order to pass from the natural into the supernatural sphere, we must acquire supernatural virtues, which are more akin to goodness directed toward God than to humans. In order to qualify for the Olympic Games, to use one analogy, one must meet certain athletic qualifications. The belief that someone can get to Heaven because they have been generally decent and good is similar to the belief that someone who is a great software engineer should be able to compete in the decathlon.

To take another analogy, in order to live on Mars, we need oxygen. In order to live in heaven, we need spiritual oxygen, which is a supernatural gift — a gift from God we can refuse or accept — and involves not just works but faith.

As Thomas Nelson writes in his introduction to Liberalism Is a Sin, by Fr. Felix Sarda Y Salvany:

Heaven … is a supernatural state, an end or objective above man and beyond his ability to again, a goal which man on his own cannot achieve. It is the presence of God. It is the eternal vision of God and an eternal sharing in the life of God Himself. But this is not something within the nature of man to achieve or possess. It is rather a special, supernatural gift from God, an unwarranted (on man’s part), gratuitous GIFT OF GOD. We do not deserve it. We can only attain it but the special, supernatural assistance which God has given us through the knowledge of the “faith of God” (Rom. 3:3) and the help of the Sacraments of the Catholic Church, the divinely revealed religion. These Sacraments were given by Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, to the Church and are supernatural means to give us supernatural assistance to save our souls and attain Heaven, a supernatural end.

The sad fact is, though we should never presume that anyone we meet or know will meet this end — or the fate of the dead, whose final interior state we cannot know, we can be pretty sure that many “good people” are in hell. Unfortunately, when these common sense points are made the person making them may be accused of somehow relishing the idea that good people are damned. This is a monstrous accusation. It is a form of rhetorical aggression, meant to deflect attention away from the meat of the matter.

As Frank Sheed wrote in his book Theology and Sanity:

The gulf between non-living and living is not so great as the gulf between natural life and supernatural. The purpose of this supernatural life … is that in Heaven we may see God direct. But we do not wait until then to receive the supernatural life. It is given to man in this life. Everything else is incidental, on the fringe, of no permanent importance. When we come to die we are judged by the answer to one question — whether we have the supernatural life in our soul. If we have, then go to Heaven we shall surely go, for the supernatural life is the power to live the life of Heaven. If we have not, then we cannot possibly go to Heaven, for we could not live there when we got there. Grasp clearly that the supernatural life, which we call also sanctifying grace, is not simply a passport to Heave: it is the power to live in Heaven.

(Fulton Sheed, Theology and Sanity; Sheed and Ward, New York, 1946; p.151)

Sheed’s book explains in detail why good people don’t always go to heaven.

Please follow and like us: