The Summit Lecture Series 15: C.S. Lewis on Heaven and Hell, part 3 with Louis Markos

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A commonly held falsehood that many philosophers and authors preach is the theory of a “One Soul”. We see it in Hinduism, Buddhism, ancient Greece, in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and other transcendentalists. The concept of “The One Soul” is that when we die, we go to heaven and join one singular amorphous mass.

There are few ideas more contradictory to the Bible than that of “The One Soul”.

Our individual personalities will persist in heaven. We will be resurrected, perfected versions of ourselves. God loves and saves individual people.

Here is the heavenly mystery: In heaven, we will be one with God, but we will still be ourselves. Similar to the mystery of marriage: My wife and I are one flesh, as the scriptures say, but we’re not some creature with two heads. We’re still individuals , but we’re one.

C.S. Lewis says that in heaven, we sill all use our gifts to praise God. And we will all take equally great joy in everyone’s praise, no matter whose gift it comes from because it all stems from and pours out to Christ – our Center.

Lewis goes on to say that in heaven, there will be the “Golden Apple of Selfhood”, but we will all continually pass it from one of us to the other in complete selflessness. He compares this to a dance where we are perpetually moving, yielding, and dynamically leading in true unity and individuality at the same time.

In Lewis’ Narnia series, three of the books actually take us to heaven – or Aslan’s country. The first one, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, ends with the characters sailing closer and closer to the shores of Aslan’s country. The closer they get, the brighter the light that shines on them. The ocean transforms from salt water to fresh water, and when they drink of it, ,it makes their eyes so strong and pure, they can look directly into the ever brighter sun.

Then, in Lewis’ The Silver Chair, Aslan teaches Jill some valuable lessons in heaven. But before he sends her away to Narnia, he says to her, “You need to remember the signs… don’t think of anything else… meditate on them day and night… Because up here on my mountain, the air is pure and your mind is pure. As you drop into Narnia, the air will thicken. Be careful that id does not confuse your mind.”

Heaven, compared to earth, is pure clarity.

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