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The arguments presented in the book are briefly summarized, pointing out that what has been defended is a Christian vision of reality (focusing on heaven) that is profoundly more hopeful than that of secular accounts, whether modern or postmodern. The conclusion is that we profoundly need to recover the hope (belief) of heaven in order to recover our very humanity.

Being evil by nature we ought nevertheless to become good; and so we can. Kant's philosophy is supposed to give us grounds for hope in an “afterlife”, when we can be good, or at least better, and when happiness will be proportioned to virtue as the highest good. Yet it remains unclear how to understand the temporal relation of this present, sensible life and the afterlife. Some of Kant's reflections suggest that heaven and hell may belong to the intelligible world we already occupy. Because the world would have been created for a moral purpose, and because the highest good is a just reward, we have rational grounds for hope in an afterlife.

This chapter analyzes two distinct symbolic understandings of the Jerusalem temple and its rituals. It finds evidence for a belief in the temple as representing the cosmos in Josephus, Philo and rabbinic literature, and evidence for a belief that the earthly temple represents a heavenly sanctuary in the Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, and other rabbinic sources. It attempts to identify one or another of these two symbolic understandings as the precursor of the other are rejected.

This chapter defends another interpretation of heaven that is neither transcendent nor anthropocentric: it argues that heaven is necessarily interrelated in a “heaven–earth–humanity” triad. It calls into question Jiang's view that there is one transcendent heaven occupying a higher position that generates a differentiated heaven. The notion of a transcendent heaven is redundant and illogical. It makes no sense to say that heaven can be both one thing that generates something else and one part of something else that is generated by it. The chapter speculates that the real reason for Jiang's metaphysical position is the need to justify an Academy that represents heaven and stands above the tricameral parliament.

This chapter explores the development of ideas of the afterlife amongt the ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Jews, including accounts of ascents to heaven. The Mesopotamian earthly paradise (“Dilmun”) and its difference from the Jewish paradise is described. The philosophical Judaism of Philo of Alexandria is outlined. There follows discussion of images of heaven in the sayings and parables of Jesus, and in particular the idea that heaven is within us. St. Paul's account of the spiritual, risen body is discussed, and St. John's account of the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem.

The mosaic of Old Peking is complete. The Italian diplomat Daniele Vare struggled with the dilemma of cultural relativism during his postings in Peking. Vare wrote novels set during the Qing and Republican eras. One day, he dreamed up a dramatic incident. A Qing official remonstrates against the emperor's willingness to issue a decree for reform. The official submits a memorial protesting the contents of the decree. He is ignored. To persuade the Son of Heaven of the sincerity of his protest, the official mortally stabs himself in the courtyard of the Hall of Supreme Harmony. The great divide between Vare and his teacher is described. As Stanley Karnow once quipped to fellow foreign devil Dick Hughes, “the Far East is a university in which no degree is ever granted”.

Lewis was interested in the medieval heavens both from an academic and an imaginative perspective. The pagan gods, to his mind, were aesthetically beautiful and also apologetically useful, and Ptolemaic astrology was deemed consonant with Christianity until at least the sixteenth century (Dante being chief among those poets who Christianized it). The seven planets Lewis regarded as spiritual symbols of permanent value, able to convey truths relating to psychology, rationality, and novitas. Lewis's Idealism and his dislike of spiritual introspection pertinent to the question of Enjoyment of these symbols. Contemplating the planets and their influences in the Chronicles of Narnia.

This chapter examines the martyrs’ rapid ascent to heaven following death and the roles that the martyrs play in the afterlife in heaven. In opposition to the ordinary dead, martyrs quickly ascend — by various routes — to heaven and participate in a number of activities similar to those of the exalted Christ. It argues that, rather than assuming that martyrs serve in a similar capacity as angels in heaven, it is possible to view the martyrs’ participation in a heavenly banquet, judgment scenes, and role as heavenly intercessor as analogous to the roles of Christ. This suggests that the question of the martyrs’ identity is more complicated than is usually assumed.

Halevi justifies his journey to himself and others in four poems. In the first poem, he reproaches himself for worldliness and urges himself to put his ideas of trust in God to the test. In the second poem, he disputes the contention that the Holy Land has lost its sacredness since the Jews were exiled by asserting that it will be the locus of resurrection of the dead and by unleashing his famous tirade against Greek philosophy. The third poem is a reply to someone who attempted to persuade him to stay in Egypt on the grounds that it, too, was the site of miracles for the Jewish people. The last poem is a long internal monologue in which he responds to friends who objected not only to his pilgrimage but to his whole turn from worldliness to piety.

Jesus's original idea, so far one can judge, was an imminent ‘kingdom of heaven’ which would transform human relationships, and was already doing so. Family was downgraded, the status of women enhanced. Paul taught salvation by faith in Christ, which made observance of any law, and all social distinctions, irrelevant to spiritual life. Christianity developed its own ritual and community, with a strong distinction between believers and unbelievers. The church was a parallel universal society, supposed to embody Christian social ideals. Early congregations elected their leaders and conferred together. But, partly because Christians based their religious knowledge primarily on intuition and mystical experience, Christians became bitterly divided. The early catholic tradition assigned authority to bishops and their councils. Christians saw the state as separate but legitimate.

A creed explains how the pursuit of a particular religious way will achieve the goals of that religion. It does that by explaining in what salvation consists (e.g., in what the blessedness of Heaven, or of Nirvana, consists), and how pursuing a certain sort of life will enable you to achieve it (e.g., because if you live such a life, you will go to Heaven or attain Nirvana). This is illustrated by showing how the different items of the Nicene creed have consequences for how we should worship and serve God and thereby mould our characters so that we would be happy in Heaven. One trusts God (and so has faith in the crucial sense) to the extent to which one acts on the assumption that by living in this way God will provide for one the goals of religion.

Someone is rational in following a certain religious way to attain a certain goal only if he believes that it is more probable that following that way will achieve that goal than that following any other way will achieve a similar goal (one that has a similar understanding of salvation and Heaven). Which way a person should follow depends both on his judgement of the relative probability of the creeds of rival religions and on his judgement of the worth of the goals which they offer; and everyone should devote much time investigating the claims of different religions and the worth of the different goals which they offer. This will include considering the relative probabilities of different claims to have a revelation, which depend both on the moral plausibility of the purported revelation and on any miraculous authentication it purports to have (for example, the Resurrection of Jesus authenticating his teaching).

The case for civil religion is developed further by exploring the relationship between Te's institution of headmanship and Tibetan ideas of sacral kingship. Historical records point to the pervasiveness of these ideas in the civil society and the mythology of Mustang, where true monarchy, as opposed to despotism, is represented as a form of democracy. The ceremony for the appointment of Te's headmen is seen as a dramatisation of the Tibetan myth of the heaven‐appointed king. The headmen are not elected by ballot, but selected as the outcome of a complex ceremony amounting to a game of chance. In other such games, the outcome is commonly understood as an expression of divine will. However, the Tepas do not attribute the result to the choice of a particular god, and the chapter argues that the divinity in question is the hypostatic form of the community of Te itself.

This chapter demonstrates how—through a complicated chain of intermediary texts—the depiction of Satan's fall through Chaos in book 2, which invokes the myth of Icarus, and the Son's successful ride in the paternal chariot of God at the end of the War in Heaven in book 6, which rewrites the story of Phaethon, both trace back to the De rerum natura of Lucretius. They counter the Roman poet's depiction of an Epicurean cosmos ordered by chance and in a constant state of falling through an infinite void—the “vast vacuity” of Chaos. The myths of these highfliers who fall are further countered in Paradise Lost by the motif of poetic flight. The shaping power of poetry itself and the epic high style counteract the specter of a universe without bound and dimension, or of the shapelessness of Death; poetry raises the poet over his fallen condition.

This chapter looks at book 3 of Paradise Lost, which sets apart an invisible God and heaven from the visible universe, divine light from sunlight. Book 3 points to a contrast between the internal illumination invoked by the blind poet and an Apollonian solar inspiration that motivates the poetry of paganism. In the episode of the Paradise of Fools, the book further criticizes—with a particular eye toward Catholic practice—the tendency of men and women to read back through analogy from God's and their own visible works to the invisible Creator, and to confuse the two. Yet, in distinguishing God's lower works from God and his heaven, Milton knows that he risks unlinking creation from Creator altogether, as do the book's alchemical philosophers, and as Satan does when he later suggests to Eve that the sun, not God, is the power source that gives life, as well as light, to the universe.

Pulling the narrative strands together, this chapter describes first the Eliots' evolving perceptions of life after death, from a literal heaven of family reunions to an ongoing mystical life of spirits who visit and counsel the living, to memories and good works that live on through subsequent generations, to the natural process of human atoms being returned to the universe to recombine in new forms and to take on new missions. More central, the chapter looks at the ways the Eliots manage the distance between the living and dead by preserving mementoes, creating memorials, writing their loved one's biographies, recording their histories on tape, and embracing the pain and struggle of separation.