See Him as He Is: The Beatific Vision in Classical, Hedonistic Christianity

ABSTRACT: The beatific vision is not only a thoroughly biblical doctrine; it has also been the premier concern for Christians throughout the ages. In the beatific vision, all human desire for happiness finds its ultimate satiation. Therefore, the beatific vision is the chief and final desire of the Christian Hedonist, who has become convinced that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. God’s glory in us, and our satisfaction in him, will reach their ultimate fulfillment when we see him face to face.

At the heart of Christianity is a deep interest in happiness. God Most High created mankind in his image and likeness to be happy in him. Crucial for grasping this point is understanding the centrality of God’s independent aseity. He who is the eternal plentitude of life and light and love is therefore the sum and substance of all true happiness. Creaturely happiness, in the fullest sense, is therefore a begraced participation in the ceaseless self-happiness of Father, Son, and Spirit. This means that the earnest prayer of Augustine is true:

Man is one of your creatures, Lord, and his instinct is to praise you. He bears about him the mark of death, the sign of his own sin, to remind him that you thwart the proud. But still, since he is part of your creation, he wishes to praise you. The thought of you stirs him so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.¹

Throughout his Confessions, Augustine continues to pull on this thread of desire, which ties all his restless longings ultimately to God the Trinity. Even the perverse and damaging consequences of sin cannot erase the sheer force of desire. For Augustine, every desire is a road that rightly (when it is not obscured or redirected by sin) leads to rest in God. The hope of one day satiating one’s insatiable desire for happiness in the infinitely self-happy God is what we mean by the beatific vision: the blessed sight of God in heaven. This, in fact, is what makes heaven heaven.

Beholding God in Scripture

The biblical warrant for this doctrine of the beatific vision is overwhelming. Throughout the pages of holy Scripture, the hope of seeing God is held forth as the premier ambition for man. This hope is hinted at through the various theophanic encounters Old Testament characters experience,² perhaps the chief example being Moses’s encounter with Yahweh on Horeb in Exodus 33–34. There, on the mountain of God, Moses requests the incomprehensible: “Please show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18). This hope — and the promise of its eventual fulfillment — is positively named by various prophetic utterances throughout the Old Testament.³

What all these passages make clear is that the longing to see God in his glory is simultaneously good and treacherous. It is a fearful thing to lay eyes on God, especially for the fallen sinner. And yet, to do so remains humanity’s deepest God-engraved longing — a longing expressed in all sorts of metaphorical and picturesque illustrations. Old Testament motifs such as the temple, the tabernacle, the new Jerusalem, the holy mountain, Sabbath, and God’s oft-repeated promise to one day dwell among his people all serve as kindling to keep the fire of longing for the beatific vision ablaze. Apparently, God wanted his people to want to see him, even while warning them of the incommensurability between such a vision and their sinful condition.

The biblical hope of seeing God flowers to a new degree with the coming of the Word made flesh (John 1:14). As the “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), Christ is the climactic theophanic encounter wherein God reveals — and exegetes — himself in the person of the incarnate Son (John 1:1–18; 14:9; Hebrews 1:1–3). This fact was made apparent in stark fashion when Christ brought his three disciples up on the “holy mountain” (2 Peter 1:18) and was transfigured before their eyes (Matthew 17:1–13; Mark 9:2–13; Luke 9:28–36). According to Peter (and Paul), we who behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ through holy Scripture are — like Peter and James and John — able to see what Moses longed for on Mount Horeb and did not truly see until, to some degree, Mount Tabor (2 Corinthians 3:12–4:6; 2 Peter 1:16–21).⁴

Even still, while what we see by faith is the vision of God in the face of Jesus Christ, we see merely “in part.” The beatific vision is the great hope that we will one day see and know fully, even as we are seen and known by God (1 Corinthians 13:12; Revelation 22:5).

Desire, Christian Hedonism, and the Great Tradition

While the language of the beatific vision may be new for many, anyone familiar with Desiring God should hear something familiar in these reflections. For decades, Desiring God has championed what John Piper calls “Christian Hedonism,” a designation well-captured by its slogan: “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” Many a Christian (myself included) has been liberated with the soul-soaring discovery that Christians need not choose between glorifying God and seeking joy. In his marvelous wisdom, God has created the world and his creatures such that man finds his deepest joy in glorifying God — and man glorifies God most precisely through enjoying him. But while Piper may be responsible for the term Christian Hedonism, its material content and teaching is far older. Not only do its roots run deep in holy Scripture; its branches break forth throughout the ages of Christian history.

Recent studies on the beatific vision reinforce the conclusion that this doctrine — the chief and final longing of the Christian Hedonist — is not the obscure hope of a few select theologians but has rather been the central hope of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church throughout the ages.⁵ Christ’s beloved cloud of witnesses has ever said, with Moses, “Please show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18). The bride of Christ has agreed with Gregory of Nyssa that “the person who looks toward that divine and infinite Beauty glimpses something that is always being discovered as more novel and more surprising than what has already been grasped,”⁶ and therefore that “this truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him. But one must always, by looking at what he can see, rekindle his desire to see more.”⁷

With Augustine, the church has ever consoled herself with the hope that “we are to see a certain vision . . . a vision surpassing all earthly beautifulness, of gold, of silver, of groves and fields; the beautifulness of sea and air, the beautifulness of sun and moon, the beautifulness of the stars, the beautifulness of the angels: surpassing all things: because from it all things are beautiful.”⁸ She has ever prayed, with Anselm, “God of truth, I ask that I may receive so that my joy may be complete. Until then let my mind meditate on it, let my tongue speak of it, let my heart love it, let my mouth preach it. Let my soul hunger for it, let my flesh thirst for it, my whole being desire it, until I enter into the ‘joy of the Lord’ [Matthew 25:21] who is God, Three in One, blessed forever. Amen.”⁹ She has found the words of Aquinas to be true — namely, that the eschatological sight of God is “ultimate beatitude,” for “there resides in every man a natural desire to know the cause of any effect which he sees; and thence arises wonder in men. But if the intellect of the rational creature could not reach so far as to the first cause of things, the natural desire would remain void.”¹⁰

This is not to say that the church’s expressed desire for the beatific vision has been monolithic and uniform. Throughout the Great Tradition, tensions arise between various parties regarding how to understand the beatific vision.¹¹ But we must emphatically insist that the beatific vision is a mere Christian eschatological hope — central to the theological concerns of Protestantism no less than that of Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. Huldrych Zwingli, for example, described the beatific vision as the hope of seeing

God Himself in His very substance, in His nature and with all His endowments and powers and to enjoy all these not sparingly but in full measure, not with the cloying effect that generally accompanies satiety, but with that agreeable completeness which involves no surfeiting. . . . The good which we shall enjoy is infinite and the infinite cannot be exhausted; therefore no one can become surfeited with it, for it is ever new and yet the same.¹²

Likewise, Francis Turretin writes that “in this life, we see God by the light of grace and by the specular knowledge of faith; in the other life, however, by an intuitive and far more perfect beatific vision by the light of glory.”¹³ And Jonathan Edwards emphasized that, in the eschaton, the beatific vision “will be the most glorious sight that the saints will ever see with their bodily eyes. . . . There will be far more happiness and pleasure redounding to the beholders from this sight than any other. Yea the eyes of the resurrection body will be given chiefly to behold this sight.”¹⁴ If all of these theologians are correct, and the beatific vision is so central a hope for the eschaton, it must not merely be rightly situated within our reflections on the last things but should appropriately orient and animate all theological contemplation. “Blessed are the pure in heart,” our Lord said, “for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). No prospect could be more inviting for the Christian Hedonist whose loves have been properly ordered. All he does must be oriented toward this end.

All good roads of desire come to their consummate and intended destination in the sight of God. This is, of course, because in the beatific vision the creature’s deepest longing on the one hand, and God’s ultimate purpose to glorify himself on the other, are perfectly one in a single experience of beatitude. While God is not in any way enriched by the beatific vision (how could the infinitely perfect and self-happy one stand to be enriched by anyone or anything else?), he has ordained for the highest expression of his glory to be, simply, our highest enjoyment of him. God’s supreme glorification in us is found in our deepest enjoyment of him: when we come to have a share in the gratuitous and profuse love of the triune life. Where but in the beatific vision could such a singular intention be more emphatically realized? Amazingly, God’s purpose to glorify himself in us and our purpose to find our happiness in him reach their ultimate union in the beatific vision.

Becoming What We Behold

Nevertheless, we cannot experience this vision without radical transformation. In his first epistle, John tells us the transformation we will undergo into our glorified bodies — the result of which we cannot now comprehend — will occur as a direct result of our experience of the beatific vision (1 John 3:2). In other words, when the believer receives that which he most longs after — namely, the sight of God in the beatific vision — he will undergo the transformative experience of glorification he was destined for at creation: deification. At last, when the saints see and know even as they are seen and known, they will enter that everlasting Sabbath rest of saturated communion with God. They will have him for whom their soul most thirsts in undiminished and undiminishable plentitude. In that ceaseless day, the saints will be full to the brim and spilling over with God. God will be all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28).

Many Protestants have a problem with the language of deification. But this need not be the case. After all, as Carl Mosser notes, “Deification or divinization is one of the earliest entries in the Christian theological lexicon,” and “patristic writers were careful to employ a variety of formulations and analogies to safeguard the Creator-creature distinction. In an orthodox context, deification refers to the transformation believers will undergo in the resurrection when they are saturated with divine life by virtue of union with Christ, the full indwelling of the Spirit, and vision of God.”¹⁵ Mosser convincingly demonstrates that deification has consistently been a staple not only for patristic and medieval theology, but also in Reformed articulations of salvation.¹⁶ Without ever ceasing to be a creature, the saint becomes by grace what the triune God is by nature: infinitely happy.

Sons in the Son

As mentioned briefly at the start of this essay, the theological foundation for these propositions is God’s own beatitude. The God who is happiness par excellence graciously incorporates his people into his own self-happiness via adoption. The Trinitarian shape of this salvation — this gracious incorporation — is almost scandalous. Consider the logic here: God Most High, who is paternity (Father), filiation (Son), and love (Spirit), adopts us into the happy life of divine sonship by pouring his Spirit into our hearts (Galatians 4:4–7; Romans 5:5). In God the Son incarnate, we become sons who can likewise cry, in the love of the Spirit, “Abba, Father!” Christ, the God-man, feeds us with the eternal life of God by offering to us himself (John 6:25–59), and as we receive (consume!) him by faith, we are receiving by gracious and adopted sonship what is his by natural and eternal sonship: life (John 5:26).

This, then, is how we come to experience deification. United to Christ and beholding Christ, we become like what we behold (2 Corinthians 3:18) — we become sons in the Son.¹⁷ Calvin puts this matter memorably when he writes that Christ “makes us, ingrafted into his body, participants not only in all his benefits but also in himself,” so that “he grows more and more into one body with us, until he becomes completely one with us.”¹⁸ Robert Lethem is correct to note about this transformation that “this is not a union of essence — we do not cease to be human and become God or get merged into God-like ingredients in an ontological soup. This is not apotheosis.”¹⁹ Letham goes on to emphasize that we do not “lose our personal individual identities in some universal generic humanity,” nor are we “hypostatically united to the Son.” Rather, we are “united with Christ’s person,” and “since the assumed humanity of Christ participates in the eternal Son, is sanctified and glorified in him, and since we feed on the flesh and blood of Christ [by faith], we, too, in Christ are being transformed into his glorious likeness.”²⁰

Such a way of thinking should not be an utter shock. We have already noted the crucial relationship between seeing the glory of God and being transformed by what we behold (2 Corinthians 3:12–4:6; 1 John 3:2).²¹ G.K. Beale has elucidated this point well in his book We Become What We Worship. According to holy Scripture, we are transformed progressively into what we behold, either for good (when we set our doxological gaze upon God) or for ill (when we do the same for idols).²² Thus, the principle of transformation-by-gazing is inescapable. But because we are blinded by the satanic veil of sin until the Spirit gives us eyes to see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:1–6), deification is not a matter of adjusting our perspective by sheer will. What is required is a miraculous work of the Spirit.

What we need, in other words, is a series of transformations that progressively move us from death to everlasting life. It is not enough to be made as creatures who are designed to find their ultimate satisfaction in God. This is already true for all image-bearers. Rather, we must first come to experience a transformation whereby we become the kind of image-bearers who want to see God and who do see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ by faith (2 Corinthians 4:6) — and who thereby receive eternal life by grace in this life. Then we need to be graciously brought into the ongoing experience of beholding Christ by faith so as to be progressively transformed into his likeness “from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Finally, we need the transformation that marks the culmination of all prior transformative experiences. On that day, “We shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

God’s Indwelling Love

In all these transformative experiences, we must realize we are recipients of divine grace and not laborers receiving an earned wage. We cannot animate our hearts and souls to long after — and cling to — God, either in this life or in the life to come. No; always, God must impart within us the love that is himself from everlasting to everlasting. Such is the deep, glorious rationale behind a passage like 1 John 4:7–21.

For John, there is a direct correlation between the love that saints have for one another and the love they have received through the gospel. This much has been noted by many a preacher and Bible teacher: truly forgiven people forgive; loved people love; those who have experienced the grace of God in their hearts extend that grace toward one another. Too seldom, however, do readers attend to the deep theological logic of this passage. Here, in John’s first epistle, the apostle makes clear the relationship between theologia and oikonomia — between God’s ad intra life and his ad extra work; between who God is in se and how the inseparable operations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are executed and appropriated to distinct persons of the Trinity in time.

The fount of every other example of “love” in this passage is found in verse 8: “God is love.” This is a statement of theologia — God in relation to God; the inner life of the a se one revealed in holy Scripture. All our love is from the God who is love (verses 7–8). And John tells us that the God who is love manifests his love to us in the mission of the Son in the incarnation (verses 9–12) and in the mission of the Spirit to indwell believers (verses 13–14), first signified at Pentecost. In other words, we come to gain an interest in the love of God through the love of God manifested in the divine missions. We are brought within God’s love when we are swept up into the meritorious life, penal substitutionary death, and victorious resurrection of Christ Jesus by the Spirit. In the Holy Spirit — he who is the divine Love of Father and Son — we are united to Christ, and as a result, God the Trinity abides in us (verse 16). From the inside out, the God of love transforms us by vivifying us with his own loving self.

All this is gloriously true for the transformed Christian now, but it will be finally consummated in its climactic form in the beatific vision (and the experience of deification that accompanies this vision). A strong continuity exists between what we are and what we will be. The bind that ties the two is the transformative experience of communion with God the Trinity in Christ: the one whom we behold by faith now is the very same one we will behold by glorified vision in the eschaton. The former vision means salvation in this age — the double grace of justification and sanctification. But the latter vision will mean glorification in the age to come — deification (1 John 3:2). This process of sanctifying communion begins in this life at conversion, but its consummation awaits the glorified experience of the beatific vision.

Heaven’s Burning Hearth

In the experience of the beatific vision, the Christian Hedonist will satisfy his deepest longing for happiness in God. In the courts of the new heavens and the new earth, when all creation will have been renewed and perfected to be the heavenly cosmic temple God always intended it to be, man will dwell with God in happy, holy, perfect beatific delight forever. There, God will receive the highest glory he intends for himself in his creatures’ highest enjoyment of him. No account of Christian eschatology is complete without this blessed hope as the end of all things. Heaven’s burning hearth, enlightening and enlivening and warming the entire frame, is this delightful union with God. No amount of earthly restoration is worth anything without this central hope: all else leaves the desiring saint cold and empty. Apart from the deifying grace of the beatific vision, the new heavens and the new earth are a stale prospect. But thanks be to God, no such prospect need be entertained for long. We see, though now only as a distant promise, what Dante saw at the top of Purgatorio’s mount:

I saw that far within its depths there lies,
by Love together in one volume bound,
that which in leaves lies scattered through the world;
substance and accident, and modes thereof,
fused, as it were, in such a way, that that,
whereof I speak, is but One Simple Light.²³

All that goodness and love and light and life that lies scattered, disintegrated, and partial in this life will one day be gathered and swept up into the one simple glory of God, which we will behold forever. We can therefore say, with David,

One thing have I asked of the Lord,
     that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
     all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord
     and to inquire in his temple. (Psalm 27:4)

And with our ear tilted toward heaven, we can hear this request met with a startling invitation: “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price” (Revelation 22:17). We are emboldened, therefore, by our Lord who says, “Surely I am coming soon” (Revelation 22:20). And so, with John — and the communion of the saints past and present — we say, “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!”