"It comes as something of a shock, in fact, when people are told what is in fact the case: that there is very little in the Bible about 'going to heaven when you die' and not a lot about a postmortem hell either. The medieval pictures of heaven and hell, boosted though not created by Dante's classic work, have exercised a huge influence on Western Christian imagination. Many Christians grow up assuming that whenever the New Testament speaks of heaven it refers to the place to which the saved will go after death. In Matthew's gospel, Jesus's sayings in the other gospels about the 'kingdom of God' are rendered as 'kingdom of heaven'; since many read Matthew first, when they find Jesus talking about 'entering the kingdom of heaven,' they have their assumptions confirmed and suppose that he is indeed talking about how to go to heaven when you die, which is certainly not what either Jesus or Matthew had in mind. Many mental pictures have grown up around this and are now assumed to be what the Bible teaches or what Christians believe.
But the language of heaven in the New Testament doesn't work that way. 'God's kingdom' in the preaching of Jesus refers not to postmortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but to God's sovereign rule coming 'on earth as it is in heaven.' The roots of the misunderstanding go very deep, not least into the residual Platonism that has infected whole swaths of Christian thinking and has misled people into supposing that Christians are meant to devalue this present world and our present bodies and regard them as shabby or shameful.
Likewise, the pictures of heaven in the book of Revelation have been much misunderstood. The wonderful description in Revelation 4 and 5 of the twenty-four elders casting their crowns before the throne of God and the lamb, beside the sea of glass, is not, despite one of Charles Wesley's great hymns, a picture of the last day, with all the redeemed in heaven at last. It is a picture of present reality, the heavenly dimension of our present life. Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden, dimension of our ordinary life--God's dimension, if you like. God made heaven and earth; at the least he will remake both and join them together forever. And when we come to the picture of the actual end in Revelation 21-22, we find not ransomed souls making their way to a disembodied heaven but rather the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, uniting the two in a lasting embrace.
Most Christians today, I fear, never think about this from one year to the next. They remain satisfied with what is at best a truncated and distorted version of the great biblical hope. Indeed, the popular picture is reinforced again and again in hymns, prayers, monuments, and even quite serious works of theology and history. It is simply assumed that the word heaven is the appropriate term for the ultimate destination, the final home, and that the language of resurrection, and of the new earth as well as the new heavens, must somehow be fitted into that.
What we see in today's church is, I think, a confused combination of several things. For one, the old heaven-and-hell view has been under attack. Many now refuse to believe in hell at all, but we find over the last century, as this denial developed, that paradoxically it has led to a diminution of the promise of heaven since if everybody is on the same track it would seem unfair to allow some to go directly to the destination rather than continue to the long postmortem journey. The idea of such a journey after death is itself now frequent, though again it has virtually no warrant in the Bible or early Christian thought. We see too the rehabilitation of a modern, sanitized, version of the old theory of purgatory: since at death we are still quite unready to meet our Maker, we will need (it is suggested) a period of refinement, of growing toward the light. (People who think like this tend to prefer to put it that way rather than emphasizing purging or other uncomfortable things.) Many embrace a universalism in which God will endlessly offer to the unrepentant the choice of faith until at last all succumb to the wooing of divine love. Some declare that heaven as traditionally pictured looks insufferably boring--sitting on clouds playing harps all the time--and that they either don't believe it or don't want to go there. Others declare, rather sniffily, that a God who simply wants people to adore him all the time is not a figure they would respect. Those of us who protest that the orthodox picture is of a vibrant and active human life, reflecting God's image in the new heavens and new earth, are sometimes accused of projecting our go-getting contemporary life onto the screen of the future."
- N. T. Wright
from: http://www.amazon.com/Surprised-Hope-Rethinking-Resurrection-Mission/dp/0061551821/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368592956&sr=1-1&keywords=surprised+by+hope
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