Do you believe that everyone goes to heaven when they pass no matter what?

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This question asks about my personal views, but I need to ensconce those views safely in the comforting embrace of Jesus’ own words. I promise to get to my own views after we establish the foundation on which I build my understanding of the afterlife.

Jesus speaks of a kingdom of Heaven. A kingdom is not a singular, static place defined by their borders. It’s a dynamic, changing entity whose borders can change for all kinds of reasons. The kingdom of Heaven emanates from its sovereign, God, and extends out into the rest of existence.

There is no reason at all to think that the kingdom of Heaven doesn’t also extend into the material world. In fact many statements made by Jesus and Paul indicate this. We can examine Matthew 5:19–20:

Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

Any Jew is intimately familiar with the law of God. Laws can promulgate from all kinds of places. They can come from kings. They can come from legislatures. The English came up with the idea that the law can come from the land. Jews believed in a law that came from God. This is perfectly in line with the conception of Heaven as a kingdom, with its own laws, that doesn’t just exist nonphysically, but also here on Earth.

Jesus is saying here that there are two kinds of adherence to the law of God. You can teach and practice the law, which he calls righteousness. And you can teach but not practice it. He then states that it’s not a all-or-one thing. You can be more or less righteous, and you have to be more righteous than the Pharisees and the teachers of the law to enter into the kingdom of heaven. But should you happen to gain admittance, the amount to which you keep to the law will determine how great you are in the kingdom.

The question wants to know whether individual humans believe that all people will gain admittance to the kingdom of Heaven. But it’s plain in Jesus’ words. No. Not everyone gets to go there immediately after death. How you live in this life determines how you exist in the afterlife. If you are righteous, then you will have a place in Heaven. Who am I to contradict Jesus?

What I will say, is that one should not read too deeply into this, in the wrong way. It’s tempting to want to think Jesus was interested in giving us a nuts-and-bolts scientific understanding of how the nonphysical world works. But He wasn’t. Jesus wanted us to understand the moral principles behind the kingdom of Heaven. Those moral principles are hard enough to understand such that trying to add divine physics on top of that would make Jesus’ teachings completely inaccessible.

It’s like trying to learn about dinosaurs by first learning carbon dating and not trying to fit the bones into a skeleton so you can at least see the structure of the enormous animals. No, Jesus only had time to give us the broad strokes. It’s good to read spiritual truths into Jesus’ words. Because that’s how Jesus intended us to take His words. But to try to read mechanistic truths is to commit the same sin that Jesus rails against the Pharisees for. Seeing only the words of God, not the spirit. It’s the spirit that’s important in the spiritual world.

Let’s look at one more parable, Luke 16:19–31

There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day: And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores, And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.

And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.

And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.

But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.

Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father's house: For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.

Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.

And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.

And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.

This further emphasizes how the world of the living is not all that different than the world of the dead, when you take into account that wisdom is spiritual and not Earthly. The unnamed rich man thought that a message sent from the recently-deceased to living relatives would be better received than from the prophets.

Abraham dashes this view. If you couldn’t be persuaded of the wisdom of righteousness by the prophets, how in the world would a dead relative be more persuasive?

He also points to a curious correspondence, what we also might call a conservation. Lazarus received evil things while on Earth, and so gets to experience good things in Heaven. And so the rich man got his good things on Earth, and so must experience evil things in Hell.

With all of this groundwork laid, let me talk about how I personally think of Heaven and Hell. I think the parables of Jesus are just that, parables. They reflect the spirit of existence through carefully-selected stories, like you might tell your children at bedtime.

I do not think Jesus intended for us to take them as literally as many Christians do today. And so the parable of Lazarus does not speak of a mechanistic chasm between Heaven and Hell, in the sense of an unbridgeable gap. After all, Abraham himself was able to reach the rich man in Hell.

The chasm isn’t physical, it’s spiritual. The rich man’s spirit is far from Heaven, so far that no amount of persuasion or action can be redemptive enough to bring it back to Heaven. This means that Heaven and Hell aren’t just physical places, they’re also metaphorical places. Did Abraham literally leave Heaven and enter Hell in order to talk to the rich man? How would He get back to Heaven if there’s this great unbridgeable chasm? No, Abraham did not leave metaphoric Heaven, he’s still there.

Similarly, the rich man could physically leave Hell, but his spirit would still be tormented as if he were still there. The rich man’s spirit was forged on Earth, it’s going to get tormented after death because that’s what he did to it while he was living. That’s the nature of spirit, the things you do and the things you believe affect that spirit, and when your Earthly existence ends and your existence becomes purely spiritual, you won’t be able to hide from what you’ve become. And you’ll find a place in spiritual reality that corresponds with that becoming.

That said, I consider myself a Swedenborgian, one who believes in the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg. One of the revelations that Swedenborg had was that the spiritual world is predicated on love. So your existence in the afterlife will prime you in order to find your true love in Heaven so that you can spend all of eternity enjoying it. Hell is a place where beings who love evil can enjoy being evil.

Reframed this way, we can see the rich man in the parable as loving good, but having a dirty spirit. His spirit needs to be cleansed before the rich man can enjoy being good. Abraham is educating the rich man on what he should have learned from the prophets on Earth.

If the rich man truly loved being and doing evil, then Abraham would have nothing to teach him, and the rich man would not be tormented by the flames, but rather excited by them. He would have asked Abraham, had he been there, not for sustenance from Lazarus, but for Abraham to bring Lazarus so that Lazarus could be tormented himself. Because that’s what love of evil does, delights in torment.

As such, most people will find their way to Heaven eventually, even if they can’t exist there immediately after death.

Is this conception of morality and justice against scripture? Some think so. I think it’s a continuation of the teachings brought to the world by Jesus. In my mind, any way you think Swedenborg is wrong because he’s against Jesus is a theological interpretation that also won’t fit with the spirit of Jesus’s words, remembering that Jesus was interested in spiritual truth and fought against misguided literalist interpretations of truth.