Pastor Jeff McCullough has just posted another video on his channel, this time answering some questions asked by viewers in relation to his previous video regarding the Latter-day Saint understanding of the afterlife, and the “three levels of heaven,” or “three degrees of glory”. I am only interested in his answer to the first question that he is responding to, asked by someone by the name of Larry, as follows:
“2 Corinthians 12:2, talked about being caught up in the third heaven. Would degrees of glory be reasonable to interpret?” –Larry
To this he then gives the following answer (emphasis added):
“This is a fantastic question. I am glad you asked it, Larry. Let’s actually look at 2 Corinthians, and I will give my best take on this passage: ‘I know a man in Christ who 14 years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows—was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell.’ (2 Cor. 2:12-14, NIV) So Paul is basically talking about going to heaven; and the question is, Why does he call it the ‘third heaven?’ Well, this is tied to an ancient understanding of the cosmos. In a lot of the ancient world, and it is reflected in a lot of the scriptures, there were sort of three levels of how people understood ‘up’. You have one level, which is the air, and the clouds, and the birds; and then the second level was where you have the stars and the planets, and all those other things in the universe as we know it; and then beyond that is where God’s presence is, or heaven. And ancient people believed that that is where God—and even in non-Christian context, the gods, lived. This is why when Jesus died and rose from the dead, he ‘ascended’ to the father, because of this idea that the heavens are ‘upward’. So the reason why I believe Paul is talking about a ‘third level of heaven,’ that he had this vision, is not necessarily the levels of heaven as outlined in the LDS Church, but he is just speaking within what people understood as: ‘I didn’t just go up into the sky, I didn’t just go up into the stars, I went into heaven, into the very presence of God, where I saw and experienced things that I can’t even express.’ Good question.”
The highlighted bit is not something that he has picked up from impartial and unbiased sources, reflecting ancient cultural beliefs regarding the nature of heaven. He has picked that up from biased sources trying to interpret Paul in such a way that it does not give support to the Latter-day Saint view of heaven. That interpretation of Paul’s understanding of the nature of heaven has become very popular on the Internet for this reason, so that a simple search is likely to bring that up at the top of the search result. You have to dig a bit deeper to get to the truth of the matter. The truth of the matter is that the “ancient understanding of the cosmos” has been that there are in fact seven levels of heaven. That has been the most common view in most cultures and traditions, including Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and many others. That is the view that is expressed in the Jewish Talmud for example. It is also the view that became popular among Christians during the Middle ages. It is also the common view in Islam, and expressed in the Quran (41:12; 65:12; 67:3-4). It has been the popular view among several other religions as well. There is a good article about it in Wikipedia which can be seen here.
Paul, having been a Pharisee, would have been familiar with this Jewish cultural view of heaven. If he was expressing the “cultural” view of heaven at the time, he should have talked about being caught up to the seventh heaven, not the “third heaven”. The fact that he expressed it the way he did, proves that he was not reflecting the cultural views of the time. He was speaking theologically, and expressing the correct doctrine of heaven as it was revealed to him in his vision. He was not mixing his divine revelation and experience with pagan traditions.
It is also true that in the Bible, the word “heaven” is used in more than one sense. For example when in Genesis it says that “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen. 1:1; 2:4), it uses the word “heaven” to refer to everything that is “not earth”. It is not using “heaven” in the sense of a “place of salvation,” or the place where “God resides”. Similarly, when Jeremiah talks about the “birds of the heavens” (Jer. 4:25), it is obvious that he is talking about the “birds of the air,” not the place where the “saved” go to. It doesn’t require too much brain power to figure out that when Paul talks about a “third heaven,” that he is not contrasting the place where God dwells, with the place where birds fly. He is dividing heaven itself, the place in which God and his angels, his seraphim and cherubim, and other heavenly “creatures” (e.g. Revelation 4–6) dwell into three different categories. So Pastor Jeff McCullough has once again demonstrated that he is not as unbiased and impartial in his discussion of the theology and doctrinal beliefs of Latter-day Saints as he likes to think that he is.
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P. S.
One more question raised in his video that requires a brief comment concerns his own denominational affiliation. He likes to suggest that he is theologically neutral and “non-denominational;” but the theology that he is influenced by, and is in favor of and is promoting, is very much “Reformed,” and in the category of “Calvinism”—although he may genuinely believe that he is being neutral on that issue.
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