The Romantics radically split from more conventional Christians in their disregard for the necessity of a judicial, masculine deity. The heaven which they rejected was the ascetic, theocentric heaven of the reformers. From the perspective of their heavenly theology, Romantic poets abd artists exploited those themes of the Renaissance and the baroque periods which sought to humanize heaven. They completed the humanizing of heaven begun in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The new idea, however, was not unique to the idiosyncratic Blake, the enigmatic Dickinson, or the outlandish Rossetti. Concurrent with their radical visions of social relations were the speculations of Protestant ministers on marriage in heaven and the domesticated paradises of fiction writers. Love continued to serve as the foundation of heaven, but it changed from the self-absorbed passion of the couple to the love experienced in marriage and family life. The modern heaven, where social relations were of primary importance, was the paradise of the poet, the minister, and the pious Christian.
– Heaven: A History (2001), p. 257
It was only logical that belief in heaven should be rejected by radical secular theology. On the afternoon of 4 May 1961, a large crowd filled the Andover chapel of the Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to listen to the annual “Ingersoll Lecture on the Immortality of Man.” The audience witnessed the birth of a theology without heaven. The lecturer, the philosopher and religious historian Hans Jonas (born 1903), declared that “the modern temper is uncongenial to the idea of immortality.” […] To be eternally remembered by God or, mythically speaking, to be inscribed into the heavenly Book of Life, was all Jonas could offer to the audience. We will have no individual, conscious life after death. The existentialism of Sartre and Heidegger, “this extreme offspring of the modern temper or distemper,” has no room for immortality. “And we,” the lecturer continued, “whether of its doctrine or not, share enough of its spirit to have taken out lonely stand in time between the twofold nothing of before and after”.
A year later, the Chicago philosopher Charles Hartshorne (born 1897), a famous defender of the existence of God, repeated his earlier disbelief in life after death. In 1968, Gordon Kaufman, professor of theology at the Harward Divinity School, did the same. In 1977, the French Dominican friar and psychoanalyst Jacques Pohier joined the growing list of secular and radical theologians. Within several years, a number of major theologians had ceased to believe in an afterlife. Inspired by writings of Hartshorne and an earlier Anglo-American philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), a group of theologians began to develop a new system of thought, now known as “process theology,” which radically challenges the existence of heaven. Although there have been attempts to reconcile this philosophy with more traditional notions of an afterlife, the process school presents detailed arguments against immortality.
– Ibid., pp. 346-7