Popular English usage flattens "Heaven" into a single destination, but careful Christian theology actually distinguishes several related but separate claims that the word carries at once: the immediate postmortem state of the redeemed soul, the final bodily resurrection and renewed creation described in passages such as Revelation's new heaven and new earth, and the beatific vision specifically as an act of intellectual and spiritual union with God rather than a place at all.
Catholic and Orthodox theology developed the most elaborate accounts of this structure, including the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory as a preparatory state distinct from Heaven proper, while many Protestant traditions simplified the picture toward a more direct passage to God's presence at death or at a single final judgment.
The Encyclopedia of Religion situates the Christian Heaven within a much broader comparative pattern of paradisal afterlife destinations across religious traditions, useful for showing what is distinctive about the Christian version specifically: its strong emphasis on relationship and communion with a personal God, its ultimate expectation of bodily resurrection rather than a purely disembodied spiritual existence, and its consistent doctrinal pairing with Hell as a genuine, not merely rhetorical, alternative outcome.