A New Heaven and a New Earth

Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441241382
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Estudios bíblicos

2014 Word Guild Award - Biblical Studies category
Named a 2014 Jesus Creed Book of the Year (Theology)
Best Theology Book of 2014, Englewood Review of Books
Best Book of Biblical Studies for 2014, Hearts & Minds Books In recent years, more and more Christians have come to appreciate the Bible's teaching that the ultimate blessed hope for the believer is not an otherworldly heaven; instead, it is full-bodied participation in a new heaven and a new earth brought into fullness through the coming of God's kingdom. Drawing on the full sweep of the biblical narrative, J. Richard Middleton unpacks key Old Testament and New Testament texts to make a case for the new earth as the appropriate Christian hope. He suggests its ethical and ecclesial implications, exploring the difference a holistic eschatology can make for living in a broken world.

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Introduction

The Problem of Otherworldly Hope

In one of the courses I teach, I regularly set my students an interview assignment. They are asked to interview a pastor, church leader, or missionary whom they know, using a set of guided, though open-ended, questions. The questions ask how the interviewee understands a number of overlapping matters, including the nature of salvation or redemption, what it means to be a Christian in the world, the nature of one’s calling as a Christian, what God requires of the faithful, and the nature of true worship, ministry, and discipleship. All the questions circle around one main goal: to uncover the worldview of the interviewees, in particular how they understand the relationship of so-called spiritual or religious matters to ordinary mundane matters of life in the world, and how they therefore should act in the world.1

The Elephant in the Room

It is common for interviewees to claim that the Christian faith should not be separated from life but ought to connect to this world. This is a relatively recent shift in attitudes, from a more otherworldly interpretation of faith to a desire for a more holistic and integrated vision. Along those lines, more and more people tend to recognize that our calling or ministry should not be divided into sacred and secular, but rather should relate to everything we do.

What is fascinating, however, is what interviewees actually mention as examples of “everything” and what they leave out. Some laudably list the need to care for “creation,” since God made and loves the world. Some mention the terrible state that the world is in and declare that Christians ought to be involved in making things better. Many emphasize ethical matters such as valuing honesty and sexual purity and being against abortion (and sometimes war); they often say that faith should affect one’s work (usually without specifying how, other than that one should model Christian behavior and be committed to excellence). And they particularly stress the importance of “relationships.” Most interviewees, however, tend to reduce this to personal, intimate, or familial-type relationships.

Yet “relationships” is a large umbrella term that covers just about everything. I am in relationship not just to other persons, but also to social and political institutions, to traditions, to the environment, to animals, to food, to time and space, to birth and death, to history, to science and art. I am related to technology, to entertainment, to economic systems, to ideas and ideologies, to depression, illness, and suffering, to consumerism, to globalization, to violence, and so on. How then does one’s salvation or faith relate to the entire spectrum of life on this planet?

It is telling that very few interviewees even attempt to address the range of everyday relationships that people have with broad swaths of mundane reality. While those who claim that faith is related to all of life do make some connections, there are nevertheless huge omissions. Even those who stress the need to care for creation tend to reduce “creation” to nature or the environment, with little reflection on the fact that human beings, and all the cultural and social formations that they have developed over history, are also part of the created order.

What becomes clear from reading these interviews over the years is that “culture” (for want of a better term) is the elephant in the room that nobody notices. While we are, in fact, at every moment in relationship with a complex web or network of cultural and social meanings, artifacts, and institutions, there tends to be a significant blind spot in the vision of many contemporary Christians (including pastors and church leaders) concerning such matters. The full range of human culture simply does not enter into the equation of faith.2

One of the questions my students put to the interviewees has to do with eschatology, the end-state vision of God’s intent for humanity and the world. In particular, the interviewees are asked how they understand the final state of the righteous. Here the answers tend to be quite traditional, centering on judgment and going to heaven when you die. “Heaven” tends to be conceived in two main ways. First, heaven is understood as a transcendent realm beyond time and space. Second, heaven is characterized primarily by fellowship with and worship of God. The final destiny of the faithful is conceived as an unending worship service of perpetual praise in God’s immediate presence in another world. While the traditional doctrine of the resurrection of the body is usually affirmed, this typically stands in some tension with the idea of an atemporal, immaterial realm. And there is certainly no conscious reflection on the redemption of human culture.

More and more, however, some respondents understand that an ethereal “heaven” is more traditional than biblical, and instead they articulate the vision of “a new heaven and a new earth” from the book of Revelation. However, even their articulation of this more cosmic vision tends to have no explicit place for the concreteness of human culture. The elephant is unnoticed in both ethics and eschatology.3 Indeed, it is my conclusion, not only from the interviews but also from my experience in the church and my study of theology and Scripture, that eschatology is inevitably connected to ethics. I am not referring here to one’s explicit statement of eschatology because some interviewees explicitly affirm a biblical vision of cosmic restoration; but it is clear that this is a bare confession and does not function as the sort of substantive vision that could guide significant action in the world. The point is that what we desire and anticipate as the culmination of salvation is what truly affects how we attempt to live in the present. Ethics is lived eschatology. It is, as New Testament scholar George Eldon Ladd put it, “the presence of the future.”4

The Bible’s Best-Kept Secret

Central to the way the New Testament conceives the final destiny of the world is Jesus’s proclamation in Matthew 19:28 of a “regeneration” (KJV, NASB) that is coming; Matthew here uses the Greek word palingenesia, which both NIV and NRSV translate as “the renewal of all things,” correctly getting at the sense of cosmic expectation in Jesus’s prediction. Likewise, we have Peter’s explicit proclamation of the “restoration [apokatastasis] of all things” (Acts 3:21), which does in fact contain the Greek for “all things” (panta). When we turn to the Epistles, we find God’s intent to reconcile “all things” to himself through Christ articulated in Colossians 1:20, while Ephesians 1:10 speaks of God’s desire to unify or bring together “all things” in Christ. In these two Pauline texts the phrase “all things” (ta panta) is immediately specified as things in heaven and things on earth. Since “the heavens and the earth” is precisely how Genesis 1:1 describes the world that God created, this New Testament language designates a vision of cosmic redemption. Such cosmic vision underlies the phrase “a new heaven/s and a new earth” found in both Revelation 21:1 and 2 Peter 3:13. The specific origin of the phrase, however, is the prophetic oracle of Isaiah 65:17 (and 66:22), which envisions a healed world with a redeemed community in rebuilt Jerusalem, where life is restored to flourishing and shalom after the devastation of the Babylonian exile. The this-worldly prophetic expectation in Isaiah is universalized to the entire cosmos and human society generally in late Second Temple Judaism and in the New Testament.

This holistic vision of God’s intent to renew or redeem creation is perhaps the Bible’s best-kept secret, typically unknown to most church members and even to many clergy, no matter what their theological stripe. While this introductory chapter is not the place for a full exposition of the biblical teaching about the redemption of the cosmos, some clarification is in order. It is particularly helpful to trace the Old Testament roots of the New Testament vision, in order to understand the inner logic of the idea.

A good starting point is that the Old Testament does not place any substantial hope in the afterlife; the dead do not have access to God in the grave or Sheol. Rather, God’s purposes for blessing and shalom are expected for the faithful in this life, in the midst of history. This perspective is theologically grounded in the biblical teaching about the goodness of creation, including earthly existence. God pronounced all creation (including materiality) good—indeed “very good” (Gen. 1:31)—and gave humanity the task to rule and develop this world as stewards made in the divine image (Gen. 1:26–28; 2:15; Ps. 8:5–8).

The affirmation of earthly life is further articulated in the central and paradigmatic act of God’s salvation in the Old Testament: the exodus from Egyptian bondage. Not only does Israel’s memory of this event testify to a God who intervenes in history in response to injustice and suffering, but the exodus is manifestly a case of sociopolitical deliverance whose fulfillment is attained when the redeemed are settled in a bountiful land and are restored to wholeness and flourishing as a community living according to God’s Torah.

Indeed, the entire Old Testament reveals an interest in mundane matters such as the development of languages and cultures, the fertility of land and crops, the birth of children and stable family life, justice among neighbors, and peace in international relations. The Old Testament does not spiritualize salvation, but rather understands it as God’s deliverance of people and land from all that destroys life and the consequent restoration of people and land to flourishing. And while God’s salvific purpose narrows for a while to one elect nation in its own land, this “initially exclusive move” is, as Old Testament scholar Terence Fretheim puts it, in the service of “a maximally inclusive end,” the redemption of all nations and ultimately the entire created order.5

Although the Old Testament initially did not envision any sort of positive afterlife, things begin to shift in some late texts.6 Thus in Ezekiel’s famous vision of the valley of dry bones (Ezek. 37), the restoration of Israel is portrayed by using the metaphor of resurrection, after the “death” that they suffered in Babylonian exile. But this is arguably still a metaphor, not an expectation of what we would call resurrection. Then a protoapocalyptic text, Isaiah 25:6–8, envisions the literal conquest of death itself at the messianic banquet on Mount Zion (where God will serve the redeemed the best meat and the most aged wines); this text anticipates the day when YHWH7 will “swallow up death forever” (cited in 1 Cor. 15:54; cf. 15:26) and “wipe away all tears” (echoed in Rev. 21:4). But the most explicit Old Testament text on the topic of resurrection is the apocalyptic vision in Daniel 12:2–3, which promises that faithful martyrs will awaken from the dust of the earth (to which we all return at death, according to Gen. 3:19) to attain “eternal life.”

It is important to note that this developing vision of the afterlife has nothing to do with “heaven hereafter”; the expectation is manifestly this-worldly, meant to guarantee for the faithful the earthly promises of shalom that death has cut short. Here, the third chapter of Wisdom of Solomon is particularly helpful. This text (which is in the Septuagint, though not in the Protestant canon) specifically associates “immortality” with reigning on earth (Wis. 3:1–9, esp. vv. 7–8); that is, resurrection is a reversal of the earthly situation of oppression (wicked people dominating and killing righteous martyrs). Resurrection thus fulfills the original human dignity and status in Genesis 1:26–28 and Psalm 8:4–8, where humans are granted rule of the earth.

These ancient Jewish expectations provide a coherent theological background for Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom of God, which he construes as “good news” for the poor and release for captives (Luke 4:18), and which he embodies in healings, exorcisms, and the forgiveness of sins (all ways in which the distortion of life was being reversed). These expectations also make sense of Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount that the meek will “inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:5), and later in Matthew that “at the renewal of all things” the disciples will reign and judge with him on thrones (Matt. 19:27–30).

Paul’s description of Jesus’s own resurrection from the dead as the “first fruits” of those who have fallen asleep (1 Cor. 15:20) signifies that the harvest of new creation has begun, the expected reversal of sin and death is inaugurated. This reversal ...