The New Creation

Two readings, both ancient, both argued from texts, and the difference between them shows up in what a Christian thinks about a hospital, a farm and a violin. The first holds that the present heavens and earth are destroyed and a new creation is made in their place. The second holds that the present creation is purged by fire and renewed, so that the new heavens and new earth are this creation healed. Do not decide which you prefer until both are on the table.

The case for destruction and replacement. 2 Peter 3:7 says the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men; 3:10 has the heavens disappearing with a roar and the elements destroyed by fire; 3:12 has the heavens destroyed by fire and the elements melting in the heat. (The BSB's footnote on 'destroyed' reads 'Or dissolved', and the Greek word for the elements, stoicheia, is rendered 'heavenly bodies' in some versions.) Revelation 21:1 says that the first heaven and earth had passed away, and the verb is not gentle. Matthew 24:35 says heaven and earth will pass away but my words will not pass away. Hebrews 1:11-12, quoting Psalm 102, says of the heavens that they will perish and will be changed like a garment. 1 Corinthians 7:31 says the present form of this world is passing away, and Hebrews 12:26-27 speaks of a final shaking whose point is the removal of what can be shaken so that what cannot be shaken may remain. This reading was formally debated in Lutheran scholastic theology under the heading annihilatio mundi against innovatio mundi, and it has had defenders in the Reformed tradition too; its supporters argue that it protects the sheer decisiveness of God's act and refuses to make the new creation a natural development of the old.

The case for purging and renewal. Romans 8:19-23 is the anchor and it says something specific: the creation was subjected to futility, not by its own will, in hope 'that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God'. It is the creation itself that is liberated, and the image in 8:22 is childbirth, which is violent and produces the same life rather than a substitute for it. Acts 3:21 speaks of the time for the restoration of all things, which God announced long ago through his holy prophets, and restoration is not replacement. Matthew 19:28 calls it the palingenesia, the rebirth (the BSB prints 'the renewal of all things'). Ephesians 1:10 has God's plan to bring all things in heaven and on earth together in Christ. Colossians 1:20 has him reconciling to himself all things through the blood of his cross. Isaiah 65 and 66 describe new heavens and a new earth full of houses, vineyards and children. And Revelation 21:5 says, 'Behold, I make all things new', where the object of the making is the all things that already exist. Irenaeus argued in the last book of Against Heresies that it is the fashion of the world that passes away and not its substance. Calvin takes the same line in his commentaries on Romans 8 and on 2 Peter 3. Among modern writers it is argued by Herman Bavinck, Anthony Hoekema in The Bible and the Future, N. T. Wright in Surprised by Hope in 2007 and J. Richard Middleton in A New Heaven and a New Earth in 2014, and it is the reading behind Gaudium et Spes 39 and the Catechism of the Catholic Church at 1042 to 1050.

Now the textual variant, which matters here more than in almost any other passage a student will meet. The last clause of 2 Peter 3:10 is one of the genuinely hard problems of New Testament textual criticism. The reading printed in the modern critical editions, and supported by the oldest major witnesses including Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, is heurethesetai, will be found, which the BSB renders 'will be laid bare', with a footnote that reads: Or will not be found. BYZ and TR will be burned up; SBL, NE, and WH will be found, i.e., will be unable to hide. (The BSB's English, in other words, has already interpreted the Greek word found as exposure, and its note gives the burned-up reading and the not-found reading as the alternatives.) The later and more widespread reading is katakaesetai, will be burned up, which is what the King James translates. A third family of witnesses has a negative, will not be found, which looks like an ancient attempt to make sense of a difficult word, and which the BSB footnote also offers as an alternative translation. Now notice the effect. If the verse says the earth and its works will be burned up, the destruction reading has its clearest sentence. If it says they will be found, the picture is of a refiner's fire laying bare what is there for judgement, and the renewal reading gains its clearest sentence in the same verse. The harder reading, which scribes would be more likely to change than to create, is the one that means found, and that is the textual argument for it; the argument against is that it is very hard to construe, which is precisely why translations differ.

Two more things about that passage should be said because both sides tend to skip them. First, the writer supplies his own analogy in 3:5-6: the world of that time perished in the flood. The flood is the comparison he chooses for what is coming, and the flood did not annihilate the earth. That is an argument the renewal reading makes from inside a passage the destruction reading depends on, and it deserves an answer rather than a dismissal; the answer given is that 3:7 deliberately escalates from water to fire, and that the escalation is the point. Second, what both readings agree on is larger than what divides them. God acts decisively and not gradually. There is a judgement by fire. Nothing of the present order survives unjudged. And the outcome is stated by the same writer in the same paragraph, at 3:13: 'a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.' A student who can state both readings, name the variant and say what is agreed knows more about this passage than most people who preach on it.

The Bible opens in a garden and closes in a city. That sentence is worth sitting with before any of the details, because it is the single largest thing the last two chapters of the canon tell you about where history is going, and almost nobody notices it. The end is not a return to Eden. The tree of life is there, and a river runs down the middle of the street, but the street is the new thing. What is described in Revelation 21 is a built environment, with walls, gates, foundations, streets, measurements and traffic through the gates.

The New Testament Survey module on Revelation worked the architecture of the vision and this lesson builds on it rather than repeating it: the cube, the only other cube in scripture being the Most Holy Place of 1 Kings 6:20, so that the city is the Holy of Holies enlarged until the nations fit inside it; the twelve gates named for the tribes of Israel and the twelve foundations named for the apostles of the Lamb, with neither people dissolved into the other; and the sentence that follows from the cube, at 21:22, that John saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. The doctrinal point for this track is what that does to the whole story of sacred space: a tabernacle, then a temple, then a glory that departed in Ezekiel 10, then a man who called his own body the temple, then a church described as a temple, and finally a city with no temple in it because the separation the temple existed to manage is over.

A garden is given and a city is made. That is not a play on words; it is the reason this section exists. In a garden, everything a human being needs is grown. In a city there is architecture, law, commerce, art, neighbours, a division of labour and a culture. Genesis 4 has the first city built by Cain and the first metalworkers and musicians in his line, which is scripture's characteristically unsentimental way of telling you that human culture begins east of Eden and under a shadow. Babel is a city. Babylon is a city and Revelation spends two chapters on its fall. And then the last thing God shows John is a city that comes down out of heaven, which means that the form human community took in exile is the form it takes in glory, redeemed rather than abolished.

Then the traffic through the gates, which is the most surprising detail in the chapter and the seed of the next section. Revelation 21:24: 'By its light the nations will walk, and into it the kings of the earth will bring their glory.' 21:26: 'And into the city will be brought the glory and honor of the nations.' And 21:25 says its gates will never be shut, which in the ancient world is a statement about security, since a city shut its gates at night against what was outside. A city with permanently open gates is a city with nothing to fear and something to receive. Whatever the glory and honour of the nations turns out to be, it comes from outside and it goes in.

One caution before the next section builds on that. Revelation 21:27 stands immediately after those verses: nothing unclean will ever enter it. The gates are open and they are not indiscriminate. Any use of 21:24-26 that turns the new creation into a museum of human achievement has to carry verse 27 as well, and the traditions that read those verses most maximally are also the traditions that have insisted most loudly on the judgement in chapter 20. Both are in the same paragraph and a reader gets both or neither.

The question is not idle and it is the question the woman in the inquiry asked. If the kings of the earth bring their glory into the city, does that mean that things human beings have made are present in the new creation, and if so which ones. Three positions, and they are less sharply separated than the positions in the last two lessons, but they produce noticeably different lives.

The maximal reading. The glory and honour of the nations are the actual cultural goods of human history, purified and brought in, so that the new creation is richer for the fact that human beings lived and worked. Its texts are Revelation 21:24-26; Isaiah 60, which lies behind those verses and describes the wealth of the nations coming to Zion in concrete terms, ships and gold and flocks; Isaiah 65:21-23, where the redeemed build houses and inhabit them and long enjoy the work of their hands; and 1 Corinthians 15:58, which stands at the end of the resurrection chapter as the conclusion drawn from it: 'Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast and immovable. Always excel in the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.' Its theological home is the Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck, and it is argued in English by Richard Mouw in When the Kings Come Marching In in 1983, by Miroslav Volf in Work in the Spirit in 1991, by N. T. Wright and by Middleton. Its named weakness is that it is very easy to read one's own civilisation into the open gates, and the history of the idea includes people who were confident that what the nations would bring in looked remarkably like the culture they already had. Its defenders answer that Revelation 21:27 screens the gates in the same paragraph, so that what goes in is purified rather than ratified, and that the objection is to a careless use of the reading rather than to the reading.

The minimal reading. What is carried in is persons, redeemed and glorified, and the glory and honour of the nations is the homage due to God rather than an inventory of artefacts; the new creation is God's making and not a collaboration. Its texts are the destruction column of section 1, above all 2 Peter 3:10-12, and it reads Revelation 21:24-26 against the background of Psalm 72 and Isaiah 60 as the submission of the nations to the king rather than as a shipping manifest. Its theological home is broad: it is the natural reading if you take the annihilation position in section 1, and it is also common in Lutheran thinking about vocation, where work has its dignity in this age because God feeds the world through the farmer's hands, and needs no eternal afterlife to be worth doing well. Its defenders add that the promise a working Christian actually needs is that God sees what she does, which Hebrews 6:10 gives her directly, and that a doctrine which has to specify that her particular loaves and her particular accounts will be on a shelf somewhere has made the promise smaller rather than larger. Its named weakness is that it has to account for 1 Corinthians 15:58, which says the labour is not in vain and says it as the inference drawn from the resurrection of the body, and for the fact that Isaiah's new creation is full of houses and vineyards and the long enjoyment of the work of human hands.

The reticent middle, which is where a good many careful writers land. Something survives; the texts say so; and no text tells you what, or in what form. 1 Corinthians 3:12-15 has a believer's work tested by fire, with some of it surviving and some of it burned, and it declines to say which is which. Revelation 14:13 says the dead who die in the Lord rest from their labours, for their deeds follow them, which is an image of things following a person through a door rather than a list of what goes through. Its defenders point at the shape of the resurrection itself as the model, which is the argument lesson 3 worked: the raised body is neither the buried one reassembled nor a replacement, and nobody can say in advance which of its features carry over, yet the promise is not thereby empty. What survives of human making may stand in the same relation to what we made as the risen body does to the buried one, which is a real answer and is also an answer that declines to be specified. The reticent position's strength is that it can affirm the promise without underwriting a programme, and it is where a good many writers who began at one of the poles have ended up. Its named weakness is that it gives a bricklayer nothing concrete to hold on to, and the maximalist tradition exists largely because someone wanted to give him something.

Two observations to keep the section honest. First, the disagreement is smaller in practice than it looks: every position here holds that work done well in this life is obedience, that the command to fill and keep the earth has not been revoked, and that no Christian is licensed to despise what God told him to do on Tuesday. Second, the texts do support the claim that human making is present in the city in some form, and they do not support a specification of it. A teacher who tells a congregation that their particular craft will be there is saying more than he knows, and a teacher who tells them it will all be burned is also saying more than he knows.

Both East and West answer the same question, which is what the redeemed will actually be doing forever, and both refuse the answers a modern reader expects. The end is not rest, not reunion, not reward. The end is God. The Western tradition calls it the beatific vision and the Eastern calls it theosis, and the first thing to say is that these are not two hopes but two idioms for one hope, with a real and unresolved difference inside them.

The Western account. Its texts are 1 Corinthians 13:12, 'Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known'; 1 John 3:2, 'We know that when Christ appears, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is' (the BSB supplies 'Christ' and footnotes the Greek as literally 'when He appears or when it appears'); Matthew 5:8, 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God'; Revelation 22:4, 'They will see His face'; and Psalm 17:15, 'As for me, I will behold Your face in righteousness.' Aquinas worked it into a full account: the final end of a rational creature is the vision of the divine essence, which no creature can attain by its own powers and which God grants by a light of glory, and in that vision the intellect rests because it has reached the first truth, with love and joy following from the seeing. Benedict XII defined it in the constitution Benedictus Deus in 1336, after his predecessor John XXII had argued in sermons of 1331 and 1332 that the blessed do not see God until the resurrection, an opinion he retracted the day before he died in December 1334: the purified souls see the divine essence with an intuitive vision, face to face, without the mediation of any creature. The Catechism of the Catholic Church uses the term at 1028. And the Reformed tradition kept it: Westminster Confession 32.1 has the souls of the righteous beholding the face of God in light and glory, and Larger Catechism 90 says that the righteous, made perfectly holy and happy, shall be full and for ever blessed, especially in the immediate vision and fruition of God the Father, of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit, to all eternity.

The Eastern account. Its text is 2 Peter 1:4, that through God's precious and magnificent promises you 'may become partakers of the divine nature', and its classic formula is Athanasius's in On the Incarnation 54, that he became man so that we might become god, a sentence Irenaeus had put in a similar form before him and which the tradition has repeated ever since. Theosis is not the absorption of the creature into God and it is not the creature becoming God by nature; it is the whole human being, body included, being made a partaker of the divine life by grace, so that what God is by nature the redeemed become by participation. Maximus the Confessor developed it; Gregory Palamas defended it in the fourteenth century against Barlaam, and the councils held at Constantinople in 1341, 1347 and 1351 endorsed him. The Palamite account turns on the distinction between the essence of God, which remains forever unknowable and unparticipable by any creature, and the uncreated energies of God, which are genuinely God and are given, participated and seen, the light on Tabor being the standing example. Gregory of Nyssa's doctrine of epektasis belongs here too: because God is infinite, the blessed advance into him forever without ever arriving, so that the end is not a terminus but an endless increase.

How far are they describing the same end? A good deal further than the polemics suggest, and not all the way. What they share: the end is God himself and not his gifts; it is the whole person and not a disembodied intellect, since both traditions confess the resurrection of the body; it is given by grace and unattainable otherwise; and it transforms the one who receives it, which is what 1 John 3:2 says in one sentence. Where they differ is precise and it is metaphysical. Benedictus Deus defines that the blessed see the divine essence. Palamas holds that no creature ever sees the divine essence and that what is seen is the uncreated energies. Western scholastic theology objected that the essence and energies distinction compromises divine simplicity by introducing a real division into God; Eastern theology replies that a God who can be exhaustively known by a creature is not the God of the fathers, and that the distinction is what makes real participation possible without pantheism. Both sides have modern representatives who think the gap is narrower than the fourteenth century made it and both have representatives who think it is exactly as wide as it looks. The dialogue has not settled it, and a student should not pretend otherwise in either direction.

Two footnotes for a Protestant reader. First, the language of deification is not foreign to the West or to the Reformation, and module 6 met it already: Luther speaks of the believer's union with Christ in terms some readers find close to theosis, an interpretation associated with Tuomo Mannermaa and the Finnish school and contested by other Luther scholars; Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection has been compared to it with more agreement. Second, both traditions are correcting the same popular error, and it is the error your congregation almost certainly holds. Most people imagine heaven as a pleasant place containing God among other amenities. Both the beatific vision and theosis say that God is not a feature of the destination. He is the destination, and everything else in the new creation is the setting in which he is enjoyed.

Start with what the new creation says backwards about the present one. The God who makes the world new is the God who made it in the first place, and he does not correct his own work by discarding it. The body is raised rather than shed. The earth is the object of the liberation in Romans 8 rather than the thing escaped from. The city comes down here. Put those together and you have the claim that the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of the last things are one doctrine held at two ends, which is why a theologian's eschatology is usually a reliable guide to what he thinks matter is for.

Now the charge, at its strongest, because it is a serious one and dismissing it is the wrong response. The charge is that Christian eschatology teaches people that this world is temporary and doomed, and that people who believe this are predictably less willing to invest in its long-term repair: less interested in conservation, in institutions, in slow work whose fruit is decades away. The charge is made in print and it has been tested. David Barker and David Bearce published a study in Political Research Quarterly in 2013, under the title End-Times Theology, the Shadow of the Future, and Public Resistance to Addressing Global Climate Change, reporting that belief in an imminent second coming predicted lower support for policies whose benefits arrive decades away. A student should treat one survey as one survey, and should also notice that the finding is exactly what the charge predicts. And it has a historical basis that a Christian teacher should concede rather than contest: there have been preachers who said, in terms, that polishing the brass on a sinking ship is a waste of effort, and there have been congregations who acted on it.

The answer is not a denial. It has three parts and all three come from texts. First, the command stands regardless of the outcome. Genesis 2:15 puts the man in the garden 'to cultivate and keep it', and that commission is never withdrawn. Psalm 24:1 says the earth is the LORD's, and the fullness thereof, which makes carelessness with it a property offence and not a matter of taste. Leviticus 25 gives the land itself a sabbath. Deuteronomy 20:19 forbids an army besieging a city to cut down its fruit trees, which is a law restraining a nation at war on behalf of trees. Proverbs 12:10 says a righteous man regards the life of his animal. None of those depends on how long the world lasts, and obedience to a command is not conditional on the permanence of the thing commanded.

Second, the texts point the other way. Revelation 11:18 says the time has come, among other things, 'to destroy those who destroy the earth', which is a sentence worth reading twice in an argument about whether eschatology licenses destruction. Romans 8:19 says the creation waits in eager expectation for the revelation of the sons of God, which makes Christians the people creation is waiting on rather than the people leaving. And third, there is 1 Corinthians 15:58, which is the conclusion Paul draws from the longest treatment of the resurrection in the New Testament: be steadfast and immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because your labor in the Lord is not in vain. The inference a first-century apostle drew from the resurrection of the body was not detachment. It was work.

Notice which reading the charge actually lands on, because the fair thing is to be exact. It lands hardest on the destruction reading of section 1 combined with a strict imminence. Those who hold the renewal reading have the most direct answer available, that the world being repaired is this one. But the destruction reading has an answer too, and it should be given rather than left out: obedience is owed to the Lord of the earth whether or not the earth endures, a nurse does not stop treating a patient because the patient will die, and Christians in that tradition have built hospitals and schools in enormous numbers. What is not available to anyone in this lesson is the sentence that it does not matter because it is all going to burn, and that sentence is what the charge is really about.

This is the last lesson of the track, so look back across eight modules. You began in Doing Theology, with what systematic theology is and what it is not, with revelation and scripture and the long argument about authority and tradition, and with the old definition of the discipline as faith seeking understanding. In God you worked whether God can be known at all, the attributes, the Trinity in the texts and then the Trinity in the creeds, and the God who acts. Creation and Providence, then Humanity and Sin, where you settled what a human being is and what went wrong, and where you did the work on monism and dualism that lesson 1 of this module leaned on. In Christ you took the incarnation and the two natures in one person, the work of the cross, the resurrection and exaltation, and the threefold office. In Salvation you did election, union with Christ, justification, sanctification, and perseverance and assurance, and you learned to state five traditions on each without caricaturing any. Then the Spirit and the Church. And then these five lessons on the last things.

Say plainly what you can now do that you could not. You can state a doctrine and produce the texts it rests on, rather than the texts your tradition quotes. You can state a position you disagree with in a form its own defenders would recognise, which is a rarer skill than it sounds and is the whole test of whether this course has worked. You can tell the difference between what the church has settled and what it has not, and you can say which councils and confessions have spoken and what they actually said, which is a different thing from what they are reported to have said. You can spot the moment when a teacher's own tradition is being presented as the plain sense of scripture. And you can hold a conviction and its strongest alternative in your head at the same time without panic, which is the condition of being teachable for the rest of your life.

Now what you owe the people you will teach. The first thing is that none of this is yours. The doctrines you can now state are the church's, held before you and after you, and you received them from people you will never meet. The second is that a great many of them were settled at real cost, and a teacher who presents them as a tidy inheritance has hidden the price. Athanasius was driven into exile five times over a single word in the creed you now recite from memory. Men and women were burned in the sixteenth century, on both sides, for convictions about the supper and about the authority that settles such things. Anabaptists were drowned by other Protestants. Tyndale was strangled and burned for putting the New Testament into English so that a ploughboy could read what you now read on a screen. Churches in the East survived for centuries under rulers who forbade them to teach. Every one of those people handed something forward at a price, and the reason to state a doctrine accurately is that somebody paid for the accuracy.

The third thing you owe them is harder, and it is the discipline this whole course has been trying to build. Where the church is genuinely divided, hold it open honestly rather than closing it for the sake of tidiness. You have seen the temptation at close range in this module: four millennial positions and three doctrines of hell, and it would have been so much easier to tell you which one wins. It would also have been a lie, and a lie with a delayed fuse, because the student who is handed a manufactured consensus discovers the truth eventually, usually from someone hostile, usually at the worst possible moment, and what he loses then is not just the doctrine but his confidence that he was ever told the truth about anything. Hold your own convictions, and you should have them. Tell your people which are the church's settled teaching, which are your tradition's judgement, and which are your own best reading of an argument that is still running. They can carry that distinction. They cannot carry being deceived for their own good.

And one last thing, which is where forty lessons have been going. Every question in this track arrived in the church because a human being needed an answer to it. Somebody wanted to know whether the God who made the world was the God who died on a cross. Somebody wanted to know whether she was forgiven. Somebody stood at a grave and asked where her husband was, and somebody else asked whether her son was in hell, and the whole apparatus of creeds and councils and confessions exists because the church decided those questions were worth getting right. You are now able to answer them more carefully than most people who will ever be asked. Use that the way it was meant to be used. The end of this course is not that you can win an argument about eschatology. It is that when somebody in real trouble asks you what is finally going to happen, you can tell them the truth, tell them honestly what is not known, and point them at the one who is coming, whose kingdom will have no end, and who says, on the last page of the book, that he is making all things new.