We will begin, then, with the creation of the world and with God its maker, for the first fact that you must grasp is this: the renewal of creation has been wrought by the self-same Word, who made it in the beginning. There is thus no inconsistency between creation and salvation; for the Father has employed the same agent for both works, effecting the salvation of the world through the same Word who made it first.
This book addresses two questions that have often been dealt with entirely separately but that, I passionately believe, belong tightly together. First, what is the ultimate Christian hope? Second, what hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present? And the main answer can be put like this. As long as we see Christian hope in terms of 'going to heaven,' of a salvation that is essentially away from this world, the two questions are bound to appear unrelated. Indeed, some insist angrily that to ask the second one at all is to ignore the first one, which is the really important one. This in turn makes some others get angry when people talk of resurrection, as if this might draw attention away from the really important and pressing matters of contemporary social concern. But if the Christian hope is for God's new creation, for 'new heavens and new earth,' and if that hope has already come to life in Jesus of Nazareth, then there is every reason to join the two questions together. And if that is so, we find that answering the one is also answering the other. I find that to many – not least, many Christians – all this comes as a surprise: both that the Christian hope is surprisingly different from what they had assumed and that this same hope offers a coherent and energizing basis for work in today's world (5).
These are important questions, and already now I'm starting to think about the large-scale implications of how we understand the hope he is talking about. I am looking forward to finding out how he answers the questions in more detail.
Although endnotes are a result of the Fall (footnotes are part of God's good, created order), some publishers continue to insist on using them. But the endnotes in Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew's book, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story, are often too good to ignore. In their discussion of the final act of redemptive history, they write of the ongoing tendency in Western Christianity to ignore the cosmic aspect of redemption, a problem stemming from the influence of Enlightenment philosophy, and one that narrows the scope of the gospel. In the quote below, I have embedded the endnotes; the bold sentences are the text in the manuscript, while the normal font is the endnote.
Too often our view of the future has emphasized solely the salvation of the individual person apart from the full creational and relational context in which human beings live their lives. It has been rightly noted that this narrowing of salvation in the West is the result of the powerful force of the Enlightenment worldview. Under its onslaught the gospel narrowed its scope. 'The early Christian belief (i.e., biblical) that the Fall and Redemption pertained not just to man, but to the entire cosmos, a doctrine already fading after the Reformation, now [under the power of secularism has] disappeared altogether: the process, if it had any meaning at all, pertained soely to the personal relation between God and man' (Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, 306-7). A. Koeberle writes that 'this cosmic aspect of redemption was increasingly lost to Western Christendom since the Age of Enlightenment, and to this day we have been unable to restore it to its strength and clarity' (quoted in G.C. Berkhouwer, The Return of Christ, 211). Often the whole of the biblical story seems to revolve around 'me.'... Lesslie Newbigin is critical of those who privatize 'this mighty work of grace and talk as if the whole cosmic drama of salvation culminates in the words 'For me; for me' (The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 179). Yet the vision of Revelation, indeed, the whole story of the Bible, leads us to look forward in hope to a creation restored to wholeness. Every facet of it is to be brought back to what God has intended for it. And within that glorious fullness and perfect wholeness, there is a place for us. Redemption is cosmic in its scope.
This has been a theme I've addressed before, and one I think that we still do not talk about enough. Our understanding of redemption has huge implications – for how we live in this world, for how we disciple other believers, and so on. Redemption extends as far as the curse of sin is found, and our witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ must reflect the holistic salvation he promises when he returns to consummate his Kingdom.
Numerous times I have expressed my concern for escapist theology on this blog, by which I mean the theology that anticipates complete destruction of the physical world and for God to take the souls of his people away to live with him for eternity in some sort of disembodied, spiritual existence. Aside from the fact that there is explicit biblical teaching to the contrary, it occured to me today that there is also a pattern in God's redemptive work in history that defies this all-to-common theological error.
God comes to us.
All throughout redemptive history, God comes to his people. It is never the reverse. God is the Creator, and we are the creatures, and we have no access to God unless he first reveals himself to us. An infinite gulf separates man from God, a gulf that only God can bridge.
God creates man, and comes to him to make a covenant with him (Gen. 2). When Adam and Eve fall into sin, God comes to them with a promise of redemption (Gen. 3:15). God comes to Abraham to make a covenant with him and to call to himself a people, Israel (Gen. 12:1-3; 17:1-8). The nation of Israel is led into slavery in Egypt, but God comes to bring them out Egypt (Ex. 20:2) and lead them through the desert into the Promised Land. God comes to dwell with his people in the tabernacle and later the temple (1 Kings 8:10-11), and in the most significant act of human history, God comes to dwell among his people in the person of Jesus Christ (John 1:14). After Jesus' ascension into heaven, God comes again in the Holy Spirit to be with his people (Acts 2:1-41). The pattern is the same, over and over: God comes, God comes, God comes.
The eschatological implications for this should be obvious – in the final act of redemptive history, Christ returning to consumate his Kingdom, God again comes to us. He comes to us that we might dwell with him forever. He comes to us to cleanse us from all sin and unrighteousness, to make us holy. He comes to us, as Paul writes in Philippians 3:21, to 'transform our lowly [bodies] to be like his glorious body.' He comes to us to make us complete in him, to be everything we are intended to be as images of God.
But there is more. Because Christ's return is the pinnacle of redemptive history, his salvation will then be complete and extend as far as the curse is found. His creation 'will be liberated from its bondage to decay' (Romans 8:21) – renewed, restored, and glorified. God comes to earth to reclaim his good creation, to free it from the strangling grip of sin and death, and to make all things new (this is beautifully portrayed in so many parts of Scripture, but particularly notable are Amos 9:11-15, Isaiah 62; 65:17-25, and, of course, Revelation 21-22).
God comes to us. Understanding this pattern is key because it impacts all aspects of our theology, our worship, and so much more. We serve a sovereign Lord, the Creator of heaven and earth. Let us rejoice in a God who comes to us, calls us his own, and dwells among us.
This is the time of year when we frequently hear the familiar old Advent and Christmas hymns. 'O Holy Night' is one of those favourites. The song was first composed by a Frenchman named Adolphe Adam in 1847, based on a poem by Placide Cappeau. A Unitarian minister, John Sullivan Dwight, arranged the composition that we best know today in the English-speaking world.
The first verse of the song speaks of sin and the coming of Christ to bring redemption. In the original French, the verse goes as follows (the literal English translation is in parentheses):
Minuit, chrétiens, c'est l'heure solennelle, (Midnight, Christians, it is the solemn hour,) Où l'Homme-Dieu descendit jusqu'à nous (When God-man descended to us) Pour effacer la tache originelle (To erase the stain of original sin) Et de Son Père arrêter le courroux. (And to end the wrath of His Father.) Le monde entier tressaille d'espérance (The entire world thrills with hope) En cette nuit qui lui donne un Sauveur. (On this night that gives it a Saviour.)
What is notable about the original wording of the song is its emphasis on sin affecting the entire world, and that the world 'thrills with hope' at the coming Saviour. This emphasis carries over in the translation most common to English speakers, where the third line of the first verse says, 'Long lay the world in sin and error pining,' and the fifth line reads, 'A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices.'
A couple of days ago, I heard a group of people singing this hymn, but in place of 'world' they used the word 'soul.' This caught me off-guard, on the one hand, because it was different from the lyrics I knew so well. Much more significantly, however, to understand the redemptive work of Christ only in terms of its effect on our soul is to miss a crucial aspect of the salvation Jesus brings. God did not send his Son into the world only to ensure that those who believe in him would one day have their souls taken away to a disembodied eternity in a far-off heaven.
No, the biblical idea of redemption is far greater than that. In their book, The Drama of Scripture, Mike Goheen and Craig Bartholomew note that God intended to redeem all of his creation:
When God set out to redeem his creation from sin and sin's effects on it, his ultimate purpose was that what we had once created good should be utterly restored, that the whole cosmos should once again live and thrive under his beneficent rule. In Jesus Christ that goal of cosmic redemption was first revealed and then accomplished (207).
Israel's longing for the Messiah was a longing for the one who would defeat sin and death and bring his Kingdom to rule over all of creation. No less is this our hope for today. We know that in Christ's death and resurrection, the promises of the covenant are guaranteed, but we wait with longing for his return and the consummation of his Kingdom. We too long for the day when he returns to restore his creation, and—to borrow an oft-quoted phrase from N.T. Wright—he sets the world to rights. We await the coming of the New Jerusalem, when all God's people will be gathered together to worship the sovereign King and live in a renewed and glorified creation where everything is as God intended it to be.
This is what the holy night long ago in Bethlehem was all about—the Incarnate God coming to bring a redemption that extends as far as the curse is found. If it is anything less, we have no reason to join in echoing the weary world's thrill of hope.
