The Church – The Israel of God and The New Creation

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but a new creation. And as many as walk according to this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God.  (Galatians 6:15-16)

In Galatians 6 St. Paul speaks about the Israel of God and the New Creation.  The Israel of God in this case refers to the Church, the Body of Christ.  St. Paul did believe that Christian believers were the Israel of God – not the New Israel (as versus the Old), but the continuation of the only Israel of God.  St. Paul does not use the phrase the “new Israel” but does believe that in Christ we are a new creation.  As Sergius Bulgakov wrote:  “The end of the world is not physical but metaphysical. In reality, the world does not end but is transfigured into a new being, into a new heaven and a new earth. ”  It is not just Jews or Christians who are renewed and transfigured but the entire cosmos.   St. Paul (and the entire New Testament) also does not use phrases like “True Israel” or “True Faith” when speaking about the Christian Church.  Actually the Church’s claim to be the “True Faith” is based upon the idea that we have received a true understanding of Christ and the world.  It is Christ as Truth that makes Orthodoxy true and the fullness of the truth.  “The greatest gift of Orthodoxy is its conviction of being the true faith, that is, a way of faith and life which possesses and proclaims the truth as a gift of God. At the heart of this awesome claim is Christ Himself who said; “I am the way, the truth and the life” (Jn 14:6). Based on the truth of the person and saving work of Christ, the Apostles and Church Fathers have bequeathed to Orthodox Christians a remarkably coherent and universal vision of truth pertaining to God, man, creation, salvation, Church, ethics, society, family, marriage, vocations, and so on.”        (Theodore G. Stylianopoulos, The Way of Christ)

A New Creation

“Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come”   (2 Corinthians 5:17).

The parousia takes place not in this world but upon a new earth and under a new heaven. The present world, this heaven and this earth, will not see Christ again. The parousia is therefore not an event in the life of this world, and even less is it one of this world’s events. Rather, it is an accomplishment that entirely transforms the life of this world as well as that of the humanity that passes through resurrection. The appearance of Christ in heaven … seen simultaneously in all places by all of humankind, is, or course, only a symbolic figure of what the helpless language of our spatiality and temporality cannot describe or express. This only means that the entire world and all humankind will be penetrated by the appearance of Christ; it will be visible and palpable to them.  Let us add that He will appear not only to human kind but also to the angels, including, in their own manner, the fallen spirits, for whom the Lord’s coming will signify, first of all, the expulsion form the world of the prince of this world as well as their own expulsion … the coming of Christ in glory. What does glory mean in this case?  It is clearly opposed to kenosis, to the coming of Christ in humility.     (Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb)

Christ the New Adam, Not the new Moses or Abraham

As I was driving to the Orthodox Mission and Evangelism Conference, I was listening to Luke Timothy Johnson’s lectures on St. Paul put out by the Teaching Company. 

One point Johnson made which really captured my attention is that St. Paul describes Jesus as the new Adam,  not as a new Moses or new Abraham, not a new Jew or the new Israelite, but a new human being. 

“Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.  But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual.  The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven.  As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven.  Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven”  (1 Corinthians 15:45-49 NRSV).

This is crucial because St. Paul sees Christ as creating something new for the entire human race not just for Jews or even for believers.  St. Paul takes the lesson all the way back to the beginning of creation and to the “first Adam.”   Now Christ has come as the new Adam.    Even the flood wiping out humanity except for Noah and family on the ark could not bring about something so totally new.  Humanity remained sinful even after the flood.  But in Christ God has created the first new Adam, the new human being for His world. 

“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”   (2 Corinthians 5:17)

St. Paul begins interpreting the Torah in the light of the new Adam, the new human being, the new creation.  The Torah as understood by the Jews was really only for and about the Jews.  St. Paul realizes God’s plan is for the salvation of the world.   The new Adam is not interpreted in the light of the Torah.  Rather, with God beginning a new creation and a new humanity even the Torah must be newly understood.   Basically its role has been fulfilled in Christ.  Now we do not need to simply follow the Torah keeping laws which are external to us, now we are transfigured and transformed in Christ – the Torah is no longer needed.

St. Paul understands this “last Adam” or the new Adam, Jesus Christ, connecting all of humanity to God.  Thus St. Paul

Christ both creates Adam and recreates a new Adam

focuses his apostolic work on the Gentiles because he sees the Gospel message as coming for the entire world – for all of humanity.  So he goes to the Gentiles because he understands the Jews are part of the people/nations of the world and Christ has come to create a new creation in which the new people of God are not just part of humanity (a remnant), namely, the Jews, but rather include all of humanity.   The people/nations of the world were not part of the Jews, but in Christ God is recreating the world so as to make all humans to be His people.    St. Paul comprehends the new creation in Christ is for all human beings – the Jewish role to be light to the world (Isaiah 42:6) has been realized in Christ.    And in Christ all peoples of the world are now included in God’s plan of salvation.

“He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it”   (Ephesians 2:15-16).

In Christ there is a true fulfillment of the promise to Abraham that all of the nations of the world would be blessed through him.

Evolution from Creation to New Creation (3)

This is part 3 and the conclusion of my blog which began with Evolution from Creation to New Creation (1), and then continued in Evolution from Creation to New Creation (2).       These three blogs are all my own ruminations upon the book by Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett EVOLUTION FROM CREATION TO NEW CREATION: CONFLICT, CONVERSATION AND CONVERGENCE.

Peters and Hewlett examine the various responses that believers have and can take to evolution from the viewpoint of biblical creationists, to intelligent design adherents, to theistic evolutionists.   They pose Five Questions for which they feel Theistic Evolutionists must be willing to give account in order to have a believable, credible and defensible position of arguing that science and theology are compatible (pp 117-118).   Their five questions summarized are these:

1)     Can theology accept “that it has taken life 3.8 billion years to develop on a 4.5-billion-year-old planet”?

2)   “Can theology accept that contingency, randomness, and chance characterize the process of speciation”…?

3)    “Can theological anthropology incorporate the evidence that biological continuity between human life and all other forms of life exists … “?

4)    How does God act in time?

5)    Can theological affirmations of divine love and omnipotence by reconciled with the fact that animals suffer because of predators, disease and disaster, and the fact that 98 percent of all species have perished?

For believers to present a credible scientific understanding of creation they must be willing to address head on the violence in nature which so troubled Darwin: “to see violence, suffering, and death as merely natural and hence value-neutral—represents a failure of theological nerve.  … From the theological point of view, we simply cannot let science alone define what is natural or, worse, redefine violence, suffering, and death as value neutral.”  If God is all powerful and all good how can one explain the violence and suffering which is obvious in nature, and not just in sinful human beings?    If God could intervene and change the world, why doesn’t He?   Is violence natural and inherent in creation, or do we have free will which enables us to aspire to something greater than our biologically determined selves? 

There is no doubt in the Orthodox tradition at least that many saints were greatly troubled by these questions, and they wept for a creation that had been so distorted by the sinfulness of humanity.   The condition of the world at times seems so hellish that it is hard to imagine that God can see any good in it at all.  And yet He does.  Certainly Christianity sees the answer to these questions and the purpose of the world itself being found in the “bigger picture” which is beyond the limits of space and time.   There is a logic to the universe which is not a human logic and so we cannot grasp the entire purpose nor see the entire picture.  We are limited by space and time.   And through the dense shroud which suffering imposes on our ability to see, we still perceive glimpses of beauty, order and design in the universe.   We long for the entire picture to be revealed, but that requires us to move into dimensions which are not yet ours to perceive.  Peters and Hewlett write:

 

Darwinius

“Each moment God imparts openness to the future that releases the present from bondage to past causes.  God’s creative activity is never ceasing; each moment the entire physical universe is given its existence in such a way that it is open toward what comes next.  This ceaseless future-giving by God explains why the laws of nature cannot grip nature in rigid determinism.” 

 

Biology would say we live within the limits imposed upon us by genetic determinism.  We are made in the image of our ancestors whose genes determine our current behavior.  Christian theology would deny genetic pre-determinism and says, yes we bear the genetic traits passed down to us through the billions of year that life has been evolving on this planet.  However we have been endowed by our Creation with His image and likeness which means we can aspire to something greater than our biological limitations.  We have not only a past but also a future, all of which are part of God’s plan even if that is hidden from our understanding.

“Once we apprehend that God intends a future, our task is to discern as best we can the direction of divine purpose and employ that as an ethical guide.  When we invoke the apocalyptic symbol of the New Jerusalem, where ‘crying and pain will be no more,’ then this will inspire and guide the decisions we make today that will affect our progeny tomorrow.”  

Chaos theory and quantum mechanics have caused us to realize that there are relationships in the universe which we do not understand and apparently cannot ever know: not because we lack the instrumentation but because it cannot be known.  The world is far more complicated and interrelated than is commonly imagined.   There are patterns in nature  and paradigms in logic which we have not yet discovered – both micro- and macro-.  There also are interrelationships which because of the limits of space and time and of our own one-sidedness,  the tiny place we occupy in the vast universe, we can never see.  Thus the logic as to why things happen the way they do remain obscure to us in our limited knowledge and vision.

According to these modern theories even the flapping of a butterfly in the rain forest can affect the weather – there is so much that we cannot know or understand about the universe we occupy.  If it is true that the tiniest of events (the micro) can alter the macro events of the world, it means that God does not have to do spectacular interventions in world history to affect its course.   He too can gently nudge His creation by doing the smallest of things.  All He has to do is be patient and let time take its course in working out His will.  So the vastness of both space and time are not wasted, but rather are the very canvasses upon which God gently and with the greatest regard for the free will of His creatures influences the design which He is creating.

Evolution from Creation to New Creation (2)

This is part two of my blog Evolution from Creation to New Creation.   It is the continuation of Evolution from Creation to New Creation (1).       The previous blog, this one and the next are all my own ruminations upon the book by Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett EVOLUTION FROM CREATION TO NEW CREATION: CONFLICT, CONVERSATION AND CONVERGENCE.  

Peters and Hewlett do not think evolutionary theory is inherently atheistic.  However, Darwin in his research became increasingly troubled by the claims of theistic Christianity about an omniscient and loving Creator God.  “Darwin… observed in the natural world: laws by which the predator devoured the prey and a history in which 98 percent of all species had become extinct before the modern era.  Such waste, Darwin thought, could not be reconciled with a God of purpose or design or compassion.  Without positively advocating atheism, Darwin could not ascribe the creation of this biological world to a divine designer.”     Darwin wrote: 

“There seems to me too much misery in the world.  I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae  [insects whose larvae are usually internal parasites of other insect larvae] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.” 

Darwin’s doubts and troubled soul are the result of his own sensitive nature and in fact are common to any thinking believer.   There are aspects of life in this world which are incredibly harsh and very difficult to reconcile with ideas of a merciful, loving, all knowing and all powerful God.  His words are not coming from a heart that hates God, but from one that is deeply troubled by the reality he sees around himself and yet wants to reconcile with a faith in God.    He obviously could not rationalize away the ravages of death and suffering which he could observe in the natural world.   

I can say from experience, having at one point in my life considered myself an atheist, that his thoughts and doubts are very rational.    They reflect very strongly pleas and lamentations one can read in our Scriptures in the Psalms:  Where is God, why is He silent?  Why does evil prosper and the innocent suffer?     Focusing on these questions certainly causes one to doubt that God is anything like what the Church proclaims.  On the other side of the equation however – in a universe without God – there is just as much suffering, pain, violence, but without a God the suffering and sorrow of the world lacks any true purpose or meaning and there is nothing ultimate for or in which to hope.   For believers, God offers the hope that there is some greater meaning and purpose to the suffering and sorrow that we experience in our daily lives.  For the believer we each experience but one piece of the puzzle which is life in this universe and we do not yet see the whole picture:  the tapestry is still being woven, God is still telling the story which He began when He first spoke creation into existence.  In the end the universe is proven not to be purely random, irrational, meaningless and hopeless, for the final chapter in which the entire story of the universe is revealed is found in the words, or the Word, proceeding from the mouth of the Creator. 

As Peters and Hewlett describe evolution it is not in the writings of Darwin that we find an absolute embrace of atheism.   The equating of evolution with atheism has been promoted by neo-Darwinists who embrace a particular materialistic and even nihilistic ideological philosophy which they termed as a “naturalistic fallacy.”   It is this neo-Darwinian synthesis which completely emphasizes chance and denies purpose toward some goal in evolution.  However, as Peters and Hewlett note, some  evolutionary biologists in promoting ideas such as the “selfish gene” are really arguing that “Nature is nihilistic  on every matter except genetic survival.”  Peters and Hewlett argue that these scientists suddenly move away from absolute adherence to the scientific method and promote as science something which is a philosophical assumption and bias – an idea based on faith not on scientific proof.

When challenged that his theory would lead to further atheism, Darwin himself reminded his contemporaries:  “… remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, ‘as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.’”    Darwin simply pointed out what had become true in Western Europe – an increased conflict between science and religion with religionists being always quick to reject every scientific truth as a threat to religion.   True science is no threat to true religion as both seek the truth about the universe, and the bottom line is there is not a scientific truth which is not Christian, because truth is truth.

In the next blog in this series I will look at what Peters and Hewlett describe as the five questions theistic scientists must be able and willing to answer in order to show that science and religion are not necessarily in opposition to one another. 

Evolution from Creation to New Creation (3).

Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? (2)

This is the continuation of my blog  Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? (1).    In this blog I am reflecting on Denis Alexander’s book CREATION OR EVOLUTION: DO WE HAVE TO CHOOSE?     The answer to the book title’s question for Alexander and for my self is “no, we don’t have to choose because the two are opposed only if one demands only a literalist reading of Genesis 1-3 or if one is an atheist.”

There is a certain difficulty for Christians in accepting a notion that Adam and Eve were created as eternal beings not subject to death, for this would imply that that Adam and Eve had some kind of existence apart from earth and were not created from real dirt/dust and that life in Paradise was not subject to the same scientific law as we are today.   For example if Adam and Eve ate fruit in Eden, were the cells and plants subject to death or not?     If they had made fig leaf garments before the fall, would they garments also have been eternal?   Were all fish, amphibians and insects completely vegan and not predators or parasites?    It would imply that Adam and Eve were angelic beings who fell to earth from some other kind of place because of sin and not because God created them with bodies.  It would imply that this world is not God’s creation but a lesser world destined for beings beneath God’s dignity.  This is Babylonian cosmology but not a Biblical one; certainly this would be an idea that the Jews and Genesis would argue against as Genesis 1 unlike the Babylonian creation stories has a good God making a good creation.   Genesis 2 admittedly is more ambivalent on the goodness of creation for there is a serpent already in Paradise and a fruit that if eaten leads to death.

Alexander however sticks with his Genesis-Jeremiah notion that the Biblical story is not meant to be read as science but rather offers a cosmological understanding of creation in which ultimately “Physical death has no place in the fulfilled kingdom of God, the new heavens and the new earth.”   Sin and death are part of this world, but this world is only a small part of the entire story which God is telling beginning with Genesis.   For Alexander the coming of Christ is inaugurating that hoped for new age in which the rules of nature (which science studies) have no final say:  the healing ministry of Jesus points not back to a pre-fallen state but looks forward to the new heaven and new earth.   The Bible’s account of creation from Genesis to Revelation is thus not intended to be science but rather God revealing His own plan which gives this world meaning which is outside of the study of science.  To try to force the Scriptures to be science is in fact to limit them and reduce them to this world rather than tying this world into the world to come.

Turning to look at some scientific concepts which are part of an evolutionary worldview, Alexander notes, “The term ‘survival of the fittest’ has sometimes been used to describe natural selection, but is not very accurate because survival is not really the main point in this process… the key point about natural selection is the successful reproduction that ensures that an individual’s genes are passed on to the next generation.”   The concept of “survival of the fittest” has been co-opted by secular social scientists and political ideologues and used for all kinds of purposes that are far removed from the original idea of natural selection.   Natural selection is a creative and life giving process not a political justification for oppressing the weak.

Alexander also notes that there are philosophical assumptions at the basis of evolution which are a matter of faith.   “Chance is simply a handy description that we humans use for our beliefs about the properties of matter.  There is no such agent as ‘metaphysical chance’, but there is the human belief held by some people that the universe has no ultimate meaning.”  In other words chance is a concept we put apply to how we perceive natural selection working.  The reality is we cannot know scientifically whether events we perceive of as chance are part of a pattern and plan that we cannot detect. 

“Evolutionary history on this planet displays overall increased complexity, genomic constraint and convergence.  …   an ‘atheism-of-the-gaps’ type of argument in which atheists seek to support their disbelief in God based on interpretations of scientific data which appear initially plausible due to lack of knowledge about the data, but appear less believable as our understanding of the process –  in this case the evolutionary process – become more complete.”

It is not only believers who have to choose faith in a God who guides the universe.  For non-believers “chance” is just as much an issue of belief because there is no way to prove that events are random rather than part of a pattern we cannot detect.

Alexander is a Christian believer, a theist and a scientist, whose writings have won him praise from evangelical Christians as well as from scientists.  He has not embraced the ideas of Intelligent Design because he feels that is an “argument from ignorance” – because we currently don’t know how complexity could emerge spontaneously does not mean that it can’t or didn’t.  It only means our ability to know is limited.  This however is the same argument he applies to atheistic scientists – we do not have the complete picture about God and His role in creation and so concluding there is no God is an assumption based in incomplete evidence. 

Next:  Evolution from Creation to New Creation (1) 

Begbie: The Flourishing of Humans in the New Creation

 This is the 3rd and final blog in a three part series which began with Resounding Truth: Music and the Flourishing of Humankind, followed by  Truth, Postmodernism and Materialism.   These three blogs all look at Jeremy Begbie’s book RESOUNDING TRUTH:  CHRISTIAN WISDOM IN THE WORLD OF MUSIC.   I first mentioned this book some months ago in my blog  “Seeing” with our Ears is Believing  and these blogs are the follow up to that original blog.

 In the first blog I wrote about what originally impressed me so much with Begbie’s writing – how using our ears to envision the world can help us understand such ideas as the Holy Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) and in what manner we can have an ominpotent God and yet have free willed human beings.    In the 2nd blog I worte about Begbie’s ideas of how our current age so influenced by certain philosophical assumptions has lost sight of what freedom is and how humans actual flourish when they live within certain constraints.  In this last blog I will let Begbie speak for himself about how he envisions the truth of Christianity revealing both the nature of God and the nature of creation.   I will offer my own apologies to Dr. Begbie who wrote a book about music, yet I made relatively little use of his many interesting pages of text on music and music history.   Not being schooled in music, my intereste in his writings were not in musiciology but in how he helped me to see the world.

Insofar as creation has been held back, infected, and disordered by evil, there will be redemption, a transfiguration.  This does not mean a return to Eden but a remaking of creation into a new state, purged of death and corruption, a final union with God not given in the beginning.  The prototype for this is Jesus Christ himself.  The one through whom all things have been created has become one of us.  He has entered the depths of cosmic disruption caused by sin.  In Jesus’s healing, his stilling of the stormy waters, his raising Lazarus from the dead, we see God coming as a creature to demonstrate within the created order his lordship over it, setting it free from the forces of chaos.  This is not violating creation but redirecting it toward its true end.  At Golgotha, Christ takes on himself the full force of the Father’s judgment on creation, absorbing the horrific impact of evil and disorder, and on the third day, with death defeated, created matter reaches its final, glorious form – the uncontainable radiance of Jesus’s resurrection body.  Easter meets Genesis.  Like our bodies, which will be changed from physical to spiritual bodies while still remaining bodies, creation will be remade by the covenant God who promised never to let it go.   …  God has not simply destroyed evil (still less explained it), but he has placed himself under its power and disorder in order to wrest out of fallen creation a new creation.  In Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, we see our humanity made new; in him, we see physical matter transformed.  In him we have a pledge that one day all things will be refashioned afresh, ‘set free from its bondage to decay’  (Rom. 8:21)—such is the dazzling outlook to which even now we are being led, when the thin veil separating heaven and earth will finally be removed and creation made totally transparent to the living God.   …  The world is designed to flourish in its otherness.  Once again, Christ himself is the prototype.  When he rose and ascended, his physical humanity did not dissolve into God; it reached its proper destiny as created matter.  Creation is not heading for a dissolution into a sea of divinity, like a drop of wine in an ocean…. This kind of love, embodied supremely in Christ, is the love with which God loves his creation. Ultimately, this is rooted in the Trinity.  Simply put:  the way God relates to the world and treats the world reflects who God is in himself.              (pp 197-198)

The Ascension: Believers, Get Your Heads out of the Clouds

 In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen.  After his suffering, he showed himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.  On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about.  For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”   So when they met together, they asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”  He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.  But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”  After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.  They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them.  “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”   (Acts 1:1-12)

One popular idea that many people profess is that we all are going to “die and go to heaven.”  This is an idea of which New Testament Scholar N.T. Wright tries to disabuse believers  (See almost any of his books or my blog The Resurrection: Life Beyond Life After Death).   I would offer that the Feast of the Ascension also does not support a “die and go to heaven” version of Christianity either. 

If Jesus was mostly interested in heaven, it is strange that He taught His followers how to live on earth, and then left His disciples on earth with work to do.  Why did Jesus spend time discipling His followers and then later convince them He had risen from the dead if all that was was important was to get them to heaven?  Why didn’t He simply take His few disciples with Him and abandon the fallen earth to its own devices?

It seems to me that Christ had an interest in a new heaven and a new earth, not in abandoning the original earth but saving and recreating the existing one.    Even if we think back to the story of the great flood in Genesis 6-8, God did not utterly annihilate creation into non-existence and create from nothing again.  Rather the story is that He tried to uproot all wickedness from the existing creation and fully intended to repopulate the earth and use the existing cleansed creation to accomplish His will.  Heaven was not the goal of God, but an earth on which His will was done as it is done in Heaven. 

The Lord Jesus had an interest in convincing His disciples that He had risen from the dead because He fully intended them to continue living on earth.  And on earth, they and we are to be His witnesses.  And to what are we witnessing?  The resurrection from the dead – in other words restoration to the world from which death has taken us.   Christ did not simply die and go to heaven, He destroyed death and was bodily resurrected from the dead.  Apparently Christ thought the body and this world was part of God’s plan of salvation.  Jesus did not abandon the world or His body, but He redeemed them, recreated them.  He invites us in baptism and the Eucharist to participate in and become part of that renewed creation.  

Baptism with the Holy Spirit is not so much for life in the world to come, but for continued life in this world as His witnesses!  We need the Holy Spirit to help us live in this new creation, and to empower us to be His witnesses to the rest of the world.  None of this has to do with exiting this world, but rather has to do with how to live in this world.

Note that the apostles were interested in the restoration of the kingdom of Israel – that was their idea of “other worldliness.”    They assumed this world was passing away and the Kingdom of God would be the same as Israel restored as a Kingdom.   But Christ’s answer to them is “get your heads out of the clouds!”   “Don’t worry about restoration and future times and heavenly places.  You have work to do on earth and the Holy Spirit is going to empower you to do it!”  Christ tells the apostles the time of the restoration is not their concern – their real concern is how to witness to Christ’s resurrection.  The place of the apostles is on earth as Christ’s witnesses and their work is with the people of earth to bring them to a knowledge of God’s truth.

Jesus tells them (and us) that we are to be witnesses to the very ends of the earth.  Notice He doesn’t mention anything about getting to heaven.  Our work is on earth, throughout the earth, to the ends of the earth.   Christ’s Great Commission in Matthew 28, also tells us to make disciples of all nations.  Our work is on earth and this is what we must focus on.  It doesn’t matter when Christ may come again, that doesn’t change what we must be doing every day while we still have time on earth.

On the very day Christ ascended into heaven, even the angels tell the apostles (and us) to quit gawking into heaven as their and our work is on earth.   What we need is not Heaven but the Holy Spirit because Jesus is coming back!    Our role is to do on earth God’s will as it is done in heaven, which is not the same as saying we need to do God’s will in heaven.  We cannot skip the earth or our life here, but rather are to do His work and will on this planet: to be His witnesses, to talk not only about Christ’s death but also about His resurrection.  We have to get our heads out of the clouds of heaven and castles in the sky in order to carry out Christ’s mission on earth.   The Feast of the Ascension is very much a call to all of us to be ministers of the Gospel, to be the Church, to make disciples of all nations by being witnesses to what God has done in and through His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Resurrection: Life Beyond Life After Death

Christ is risen from the dead,

Trampling down death by death,

And upon those in the tombs bestowing life!

 Many Christians have seized upon Jesus’s resurrection as the sign that there really is “life after death.” This tends to confuse things. Resurrection isn’t a fancy way of saying “going to heaven when you die.” It is not about “life and death” as such. Rather, it’s a way of talking about being bodily alive again after a period of being bodily dead. Resurrection is a second-stage postmortem life: “life after ‘life after death.’”…But interestingly, none of the resurrection stories in the gospels or in the book titled Acts of the Apostles (more colloquially called   simply Acts) speaks of the event proving that some kind of afterlife exists. They all say, instead: “If Jesus has been raised, that means that God’s new world, God’s kingdom, has indeed arrived and that means we have a job to do. The world must hear what the God of Israel, the creator God, has achieved through his Messiah.”…From that point of view, as the Eastern Orthodox churches have always emphasized, when Jesus rose again God’s whole new creation emerged from the tomb, introducing a world full of new potential and possibility.  (N.T. Wright, Simply Christian)

Our Paschal Hymn tells us that Christ is risen from the dead not risen from death.  What is the difference?   Death is what happens to all living creatures – all living creatures have a beginning and an end which is death.  In Christian thinking what happens to humans after death?  They do not go out of existence but rather become part of the dead – they continue to exist in the realm of the dead (The realm of the dead in  Hebrew is “Sheol”,  in Greek  “Hades.”)   On Holy Saturday we commemorate Christ’s descent to this place of the dead (Ephesians 4:9, Romans 10:7) where he “rests” with the dead before arising to the new life which inaugurates the new creation (1 Peter 4:6). 

In singing that Christ is risen from the dead we are affirming that there is continued existence after death – “life after death” thus refers to our existence among the dead.  We affirm that Christ descended into the realm of death and filled that realm with His life.  He existed with the dead but then bodily was resurrected from among the dead into new life in the renewed creation.    The important note for us is that this affirms that all of those who have died still exist (Jesus says, God the God of the living not of the dead.   He refutes the misunderstanding of his contemporaries who think death is final and that “the dead” do not exist.   The dead exist and therefore have life Jesus teaches in Matthew 22:23-33, so they can be resurrected.  Resurrection is not calling them out of non-existence back into existence, but rather restoring bodily life to those who have been separated from their bodies – their bodies died and were returned to the earth, but their souls continued existing among the dead.)  

When we die, we too go to the place of the dead which is now filled with the light and life of Christ (Revelations 14:13).  Death can no longer hold the dead captive.  We are freed from being eternal prisoners to death and now can rejoice with Christ while still awaiting our own resurrection.   For Christians we have already descended with Christ to the place of the dead in our own baptisms (Romans 6).  We are now alive in Christ and death no longer holds us captive (Romans 14:8, 1 Thessalonians 5:10).   When we physically die we will be with Christ, even though in the place of the dead.  There we will joyfully await the final resurrection in which the last enemy death is completely annihilated (1 Corinthians 15:26).   Thus we need not fear death, for even death itself will not separate us from the love of Christ (Romans 8:38-39). 

 ”Very truly, I tell you, the hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. … Do not be astonished at this; for the hour is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice  and will come out—those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation.”  (John 5:25,28-29)

The Church Does Not Exist for Heaven

THE APOSTLES

In the season from Pascha to Pentecost, our daily Scripture readings include lessons from the Acts of the Apostles.  The original disciples of Christ – the Twelve, the Seventy, the Women disciples of the Lord – were joined by new believers and formed the Church.  The Church in the words of St. John Chrysostom is more important than heaven!

“Are you not aware of this, I ask you, that the Church is placed on earth but its life is lived in heaven? How does this emerge? The facts give clear proof; eleven disciples were under attack, and the whole world did the attacking; but those attacked had the victory, and the attackers were done away with. The sheep prevailed over the wolves; do you see the      shepherd sending the sheep amidst the wolves so that they would not achieve salvation even by flight? What sort of shepherd does this? Christ did it, however, to show you that good deeds are done not in the normal course of events but in defiance of nature and normal events. The Church’s roots, in fact, are stronger than heaven. But perhaps the Greek charges me with arrogance; let him await factual proof and learn the truth, how the sun would more easily be snuffed out than the Church disappear. Who proclaims this, you ask? Its founder; “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” Instead of simply making this promise, he actually brought it to fulfillment; after all, why did he give it a firmer foundation than heaven? The Church, you see, is more important than heaven. For what reason does heaven exist? For the Church, not the Church for heaven. Heaven is for the human being, not the human being for heaven. This is clear from what he actually did: Christ did not take up a heavenly body.”                                                                                                                      

Biblical scholar N.T. Wright frequently points out that the popular notion of “die and go to heaven” is not what the New Testament teaches.  Heaven and earth are not opposing places, but rather the New Testament envisions the earth becoming heaven – this is the point of the resurrection of Christ.   The New Testament is not proclaiming the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of the dead.  As he wrote in THE RESURRECTION OF THE SON OF GOD:

 “…the Messiah here is the truly human being, the fulfilment of God’s purposes in creation, now set in authority over the rest of the created order. There is no need to escape from the created order; the Messiah is its lord.  Nor is there any need to escape from earth to heaven; instead, the Messiah will come from heaven to earth, to rescue his people not by snatching them away from earth but by transforming their bodies.” 

“In Revelation 21 … the heavenly city comes down from heaven to earth.  That is what the narrative is all about.  As Christopher Rowland has insisted, the end of Revelation offers an ultimate rejection of a detached, other-worldly spirituality in favour of an integrated vision of a new creation in which ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’, the twin halves of created reality, are at last united.  Always intended for one another, they are by this means to be remade, and to become the place where the living god will dwell among his people for ever.”