“Behold,
I am making all things new”
Revelation 21:5
Revelation 21:5
(Anyone)
fortunate enough to be catechized into (Christian) Orthodoxy rather than
(something other than orthodoxy), he would surely have been told that salvation
is cosmic in scope and includes all creation; that the promised Kingdom of God
will be nothing but this world restored and transfigured by the glory of God, in
its every dimension, vegetal, animal , rational, and social; and that a
deified humanity will serve therein as a cosmic priesthood, receiving that glory
from Christ and mediating it to the natural world. He would also undoubtedly
have encountered the now quite standard eschatological motif of the redeemed
cosmos as the burning bush: pervaded by the divine glory, but unconsumed—an
infinitely realized theophany.
Now,
this may be just so much fabulous Oriental flummery but, for what it is worth,
it is also quite literally the only eschatology on offer in Scripture—not,
moreover, in the occasional fugitive metaphor, or as a collection of vague
images, or in disparate hints and fragments, but as a quite explicit theology,
reiterated again and again, from the prophets, through the Gospels, right to the
end of Revelation (when, rather than the saints ascending to the Empyrean, the
New Jerusalem descends to earth). So perhaps one can be forgiven for concluding
that the eschatological language of the New Testament is more than a congeries
of mythic ciphers: that Christ really is the “savior of the cosmos” and
“of all creation”; that the “glory” for which creation in its labor
pains expectantly “groans” will be revealed when creation is “liberated
from decay”; that the general resurrection will bring about the “glorious
freedom” of all creation; that there really will be a “restoration of all
things,” “a new heaven and a new earth,” when “everything in heaven and
on earth” will be “subordinated to”—“hierarchically arranged
below”—the Son, and through him the Father, and God will be “all in
all.”. . . . .
.
. . . . certain things are not open
to debate. From the New Testament and the apostolic age, we have inherited only
one vision of the consummation of all things in Christ: that of a cosmic
restoration in the age to come, a new heaven and a new earth, paradise regained
and perfected (whose biblical depiction insistently includes the mineral,
vegetal, and animal realms). Is it true? . . . . . All that can be said with
certainty is that no other promise has been given, and so any eschatology that
cannot truly accommodate that vision cannot be regarded as credibly Christian.
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