This brings me to the topic of new creation. God created, and it was good. To truly love God's good creation as intended, we must despise all that threatens and destroys it. In the Apocalypse of John, when justice is being done, it was said that those who “destroy the earth” were to be judged.[1] While being careful not to read an anachronistic, post-modern, polluted and industrialized world back into the text, it is worth noting that if there were those guilty of “destroying” the earth then, how much guiltier are we today?
I have found that dualism,[2] as a theological paradigm, has caused a certain amount of damage in the faith community and has resulted in a negative impact upon the environment. Here is what I mean. When the hope of Christianity shifted from bodily resurrection on a renewed and renovated earth to a disembodied, ethereal escape into the heavens and outside of the physical world, the attitude toward the earth changed.
The old cliché, “it’s all going to burn” is a phrase I heard frequently growing up. When apocalyptic imagery of fire, brimstone and destruction pervades our eschatological motif and accompanies the idea of dualism, there remains little incentive for maintaining an attitude of remediation. The point is fixing, not fleeing. God is going to mend our broken, violent relationship with creation. Biblical prophecy is not only meant to be predictive, but also meant as a call to action by highlighting misconduct now in light of a future reality; inaugurated eschatology.
Jesus’ action – as ours should be – was in anticipation of a greater kingdom, where the defeat of chaos will be universal, throughout all of creation and to every creature. Christians are to be conquering people, howbeit not through the sword, violent measure or human strength, but as channels of mercy, love and grace which bring healing.
I will finish up this series in the next post, concluding with the new creation.
“The renewal of creation, the birth of the new world from the laboring womb of the old, will demonstrate that God is in the right . . . the New Testament invites us, then, to imagine a new world as a beautiful, healing community; to envisage it as a world vibrant with life and energy, incorruptible, beyond the reach of death and decay; to hold it in our mind's eye as a world reborn, set free from slavery of corruption, free to be truly what it was made to be.”[3]
I will finish up this series in the next post, concluding with the new creation.
[1] Rev 11:18; cf. 2 Bar 13:11.
[2] I am specifically referencing the dualistic notion of body/soul: humans are mortals that have spiritual experiences, not immortal spirits having human experiences. Bauckham touches on this: Richard Bauckham, The Bible and Ecology : Rediscovering the Community of Creation (Waco, TX.: Baylor University Press, 2010), 148-49, 171.
[3] N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (Downers Grove, IL.: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 118.
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