This is the blog of Jack Kilcrease and the home of all new posts on theological topics.
The New Heavens and the New Earth: The Marriage Supper of the Lamb
The resurrected people of God will dwell in the New Heaven and New Earth. Contrary to popular Christian piety, the Bible does not envision humans floating away from the temporal order to an immaterial and disembodied heaven. Rather, Revelation describes the New Jerusalem as coming down from heaven (Rev. 21:2). The presence of God fills all creation as a cosmic Temple paralleling the way the Lord had earlier filled the Tabernacle/Temple. St. John records that the New Jerusalem, which will be like an arboreal Temple (i.e., a new Eden), will have no Temple. Rather, God and the Lamb will be its Temple (Rev. 21:22).1
Heaven is the Direct Presence of God
In this sense, it is not so much that humans leave earth for heaven, but that heaven and earth merge. Heaven is not a separate ontological realm, or physical created space. Instead, it is simply the unmediated presence of God. Daniel describes the ascension of the Son of Man as movement into the presence of the Ancient of Days (Daniel 7). Hebrews reinforces this point by noting that Jesus’s ascension into heaven is one into the presence of God (Hebrew 9:24). In the same epistle, the author reminds readers that heaven “is not a part of this creation” (Heb. 9:11). In other words, heaven is God’s direct and unmediated presence; it is not a distinct created realm.
Continue reading “The New Heavens and the New Earth: The Marriage Supper of the Lamb”The New Heavens and the New Earth: Annihilation or Renewal?
As St. Paul shows in 1 Corinthians 15, the risen Christ is the prototype for the new humanity. He exemplifies the “spiritual body” (soma pneumatikon)1 that believers will enjoy after their resurrection and judgment in the new heavens and the new earth. What God has prepared for the redeemed transcends human comprehension (1 Cor. 2:9). Therefore. for the most part, we must take the Bible’s descriptions of life in the redeemed state as metaphorical or analogical language.
Nevertheless, with regard to the resurrected body, we have a concrete example of what it will be like in the person of Jesus. Following the resurrection, Jesus displayed his glorified body and its capacities to the disciples, who then recorded these encounters in the Gospels. These accounts show that although the glorified body will remain physical, it will be mysteriously physical. Resurrected bodies will transcend the normal limitations of earthly bodies (1 Cor. 15:49).
Annihilationism?
Since the time of Luther, Lutheran theologians have disagreed about the nature continuity between the old and new creations. Some believed the new heavens and new earth would be the result of the destruction of the old creation and its replacement by a new creation. Others believed renewal of the original creation would form the new heavens and new earth would be.
Continue reading “The New Heavens and the New Earth: Annihilation or Renewal?”God’s Humbling Hiddenness and Revelation by Faith
Luther will guide our biblical explication of the God of the Gospel as both hidden and revealed. As we observed in an earlier section, both the pre-modern Greek and Latin theological traditions relied on a dialectic of “negation” (apophatic theology, via negativa) and affirmation (kataphatic theology, via positiva). Lowell Green has noted that Luther in his doctrine of God also relies on a form of affirmation and negation, albeit a radically different one.1 Luther’s affirmation is God hidden (negation) and God revealed (affirmation). As we will also see, one could also add God’s appearance under the law as negation, and gospel as affirmation.
It should be recognized that Luther’s concept of divine hiddenness is not just a matter of affirming that God is incomprehensible. Of course, all orthodox Christian theologians have claimed this one way or another. Rather, following the biblical data (Isa. 45:15), Luther is clear that God actively hides from his people.2 Why and how this is the case is something we will explore below.
Luther on Divine Hiddenness
How Luther talks about divine hiddenness is quite complicated because he applies the principle differently in different contexts. The British historian of Christian doctrine B.A. Gerrish has thematized these disparate statements of Luther into two kinds of hiddenness: Hiddenness 1, where God is hidden in his revelation, notably in Christ. Hiddenness 2, where God is hidden above and apart from revelation.3
Continue reading “God’s Humbling Hiddenness and Revelation by Faith”The Faithfulness of East and West: Post-Nicaea Rejection of Onto-Theology Part 2
The Eastern Theological Trajectory
The Cappadocians
The writings of the Cappadocian Father St. Gregory of Nyssa illustrate the Eastern theological trajectory. In the mid-Fourth century, Gregory confronted a Neo-Arian theologian named Eunomius.1 Beyond holding that the Son could not be homoousios with the Father because being “generated” and “not generated” would make God compounded of two realities and not simple,2 Eunomius also asserted an extremely crass version of onto-theology.3 According to Eunomius, God was as knowable as any other being and therefore easily intellectually dissected, a point which he based his early criticism of Nicene doctrine upon.4 This was also backed up with a strongly univocal conception of language.5
In response, Gregory noted that Eunomius was engaged in a category confusion. Being ingenerate and generate was not a property of the divine substance, but rather the persons within the common substance of divinity.6 The divine substance and the divine persons were two distinct, yet related realities. The personal relations within God spoke of the “howness” of God and were knowable from the common actions of the persons of the Trinity in the economy of salvation.
Nevertheless, contrary to the claims of Eunomius, the “whatness” of God in the form of the divine substance was unknowable, in this life or even the next.7 Hence, it was not part of the system of being, and it was not therefore subject to Eunomius’s logic chopping. In keeping with this view of the divine essence, Gregory of Nyssa composed a mystical text entitled The Life of Moses.
In this work, Moses’ ascension into the darkness of Sinai in Exodus 21 becomes a metaphor for Christian existence. Spiritual progress means an ever-increasing movement into the luminous darkness of the divine life.8 In this, Gregory rejects the notion that the soul is capable of ever spiritually beholding the divine essence, and therefore categorically denies what Western theologians have typically called the “beatific vision” (visio beatifica).9
Continue reading “The Faithfulness of East and West: Post-Nicaea Rejection of Onto-Theology Part 2”Our Sabbath Rest and Vocations in Christ
Throwback Post
In the Genesis 1, the pinnacle of creation occurred on the sixth day when God made humanity in his own image. Then on the seventh day God remained present with his very good creation and rested. God’s sixth-day creation and seventh-day rest pointed toward and paralleled the Son’s Incarnation as the ultimate gift of divine presence and rest. The Incarnation prefigures the destiny of the whole creation. At the end of Revelation, St. John writes that the whole creation has become a Tabernacle of the divine presence (Rev. 21:3, 21:22). This correlates well with Daniel’s promise that the Temple mount (i.e., the locus of the presence of the divine kavod) would permeate the whole of creation (Dan. 2:35).1
The promise of God’s communicative presence and divine rest are inexorably tied up with the promise of grace found in the gospel. The gospel is a unilateral gift and, as such, is an act of self-donation. To make an unconditional promise entails surrendering one’s being to the other. The one making the unconditional promise ceases to makes any conditions (i.e., the works of the law). As we have already seen, unconditional promise is also manifest in the covenantal imagery of marriage and its consummation (established in Genesis 1). This is why the Bible uses the image of the nuptial feast for the eschaton (Lk. 14:7-14, Rev. 19:6-9).
Continue reading “Our Sabbath Rest and Vocations in Christ”