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.
Heaven will descend to us and not we ascend to it. However, some may object that St. Paul describes believers as caught up into the air to meet Christ upon his Second Coming (1 Thess. 4:17). Nevertheless, as N.T. Wright has noted, in this passage Paul describes the procedure followed by Greco-Roman cities hosting the emperor. When referring to the second coming of Christ, the New Testament employs the technical term for a visit from an emperor or imperial official: Parousia. When such an imperial visit occurred, a delegation met the emperor outside the city and then returned to the city with him. Paul is saying that Jesus is the true ruler of the world, and so we will meet him in our resurrected state as we would a Roman Emperor.2
God’s Self-Donation in the Marriage Supper of the Lamb
We see through Holy Scripture that unconditional promises are by nature acts of self-gift. To make a promise to another is to place oneself at the disposal of another in order to fulfill the promise. Hence, the promise of marriage is sealed with consummation that involves the literal physical self-gift to the other. The protoevangelium found its final fulfillment in the full self-communication of God in the Incarnation and the cross. In a similar manner, the promise of justification is sealed by the reality of mystical union and the full self-donating presence of the risen Jesus in Word and Sacrament. Here he is quite literally gives himself to believers.
Given the self-donating pattern of God’s grace, the renewal of the final eschatological state of creation is supremely fitting. This renewal is a supreme and final self-gift of God, who fills the New Heaven and Earth. God’s final self-donation is an expansion and universalization of his presence in Eden in the protological state, in the Tabernacle/Temple in the Old Testament era, and finally in the Incarnation and the means of grace in the era of the New Testament.
Since the eschaton is the culmination of God’s self-gift in Christ, it is not surprising that the inspired writers of Scripture make frequent use of bridal imagery. Revelation describes the fulfillment of God’s eschatological purposes as the “marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:9). The bridal relationship between God and his people can beeasily documented through the Scriptures (Jer. 31:31, Isa. 54:5, Hos. 2:2, v. 19-20). Marital union from the very beginning consists of self-donation the mutual self-gift. This is why the relationship between God and his people is fittingly spoken of as a mystical marriage. Indeed, this seems to be the chief reason why Christ said that marriage would cease in the glorified state (Matt. 22:30). All humans have bridal bodies prepared for exclusive eschatological marriage to the Lamb.
- Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission, 368. ↩︎
- Wright, Christian Origins and the Question of God, 3:217-218. ↩︎
From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).
Cover image from
https://x.com/ItNoFtStHS/status/1299725046349471745; https://newbostoncoc.org/kevins-korner/sermon-outlines/new-jerusalem-the-bride-the-lambs-wife/