As Theologian-in-Residence at Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas, TX, my theme for special lectures this year is Living Wisdom: Forming Our Faith with the Mighty Dead. There will be four series of lectures under this theme. Our first series is "Living Hope: The Story of the Future Life." And this is the first lecture in that series. To download a copy of this lecture, click here.

Introducing the Series

I would like to begin today’s lecture with some words from G.K. Chesterton: “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about." With those words, Chesterton touches upon a profound truth not often recognized by modern Christians: sometimes the greatest resources for facing our future are found in our past.

“Living Wisdom” is a double entendre: I’m convinced that there is much wisdom in our history that is alive and worth taking into our own lives and our own faith in Jesus Christ. But in the other sense, my hope is that in our own lives we will be living this wisdom. The eminent historian of Christian doctrine Jaroslav Pelikan has famously written: “traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” But “Tradition” is the “living faith of the dead.” I think that captures it very well. Tradition is the living faith of the dead, and to have a living faith today that is not merely a reflection of our own age, we need to be living this tradition, continuing this living faith.

In a more general sense, C.S. Lewis once insisted on the value of reading old books.

"It’s a good rule after reading a new book never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to three new ones....Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and especially liable to make certain mistakes. We all therefore need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period.... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books....The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds and this can only be done by reading old books."

That’s a good way of stating our aim in these lectures, we want “to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.”

So, under the theme of “Living Wisdom” we’ll have four mini-series over the next year, each mini-series consisting of three lectures. This first series beginning with this lecture is entitled “Living Hope: the Story of the Future Life.” Later in the year, we’ll move on to three other mini-series: “Living Grace: The Story of Salvation,” “Living Water: The Story of Baptism,” and finally “Living Meal: The Story of Holy Communion.”

The church’s understanding of these major themes – the future life, salvation, and the sacraments – has developed over a long period time. And by entering these stories, I hope we can, as Lewis put it, correct some of the characteristic mistakes of our own period, expose some of our blind spots and be inspired toward greater faithfulness.

The Future Life

And we begin with “Living Hope: The Story of the Future Life.” Why, you may ask, should we begin with the end? Well, beginning with the end in mind is often a good idea. Endings orient everything that comes before. When you know in what direction a plot is headed it helps to make sense out of all the major events that lead up to it. In this case, that would mean that beginning with the future life has the potential of providing an orientation for our life in the present. And indeed it does, as I hope to touch upon this morning and in the two weeks to come.

And we begin with the “end” because the “logic” of Scripture begins here, too. When we think about the drama of redemption that is told in the Bible and that gives shape to our own lives, we are compelled to begin with God’s promise to put right all that has been tainted in his creation. This promise of the future restoration of all things in Jesus Christ is right at the core of the message of the New Testament. Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God. In his life, death and resurrection Jesus accomplished the victory of the Kingdom of God. And he has promised to return again and consummate his Kingdom, and establish a New Heavens and New Earth, a New Creation. The Kingdom of God will come and transform this world.

The New Testament says that Jesus’ resurrection was the first-fruits of a physical, restored universe that awaits us in the future. What’s more, Jesus has promised to give us new bodies — resurrected bodies like his own resurrected body, bodies that will never decay or die, so that we can live as whole creatures and “reign” with him in the glory of his New Creation. What’s even more, the New Testament says that the same Holy Spirit in whose power Jesus was raised from the dead has been given to those who believe in him. In short, we not only can hope for the New Creation when Jesus returns, but our own lives now are supposed to be a living demonstration of the future hope of the whole world. These basic but astounding truths provide the foundation for Christian hope and life in the present; they show us the goal of our salvation; they show us the end toward which we are drawn as we participate in the sacraments of baptism and holy communion; and they show us that our lives here and now, and the world in which we live, have meaning because God has promised ultimately to renew them entirely.

Contemporary Confusion

Unfortunately there is great confusion in the church today about the future life and about its relationship to the present life. My own journey of faith has been a part of that confusion. When I became a Christian some sixteen years ago, my beliefs about the future life were the same as the other Christians I had the privilege of being in fellowship with. I understood that Christianity offered a message of salvation from sin; I understood salvation to mean going to heaven; and I understood going to heaven meant living an immaterial, spiritual existence where we could forever be free from constraints of this world like time and physical bodies and work. So, I thought God’s ultimate plan was to destroy this world and rescue us from it. I thought our souls would just live, forever, in heaven. Perhaps needless to say, I had a very hard time relating this vision of the future life to anything in this life. I just knew it would be a departure from this life. And I found comfort in many popular hymns, with phrases like: “this world is passing away,” “this world is not my home,” “we are only passing through,” and “I shall fly away.”

The truth, of course, is that this vision of the future life falls well short of the mark. I had neglected the New Creation. And I wish confusion about this was limited to me personally. But, to be blunt, the prevailing view of the future life in the church today is very similar, and it’s been shaped more by the massive cultural influence of ancient Greek philosophy and Gnosticism than it has been shaped by the promises of God in Holy Scripture.

How can we have missed the significance of the resurrection? How can we have overlooked the promise of the New Creation? In the early years of my journey of faith, if you had asked me if I believed in the resurrection I would have said yes. And then I would have gone right along thinking of the future life as an immaterial existence, as a disembodied soul forever. I probably had, in the back of my mind somewhere, the idea that the resurrection was in the end a “spiritual” sort of thing, kind of like the spiritual consummation of being “born again.” As for the New Heavens and New Earth, I probably thought all the Bible had to say about that was one reference at the end of the Book of Revelation, a highly symbolic and, I thought, confusing book that I used more for trying to figure out when the end would be and less for discerning what the promise of the New Creation meant.

Not to belabor the point, but just in case you are not resonating with this problem of setting aside the New Creation, let me offer some more concrete evidence of the typical view of the future life in the American church today. I’ll limit myself to one example. And don’t get mad at me, at least not for long, because many of you have probably read and enjoyed the book I’m about to critique. Actually, some of you have asked me about the book and what I think of it, so I went and skimmed it. So I guess I can say you asked for it!

A well-meaning Baptist pastor named Don Piper has written a little book about his experience of dying and going to heaven. The book is called 90 Minutes in Heaven, and it’s spent many weeks on the Bestseller list, has sold over a million copies and, to boot, has a “five star” rating on ChristianBook.Com. Piper tells the moving story of his experience of what he calls heaven, after he died, or seemed to die at least, in a car accident. His vision of heaven has many of the usual images like pearly gates and dazzling luminescence. Now, before I go any further, let me just say that I have no idea whether or not Don Piper really did go to “heaven.” What I’m more interested in is his characterization of this immaterial heaven as the permanent, eternal home of those who are in Christ. Piper writes: “I have made my final reservations for heaven, and I’m going back someday — permanently.” And one sentence sums up the purpose of the book. He writes: “I believe God gave me a hint of what eternity in heaven will be like.” Eternity. No resurrection. No New Creation. A permanent, eternal existence as bodiless, immaterial beings away from the earth.

Actually Piper is explicit about never wanting to return to the earth. He reflects on the fact that he did not get to see God during his stay in heaven, when he writes: “The only way I’ve made sense out of that part of the experience is to think that if I had actually seen God, I would never have wanted to return. My feeling is that once we’re actually in God’s presence, we will never return to earth again, because it will be empty and meaningless by comparison.”

Honestly that pretty well sums up the prevailing view: our permanent home is to shed the materiality of our bodies, escape the earth, and live eternally as disembodied souls; and life in this world that God created is basically “empty and meaningless.” I hope you know that my intention is not to pick on Don Piper. His story merely reflects the prevailing view in Christian circles, not to mention much of the wider culture.

One more thing worth noting about this: when I was investigating Piper’s book, I took a look at the New York Times bestseller list. In a highly ironic twist, there is, in fact, right now, a book on the bestseller list called “A New Earth,” and one of its chapters is entitled “A New Heaven and a New Earth.” The book is recommended by the Oprah Book Club. It borrows biblical language about the future life to describe “the flowering of human consciousness.” According to the book jacket, the author, Eckhart Tolle, describes “how transcending our ego-based state of consciousness is not only essential to personal happiness, but also the key to ending conflict and suffering throughout the world.”

Now, what I’m about to say is going to sound harsh, so brace yourself. The co-existence of these two very popular books reveals a sad reality. Many people in our world are open about the fact that they are broken, and they are hungry to see themselves and this world changed for the better. And yet many of us Christians are off reading a book that describes this life as “empty and meaningless,” and we have left the rest of the world that’s longing for meaning and transformation scrambling to borrow the language of biblical hope and infusing it with lame pop psychology.

We can do better than this.

Seeking Living Wisdom

My own re-awakening to the cosmic scope of God’s redemptive purposes and their relevance to life in the present came through reading great works in the history of Christian thought. I wish I could say it was intentional. But my initial forays into historical theology were actually through assignments for college courses. I majored in religion so that I could get done quickly and go be a missionary, but something strange happened instead. I fell in love with history and it changed my life. It laid bare many of my blind spots and enriched my understanding of Scripture and God’s activity in the world. (So I got carried away with reading and ten years later I’m still trying to finish my PhD dissertation in historical theology.)

But back to the point: it was through reading history that my eyes were opened to the biblical hope of the New Creation – not that we will be saved from this world to live as disembodied souls, but rather that our destiny, along with that of the whole creation, is a restored, physical, everlasting life where the reign of Jesus Christ will be beautifully visible in all things.

We could learn this lesson from a variety of episodes in church history. But we can probably learn the hope of the New Creation best by looking at one of the most intense struggles of the church to defend “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), and that is the early church’s struggle against Gnosticism. In its struggle against Gnosticism, the early church made clear that the biblical hope is the hope of the New Heavens and New Earth.

"Gnostic Christianity"

“Gnostic Christianity” was an eclectic combination of teachings that stemmed from a variety of different sources, including the Scriptures but also Greek philosophy and a variety of ancient mythologies. For awhile it even looked like Gnosticism might win the day in many segments of the church. It was a powerful movement because it tapped into a perennial tendency in human spirituality that is still going strong today. So, as with many other doctrines, the early church honed its understanding of the future life in a somewhat defensive posture. That is, the church was faced with a surging movement that presented a contrary system of belief, which compelled the theologians of the church to respond with clear and forceful explanations of the teachings of Scripture.

From this early church struggle against Gnosticism we can learn the close relationship between five central tenets of biblical truth that under gird basic Christian spirituality: 1) the unity and goodness of God, 2) the goodness of God’s creation, including our bodies, 3) the redemptive significance of Jesus Christ’s incarnation, perfect life and bodily resurrection, 4) that our ultimate destiny is to live in resurrected bodies in the New Heavens and New Earth, and 5) the value of the present world and our participation in God’s renewing work by the power of the Spirit. The church’s struggle against Gnosticism can help us to see how these five realities hang together. As we have seen, much contemporary Christianity has seen fit to overlook the last two points – that is, the New Creation and the significance of our lives in the present. The same was true of ancient Gnosticism. Yet the early church’s rejection of Gnosticism showed that if we reject the New Creation and the goodness of the present life, then we are also rejecting the first three points: the goodness of God and his creation, and the full scope of Christ’s redeeming work.

So let’s go back to the second half of the second century, when the threat of Gnosticism was reaching a high point.

To complicate matters, at this early date the church had not come to a definitive consensus on what writings should be included in the New Testament. They accepted the Old Testament, and there were various circulating collections of the apostolic writings that would take final shape in what we now call the New Testament. But the church was only gradually forced to come to a consensus in its recognition of what books God had indeed inspired and intended to be the authoritative foundation for the church’s faith and life. This temporary fluidity of the canon should not be exaggerated — there was general agreement on what texts were authoritative, and there was a clearly emerging “rule of faith” (which became the Creed) that helped define the boundaries of orthodoxy, or “right teaching.” But the lack of a universally recognized Bible did make it easier for some heretical groups to claim that their own texts were in fact inspired by God.

And this was precisely what the movement we refer to as “Gnostic Christianity” did. The term “Gnosticism” when applied to ancient church history refers to a group of heresies that share some common “Gnostic” characteristics. The word “Gnostic” comes from the Greek word “Gnosis,” which means “knowledge.” And this is what the Gnostics claimed they had, that is, “special knowledge.” Salvation, they believed, was not accomplished by Christ, as the New Testament teaches. Instead, Christ came to reveal special knowledge so that the elect would know the secrets that could free their spirits from this miserable creation, so that they might re-enter the world of spirit from which they originally came.

According to the elaborate and frankly bizarre mythology of Gnosticism, their spirits used to exist in a spirit world formed by a series of emanations of deities that came out from the Supreme God, who was unknowable. But these spirits had become trapped in human souls and bodies and were imprisoned in this evil, material world whose Creator was an evil, nasty lesser god. Often they actually identified this evil creator god with the God of the Old Testament, and they ridiculed him as vindictive and cruel. But they thought the God of the New Testament, the Father of Jesus, was a God of love who sought to free the elect from the evil materiality of this world and their bodies. “The elect” were a select group in whom a “spark of divinity” had been implanted prior to their imprisonment here. With the special gnosis or knowledge, they could reconnect with the spirit world. The special knowledge included a series of secret passwords that they needed to know in order to pass through the required levels of the spirit world in order to make it back to their eternal home.

Now, the Gnostics believed Jesus came to reveal this special knowledge to the elect. Because the Gnostics believed matter was evil, they taught that Jesus only appeared to be a man. Furthermore, it should be apparent that on this view he could not actually crucified; someone else was crucified in his place, while he returned to the supreme God. For Gnostics, Jesus came as a perfect spirit to reveal knowledge of salvation; so the incarnation, fully human perfect life and bodily death and resurrection of Jesus Christ were outside their understanding of salvation.

The Gnostics also believed that during his earthly ministry, Jesus revealed the special gnosis only in a thickly veiled form, such as in parables. So we would look in vain to the Bible alone for such saving knowledge. Instead, they believed that, after his “resurrection,” Jesus gave the special gnosis to a select few, special apostles. Armed with this special gnosis, one could then use it as a code of sorts to then go back and understand the writings of the Old and New Testaments accordingly. In this way, the Gnostics could cite the Bible, but it was cleverly filtered through their independent system of belief that they said was specially revealed to them by the voice of the risen Christ. Among their favorite verses from the Bible were sayings of Jesus like, “The Kingdom of God is within you,” to which they attached their own special meaning. In any case, the insufficiency of the apostolic writings that now form the New Testament, and the need for their special gnosis, led them to write their own Gnostic Gospels. So, it goes without saying that, because the Catholic or Universal Church relied on the writings of the New Testament apart from this “special gnosis,” the Gnostics battled against the institution of the church and believed it did not possess the real truth.

So, here’s a summary of ancient Gnostic spirituality. Listen for the modern parallels, too: they viewed material existence, including their bodies, as something to be escaped; their true selves were a “spark of divinity” that they found by turning inward into themselves; special knowledge could free this spark of divinity from the confines of material reality; they used their eclectic beliefs to filter the teaching of Scripture; and they warred against the institutional church. You can see the remarkable similarities between ancient Gnostic spirituality and the spiritual ethos of the modern western world, both within the church and outside it. Numerous scholars have drawn the parallels between ancient times and today.

It’s well known that a number of the “secret Gnostic Gospels” were discovered in Egypt in 1948, and their likeness to much contemporary spirituality has given them enormous popularity. For instance, there is the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth. The famous book and movie the Da Vinci Code is, of course, about Gnostic Gospels, replete with the “special codes” and a very negative view of the institutional church.

Wisdom from Irenaeus of Lyons

Back in the 2nd century, let’s see how the church responded to these Gnostic beliefs. In particular, I want to look at the one early church father who did more than any other to confront the challenge of Gnosticism. This was Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons from about 177AD until his dead about twenty-five years later. Irenaeus wrote a collection of five books entitled, A Denunciation and Refutation of the So-called Gnosis, or as often more simply called, Against Heresies. In this work, Irenaeus set out the main lines of what became the enduring Christian response to Gnosticism. (This work is important for other reasons as well; his appeal to the authority of Scripture and to the unbroken succession through which he believed orthodox doctrine had been handed down from the apostles also had a significant impact on the church’s thinking about “Christian authorities.”)

In order to refute Gnosticism, Irenaeus employed several approaches. He spent the whole first book of Against Heresies simply outlining Gnostic beliefs, which we have merely summarized above. To some extent, just to explain some of the Gnostic “secrets” is to have refuted them, for they seemed quite fanciful even in ancient times. Outlining Gnostic beliefs also served the purpose of showing how their teachings worked as a package, so to speak, a total system: their understanding of creation, for instance, relates directly to their understanding of redemption: if you do not believe creation is good, then nor would you think a good God would seek to redeem it. Or, as the case might be stated for modern forms of Gnostic Christianity, if you reject the redemption of creation in favor of eternity as a disembodied soul, then it seems you’re implying either that God’s act of creation is not good, or that God is not good, or both.

But Irenaeus does not stop with a negative rejection of Gnosticism; he also states the case for biblical Christianity positively as well. The Gnostics had divided up the Bible and driven a wedge between the Old and New Testaments. But Irenaeus showed that the Bible tells ones universal story. The story begins at creation. And after sin enters the world, what we find is one great drama of redemption that leads to the New Creation, the restoration of all things in the New Heavens and New Earth.
At the outset of Book II of Against Heresies, Irenaeus begins by summarizing the Bible’s teaching on the unity of God, the goodness of the Creator and the goodness of the creation. He writes:

It is proper, then, that I should begin with the first and most important point, that is, God the Creator, who made the heaven and the earth, and all things that are therein (whom these men blasphemously style the fruit of a defect), and to demonstrate that there is nothing either above Him or after Him; nor that, influenced by any one, but of His own free will, He created all things, since He is the only God, the only Lord, the only Creator, the only Father, alone containing all things, and Himself commanding all things into existence.

There is only one God, and he is both the Creator of all things and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and he is good. The creation, which was created by God out of nothing, is therefore a good gift for which we should give thanks, and Irenaeus goes on at length – sometimes with intentional humor – about how the Gnostics are ungrateful creatures who “blaspheme their Creator after a most impudent manner.”

Furthermore, while the Gnostics thought the very creation of human beings was the fall of humanity into sin and corruption — since matter is evil — Irenaeus sets out the biblical teaching that God created human beings good, both body and soul. The evil in the world and in humanity is not the result of creation. Rather, as is taught in Genesis, it is the result of human sin, led by the first man, Adam. Irenaeus then sees the whole narrative of Scripture as the revelation of God’s activity to gather up the present fallen order of things, to transform it and carry it into the eternal Kingdom of God.

As he elaborated the biblical doctrine of redemption, Irenaeus gave full weight to the story of redemption in both the Old and New Testaments. Whereas the Gnostics saw a sharp division between the Old and New Testaments, Irenaeus saw a beautiful continuity. He put a great deal of emphasis on God’s progressive establishment of covenants with humanity: In the Old Testament, with Adam, Noah, Abraham and Moses. Through these covenants God was preparing humanity to receive the incarnation of the Son of God.

By lifting up the unfolding character of redemption in history, Irenaeus shows that world history is the story of God’s progressive redemptive activity. This history is not “empty and meaningless,” and it will not, Irenaeus insists, end in destruction or the discarding of the world as irrelevant and useless. It is, instead, precisely what God is redeeming along with humanity. History is heading toward fulfillment, rather than annihilation.

At the climax of God’s redemptive activity in the world is Jesus Christ: his incarnation, perfect human life and bodily resurrection. These events, along with the continuing ministry of the resurrected Christ in the power of the Spirit, are the culmination of God’s work revealed to us in the Old Testament.

In the incarnation, the Son of God becomes human so that he can be the head of a new humanity. Adam was the first head of humanity, and it was because of his sin that the order of all things was turned away from God; but in Christ, the Second Adam, who was perfect, humanity and indeed the order of this world are taken up in order that they might be redeemed. Building on Ephesians 1:10, Irenaeus described what happened in the incarnation this way: “at the end of the times appearing to all the world as man, the Word of God gathering up in Himself all things that are in heaven and that are on earth.”

If in his incarnation Jesus is the Second Adam who can set humanity and the world right, then in his bodily resurrection he accomplishes the ultimate victory over sin and the Devil for both humanity and for the world. The Gnostics had denied even the bodily birth of Jesus, since that would mean Jesus was associated with matter. But Irenaeus replies, focusing on what that would mean for Christ’s resurrection and the hope of the world:

"Now, if He was not born, neither did He die; and, if He died not, neither did He rise from the dead; and, if He rose not from the dead, neither did He vanquish death and bring its reign to nought; and if death be not vanquished, how can we ascend to life, who from the beginning have fallen under death? So then those who take away redemption from man, and believe not God that He will raise them from the dead, these also despise the birth of our Lord, which He underwent on our behalf, that the Word of God should be made flesh in order that He might manifest the resurrection of the flesh, and might have pre-eminence over all things in the heavens, as the first-born and eldest offspring of the thought of the Father, the Word, fulfilling all things, and Himself guiding and ruling upon earth.”

The resurrection of Jesus Christ guarantees the promise of our resurrection and the establishment of the New Creation, where Jesus will be “ruling upon earth.” Christ’s fulfillment of all things and his ruling upon the earth will ultimately be visible in the transformation of this world when Christ returns and establishes the New Heavens and New Earth.

In one remarkable passage Irenaeus, at the very end of Against Heresies, sums up his understanding of the future life; he outlines his view of the physicality of the future resurrected life in the New Creation, and its relationship to the goodness of God and our life in the present. Building on a host of biblical prophecies from Isaiah to Revelation, as well as the general pattern of redemptive history, Irenaeus writes of what will happen when Christ returns:

“For since there are real men, so must there also be a real establishment (plantationem), that they vanish not away among non-existent things, but progress among those which have an actual existence. For neither is the substance nor the essence of the creation annihilated (for faithful and true is He who has established it), but “the fashion of the world passeth away;” (1 Cor. 7:31, Rev. 21)….And therefore this [present] fashion has been formed temporary…But when this [present] fashion [of things] passes away, and man has been renewed, and flourishes in an incorruptible state, so as to preclude the possibility of becoming old, [then] there shall be the new heaven and the new earth, in which the new man shall remain [continually], always holding fresh converse with God. And since these things shall ever continue without end, Isaiah declares, ‘For as the new heavens and the new earth which I do make, continue in my sight, saith the Lord, so shall your seed and your name remain.’”

What a magnificent affirmation of the biblical promise. Because the God who created all things is good, he will refashion and not destroy his creation, including the bodies and souls of those who are in Christ. Irenaeus carefully acknowledges the teaching of Scripture, clear, for instance, in Revelation 21, that it is the present order or fashion of things that will pass away; the world will be renewed and will become the Kingdom of God when heaven and earth unite.

Thus, he highlights the remarkable continuity between the present life and the next life. The order of things will change: sin will be judged, corruption will be overcome, disorder will become ordered. But the world and its history will go on in a transformed fashion and become the Kingdom of God. As Paul says in Romans 8:21, “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”

Such a biblical view of the continuity between the present and the future life opens up wide vistas of meaning and purpose for life in the present. It means that our service to Jesus Christ in all spheres of his creation will not be meaningless and irrelevant in the end; rather, they participate in the providential and redemptive history through which God is working to restore all things to himself. God will not simply destroy our work, our relationships, our art, our culture, our humanity. Nor will he destroy the creation. Rather, he will redeem these things. Our job as Christians is to nurture and cultivate God’s creation, which is full of meaning and purpose, honoring our creator and preparing for the consummation of the Kingdom.

Finally, I want us to see how we could possibly live up to such a high calling, to prepare for the consummation of the Kingdom. Irenaeus shows that the church can fulfill this vocation because the redemptive work of Christ has made possible the re-union of humanity and the Spirit of God. Pointing to biblical texts like 2 Corinthians 5:5 and Ephesians 1:14, Irenaeus speaks of the Spirit’s work in us as “tending towards completion, and preparing us for incorruption, being little by little accustomed to receive and bear God.” The “earthly kingdom” now – the reign of Christ by the Spirit through those who believe in him – is the “commencement of incorruption” in this world that, when Christ returns, will be advanced to perfection in the New Heavens and New Earth. This is not an arrogant triumphalism, but a joyful calling to engage God’s world to promote the beauty and justice and truth of God.

I hope it is clear just how far away we are now from the prevailing view of our history and this world as “empty and meaningless,” a view often coupled with a truncated, immaterial vision of the future life.

To sum up, we have seen how the early church’s struggle against the Gnostics demonstrates the close linkage between our view of the future life, and our view of the nature of this world and the goodness of the Creator of this world. It was logical and consistent for the Gnostics, for whom this world was only nasty and evil, to ridicule its Creator and indeed consider the Creator to be different from the loving God who sent Jesus to save them from it.

The Gnosticism that tends to influence the modern church is less consistent. Modern Christians who seek to escape this world and their bodies for all eternity, and who view the present course of history as ultimately meaningless, are not, at the same time, explicitly ridiculing their Creator. But such a shortsighted hope for escape rather than renewal is a far cry from the robust biblical promises of God, and it fails to honor God whose work in the world is redeeming rather than annihilating his creation.

God has not left us in a world without meaning and purpose. Rather, he has called us into this world, to participate in his renewing work by the power of the Spirit, as he prepares us and this world for the New Creation, our future life.

Next week, we’ll continue the story of the future life by investigating how the church’s views about life between death and resurrection have developed over time. If our ultimate destiny is life with the Lord in resurrected bodies in the New Creation, a transformed life that will begin when Jesus returns, what happens to those who die in Christ before Jesus returns? This will get us into the question of an “intermediate state,” whether or not our souls continue to live, temporarily, apart from our bodies. (I think the answer is a confident “yes.”) And finally in the third week we’ll look at how the church has wrestled with the question of when Christ will return, and how it will happen. Is the end of the present order of things coming soon? Will there be a so-called “rapture” of the church followed by a thousand year reign of Christ on earth, as the popular book series, Left Behind, teaches?

I hope you’ll continue on this journey with me into the “story of the future life.”