As I noted a few days ago, God doesn’t promise us an escape from this world—he promises us the world remade new, and ourselves remade new within it, to start all over again. Sort of. Surprisingly, though the human story began in a garden, when God remakes the world, it will center on a city, the new Jerusalem; we aren’t going backward to be Adam and Eve again (contrary to Michael Omartian’s classic song), with all our mistakes erased as if they had never been, but rather, forward, with our mistakes redeemed—and with them, our accomplishments. To be sure, there are many of us who don’t care for cities, but as a whole, as Jacques Ellul has written (thanks to John Halton for his post on this), “The city is . . . our primary human creation. It is a uniquely human world. It is the symbol that we have chosen.” For God to center his rule on a city (especially when the city is “the place that human beings have chosen in opposition to God” [emphasis mine], as Ellul notes), is a sure sign that in remaking the world, God will take our works into account and redeem the works of our hands, even to the point of turning the center and hub of our fallen civilization into the center of his perfect reign. This tells us that the good that we have made, the good things we have built, the honorable works of our hands, will not be swept away in the final judgment; even as God will redeem and perfect us, so too will our accomplishments be redeemed and perfected. The gifts God has given us, and the good things we do with them to his glory, will also be saved. This is what it means that Jesus is preparing a place for us—that who we are and what we bring with us matter, and will remain.
Of course, that redemption and perfection are an important part of the picture. The late great Dan Quisenberry once quipped, “I have seen the future, and it is much like the present, only longer”; but if that tends to be drearily true in human history, it will not be true at all of the new creation. We will be raised in our own bodies, but our bodies will be different in kind. Now, they are perishable; our bodies erode, they wear out, they catch diseases, they break, they fail, and we die. In the new creation, they won’t be subject to any of that; they will be imperishable, what Paul calls “spiritual bodies.” Flesh and blood as we know it now cannot endure the glory of God, it cannot stand up to the brightness of his presence; it’s too frail and flimsy and shadowy a thing to breathe the air of heaven. It must be made new, remade, along with the rest of creation, in order to be solid enough and real enough to stand in the very presence of God. So too the works of our hands, those things we have forged out of our own hard work and the raw materials God has given us; that which is worthy will endure, but not as we have known it, for it too will be remade by the hand of God.
This is the promise of the gospel—the promise we see realized first in the resurrection of Christ, whom Paul calls “the firstfruits,” the first harvest, “of those who have died”; as the first one to be raised from the dead, as the one who went before us to show us the way, he shows us the new life that waits for us. We will be raised from the dead, not merely as we are now, but as he is, and the sting of death, the victory of the grave, and the power of sin in our lives will be no more, forever and ever and ever.
Thanks for reminding us of Ellul’s theology of the city. I for one am tired of the anti-city, anti-modern stance I hear in so many churches. If Ellul is correct, how will it change the way we interact with our society? How can we bless the city here and now?
Large questions, and important ones–and in some ways, questions with context-specific answers. I think certainly it leads us to appreciate and value human work and its products, and to take what we do with this life more seriously than many people would prefer to do. As for the city specifically, there are a number of folks who do urban ministry who have taken on that question; for me, the focus is on blessing the town in which I pastor.
BTW, when were you at St. John’s?
I got my B.A. in 96 and my M.A.E.C. in 02.
I started thinking about this question before reading Ellul — specifically, after my Frosh year in Santa Fe, when I was trying to figure out a Christian “response” to a culture that was so different from the middle-class white Protestant south-eastern suburb I grew up in. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians helped a lot in thinking about what is necessary for Christians to do in cosmopolitan settings.
Maybe I should read Meaning of the City alongside the Corinthian letters….
So you were there before Chris and Peter, then. I can see where the move to Santa Fe would have started you thinking about this; it doesn’t matter where you’re from, Santa Fe is different. Ellul’s a good companion for those sorts of inquiries, though.