Missing the Point (1): Ch.1: We Have Missed the Point of God (Eschatology)

“But the ultimate reason for our hope is not to be found at all in what we want, wish for and wait for; the ultimate reason is that we are wanted and wished for and waited for. What is it that awaits us? Does anything await us at all, or are we alone? Whenever we base our hope on trust in the divine mystery, we feel deep down in our hearts: there is someone who is waiting for you, who is hoping for you, who believes in you. We are waited for as the prodigal son in the parable is waited for by his father. We are accepted and received, as a mother takes her children into her arms and comforts them. God is our last hope because we are God's first love.”[1]

Reading from the End to the Beginning

Eschatology in most peoples’ minds has to do with what happens to us after death and the events leading up to the end of history (however you understand that). After all, it means “last things.” But it’s always meant more than that but for a long time in the West me missed that point. In the 1960’s, however, a German theologian Jürgen Moltmann rediscovered this truth. He saw that the “end” in the sense of how God intends things to be then and there exercises a decisive influence over how we should live here and now. He wrote a famous book, The Theology of Hope, explaining this. And though his ideas have convinced and influenced most scholars they have had little impact in the churches.

Why?

Because we’ve stopped reading the Bible too soon! We end at Rev.20 with the judgment scene at the great white throne in Rev.20. We believe we already know what comes after that – heaven. And heaven is, we believe or have been told, a non-earth place for a non-earthly existence, probably immaterial (as we imagine angels’ to be).

Had we read on in Rev.21-22, however, without preconceptions about heaven or life after death, we would have read of a new heaven and earth, a holy city coming down from heaven to earth (note the direction!). The city was in the shape of a cube and was apparently coextensive with the new creation. God declares this city, this new creation will be his “home.” God will make all things new and rule over all reality. There is no temple in that new creation. The Lord God and the Lamb are its temple. And God’s people will reign there forever.

And had we been attentive readers we would have noted that this vision is congruent with Old Testament visions like Isa.65:17-25 on the earthly site of God’s new creation. The New Jerusalem is a garden of Eden embedded in a glorious city. The New Jerusalem’s cubic shape matches only the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s temple (1 Ki.6:20). With the absence of a temple and the city coextensive with the new creation the images intend us to see the new creation as one huge Holy of Holies where God will dwell with his human creatures on his creation as originally planned. And according in 1 Cor.15 we will receive new bodies at our resurrection. They will be more than our present bodies but not less than them. We will be flesh and blood throughout eternity – as will Jesus! And we will do more than play harps and sing hymns to God forever. We will “reign”! In other words, whatever life after death is, our ultimate hope is in “life after life after death” (as N. T. Wright cleverly puts it[2]).

If we look back to our other two sin free chapters, the creation stories of Gen.1-2 we find something very similar both in content and image. As most commentators recognize today, Gen.1 is not telling a scientific “how to” story of the origins of the universe. Rather, like the cultures surrounding it, Israel’s “origins” story is of its deity building a temple in which to dwell after a climactic victory. God has subdued chaos (the formless void, Gen.1:2) by his word and Spirit without a struggle. He then proceeds to construct his creation as a temple[3] (as ‘lordly architect” in Gen.1 and as “playful artist” in Gen.2), fill it with “royal priests” (Adam and Eve) and take up life there with them (Gen.3:8 where God comes to “have a chat” with the pair as apparently was their custom).

The river flowing out of Eden branches off into four others which water the uninhabited regions of the earth. Evidently God intends them to be inhabited by children of Adam and Eve who will leave Eden and spread throughout the earth. And as royal priests of God they establish the boundaries of his creational temple ever further from the mini-sanctuary of the Garden till it finally embraces the entire earth (which fulfillment is pictured in Rev.21). And the work humanity is given as God’s royal priests is pictured as their eternal “reign” in Rev.22:5).  

This is enough, I think, to make the case that the biblical story is bookended by these four chapters that apart from sin show us what God intended in creation all along. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons we have misheard the Revelation stories as a timetable of events at the very end of history beyond which lay heaven and the Genesis stories as scientific origins accounts and missed the point of at least the following:

-what God is up to (creating a temple to dwell in with humanity)

-who we are and what we are supposed to do (bearers of God’s image; royal priests in his creational temple protecting and caring for that temple as it spreads around the world.)

-the nature of this world we inhabit (a temple)

We’re not just born willy-nilly into a world to figure out who we are and what our lives are supposed to be about, go wrong, somehow turn to Jesus for salvation, and live out the rest of our lives till we die and go to heaven to live there forever with God. Compared to an active priesthood playing key roles in God’s worldwide movement to establish his creational temple.

The God of the End and the Beginning

But most importantly we miss the point about God. THE point. That God loves us, likes us,[4] wants to be with us, and intends and will do good for us. Even when we rebel against him or ignore his ways he punishes to get our attention so we may be forgiven and restored. God is for us in every way possible!

Too often we adopt a toxic view of God our culture or “Christian” religion promotes which I call “God with a Scowl.” If the God you worship, and I mean the real God you respond and relate to in your gut, if that God bears any or all of the following characteristics, you have this toxic God and he will pervert everything the Bible’s God is about. Is your God  

Distant?

Domineering?

Demanding?

Disapproving?

Damning?

It was this deity who required the murder of Jesus on the cross in the first century. It was this deity whose death Nietzsche joyfully but erroneously announced in the 19^th century. It was this deity who oversaw the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis in World War II. And it is this deity who underwrites the financially, socially, ecologically, and spiritually destructive cut of consumeristic “Christianity” in the West today. It is the great achievement of Philip Pullman to have skewered and put to death this deity in his Dark Materials trilogy. Though this deity often travels under the banner of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, I challenge you to compare him to the figure we meet and see in action in Jesus of Nazareth to see the difference. Take another look in the gospels at Jesus and behold the true and living God!

The God we hope for, the one denied us by the God with a Scowl view so popular in our culture, is the one Moltmann describes in the superscript I added to this chapter:

“But the ultimate reason for our hope is not to be found at all in what we want, wish for and wait for; the ultimate reason is that we are wanted and wished for and waited for. What is it that awaits us? Does anything await us at all, or are we alone? Whenever we base our hope on trust in the divine mystery, we feel deep down in our hearts: there is someone who is waiting for you, who is hoping for you, who believes in you. We are waited for as the prodigal son in the parable is waited for by his father. We are accepted and received, as a mother takes her children into her arms and comforts them. God is our last hope because we are God's first love.”

Yes, that’s the God of Christian faith. With him love is the first, last, and only truth of our lives. That God is love, this kind of prodigally-extended prodigal-welcoming love, is the point of biblical faith. And far too many of us have missed it!

The Triune God

One chief way Christian faith has spoken about the mystery of God is to call God “love.” This means more than that God acts in loving ways. It says something about who God is. It means that God is something more than, say, a billiard ball. The latter are single, solitary, self-sufficient entities that roll around a billiard table striking other balls or the table rails. These contacts change the direction of the ball but in no way add or subtract anything to what it is. If God is this kind of unitary, numerically singular being, what sense does it make to say he is love. The only kind of “love” this kind of being could have is narcissistic.

The New Testament designations of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit gave the early church important clues to better thinking about God. They did not want to say that Christian faith believed in three gods nor that God was single and solitary like the billiard ball. What were they to do?

They ended up seeing God more like what we today would call a molecule: two or more atoms joined together by the forces shared between them. Though like all analogies this one is imperfect is does indicate how early church thinkers saw God as differentiated within himself (three persons), and related in those differentiations (one).  Mind-bending, I know! So did the early church. They struggled mightily over several centuries before arriving at what we today know as a trinitarian understanding of God. This is a description not an explanation of who and what God is. The latter is impossible. Either God has for his own reasons not made this explicable to us or who he is is intrinsically unknowable to his creatures. My money is on the latter option. God has told us as much as we can handle to fashion a description of him. We don’t thereby understand God but he has made himself knowable in this admittedly paradoxical, difficult to explain way. But why should we expect the Creator to be understandable to us or even able to explain who he is to us in ways we consider rational or self-evident. So let’s see how this description helps us know God better.

Here we come back to the New Testament’s description of God as love (1 Jn.4:8,16). If this is true God, within himself, must be a lover, a beloved, and the act of love itself. And further, the love this being in must also seek others outside himself to avoid being narcissistic. So, we could say, the Father is the source of love, the Son the recipient of the Father’s love, and the Spirit the “bond of love” that brings together the Father and Son and reaches out to others creatures to share that love with them too.

Because the Father is neither the Son nor the Spirit (ditto for the Son and the Spirit) his love is real and not simply self-love for it is the love of another (the Son) and a sharing in a real relationship with him (and the Spirit).  God, then, we might say, is an eternal community of love. And God, being love, invites his creatures into that relationship on the creation he made for this purpose. 

God, being God, is “always and at the same time the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”[5] God is our never-ending, inexhaustible invitation to enter into the love he is and has for us no matter what hell we have managed to find our way into.

This God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one who raised him from the dead, is the one living and true God. The one who intends and will achieve his desire to be with us on this planet in friendship and communion forever. To miss this is the miss THE point of the whole Christian thing in a profound way that perverts the entire project.

And if your God is

distant,

domineering,

demanding,

disapproving, and

damning,

you’ve missed the point!

And if you’ve missed this point, from which flows everything else biblical, you’re bound to miss much else as well.

Summary

We begin at the end because only at the end do we meet God fully revealed and see God’s purposes, what the Bible is really all about, fully displayed. This end (called eschatology in theology) is far more than the last temporal state of either humanity or the world but rather that which drives and conditions the whole story. Humanity lives faithfully by “remembering the future” and failing this falls into all manner of difficulty.

God is revealed to be the temple in which his creatures dwell (where else would God dwell, after all?), where he shares life with humanity, and where the slain but resurrected Lamb stands at the center as the God who shares the life of his creatures so fully he became one of them. Such divine-human community was always God’s intention and the whole story is designed to tell that tale.

The God we meet in this story is love. The love this God is is capable of justice, discipline, wrath, and judgment, as we will see as we move through the story. But all of this is finally love and serves the ends and intentions of divine love, that eternal divine-human fellowship. That is, the goal of even the most severe of God’s actions toward us is restoration to this good end he intends for us not our deprivation of it or our destruction.

As love, this God who is our source and our destiny, is internally self-differentiated as lover, beloved, and love itself. That is, this God is triune, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. His inner life as a community of love mirrors the life together with him he intends for us all.  This has implications at every stage in the story.  

We miss the point here at our peril!

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[1] Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life (Fortress, 1997), 40. 

[2] Life After Life After Death (Augsburg Fortress, 2006).

[3] See the details summarized by Derek Rishmawy, “9 Reasons the Garden of Eden Was a Temple,” https://derekzrishmawy.com/2012/12/07/9-reasons-the-garden-of-eden-was-a-temple/.

[4] Cyd Holsclaw, Does God Really Like Me? (InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition).

[5] A Declaration of Faith (PCUSA), ch.5, par.8 at https://www.pcusa.org/site_media/media/uploads/theologyandworship/pdfs/decoffaith.pdf.