Abstract
This paper draws attention to a substantial gap in the new Christian eschatology pioneered by Bishop Tom Wright and supported by many other theologians, some with solid scientific credentials. This eschatology sees a substantial degree of continuity between the present earth and a future earth-heaven to be inaugurated by the parousia of Jesus Christ. Lacking is a clear exploration of Christian expectations for the future of human and terrestrial history. This is a matter of urgent apologetic and pastoral concern.
Introduction
A new and increasingly influential eschatology, aiming to be more faithful to the dominical and apostolic assertions, has been pioneered over the past two decades by Professor Tom Wright. It questions the long-standing belief, enshrined in much Christian writing, in popular hymns old and new, and in contemporary ‘ordinary theology’, 1 that sees the Christian faith as promising believers a disembodied transfer to heaven when they die, there to receive a new body and be with Christ for ever. Instead, Wright asserts that the New Testament foresees the transformation of the present heaven and earth into a new and merged heaven-and-earth, accompanied by or following the (re)appearance (παρουσια) of Jesus Christ. Into this new physicality the dead in Christ will be resurrected, to live a fulfilling, fruitful and unending embodied life of love, joy and peace in the presence of their Lord.
Over the same period scientific cosmology has become more confident in predicting the long-term fate of planet earth, the solar system, our galaxy and indeed the whole known universe. Briefly, this sees a slow decay of the universe over many billions of years and, for planet earth, a fiery future that will reduce all life to cinders.
Wright’s eschatology has been broadly supported by numerous theologians, including some who have strong scientific backgrounds, notably John Polkinghorne and David Wilkinson. There is a remarkable concordance among these Christian apologists. They see the current earth and heaven as parallel worlds that intersect at many points. The new merged earth and heaven will have many continuities and some discontinuities with the old order; the resurrection body likewise will be like an electronically stored computer document that finds fresh expression in a new hard copy.
This widely accepted Christian view of the future generates questions that seem not to have been addressed. Will the return of Jesus Christ be, like his incarnation, a dateable event in human history? What would an imaginary observer see when the present visible and tangible earth is transformed into a new earth-heaven? Will the present earth survive this cataclysmic event, to continue into its predicted multi-billion year decline into lifelessness?
Critique
Current cosmology
In recent years cosmologists have been increasingly united and confident in presenting an account of the origins and probable future of the known universe. Current understandings envisage our universe coming into existence 13.7 billion years ago and heading for ‘a highly problematic future’. Its long-term history is controlled by the competing effects of expansion and gravity. These contrasting tendencies are very evenly balanced and it is not known for certain which will win in the end. If expansion predominates (the possibility currently favoured by most cosmologists), cosmic history will continue indefinitely in a world growing steadily colder and more dilute. If gravity predominates, the present expansion will one day be halted and reversed. What began with the big bang will end with the big crunch, as the universe implodes into a cosmic melting pot. The timescales for these processes are immensely long, spanning many tens of billions of years.
Cosmology still has numerous areas of uncertainty and vigorous debate. Multiple universes, multiple dimensions, are imagined and their consequences predicted and considered.
The new eschatology
Wright’s Christian eschatology makes a strong appearance in most of the books he has published over the past twenty years. It is most fully developed, however, in a book dedicated to the topic, his Surprised by Hope.
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Stephen Kuhrt, whose Tom Wright for Everyone
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has provided both a summary of Wright’s theology and an indication of how it can inform and infuse pastoral work, states: ‘[O]f all Wright’s achievements, perhaps the most significant has been to provide a much clearer exposition of the eschatology which has always been clear within the Bible but which few have been willing to draw out.’ Kuhrt also provides an admirable summary of the distinctive features of Wright’s eschatology: God’s promise to bring one day a new heavens and a new earth fully and finally joined together. Rather than those belonging to Jesus being removed from the earth and taken to another place, the New Testament consistently speaks of the resurrection of God’s people to take their place within a physical world that has similarly been remade and transformed. This will then result in those renewed in God’s image finally being able to fulfil the original mandate they were given in creation of ruling this world for him.
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Thus the fusion of heaven and earth will signal the end of an age and the beginning of a new and more glorious one. And ‘when God renews the whole cosmos, Jesus himself will be personally present as the centre and focus of the new world that will result’. Wright points out that ‘Paul’s letters are full of the future coming or appearing of Jesus’, summarizing the consistent message of the New Testament’s letters and Revelation as follows: ‘there will come a time, which might indeed come at any time, when Jesus himself will be personally present and will be the agent and model of the transformation that will happen both to the whole world and also to believers’. 7
Wright places great stress on the essential continuity of the old and the new. In Surprised by Hope he returns repeatedly to 1 Corinthians 15.58, which he paraphrases: ‘so, then, since the person you are and the world God has made will be gloriously reaffirmed in God’s eventual future, you must be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the Lord’s work, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain’. Wright’s amplification of this text (my italics) illustrates his inference from Paul’s ‘not in vain’ that nothing good in the present world will be lost in the new. He is sure that Bach’s music will be there, that a tree planted today will enhance God’s future kingdom, and that every deed aiding the poor will somehow contribute to God’s new world of justice and joy. He insists that we are ‘not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to fall over a cliff’, nor are we ‘planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site’. Far from it: ‘every act of love, gratitude and kindness, every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation, every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support … will become, in due course, part of God’s new world’. 8
Although Wright is chiefly concerned about the earth, he develops his theme to encompass the entire cosmos: ‘God will redeem the whole universe. Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning of that new life, the fresh grass growing through the concrete of corruption and decay in the old world.’ 9
Two scientific minds
John Polkinghorne was a distinguished mathematical physicist before he became a priest and a theologian. In 2000 he and co-editor Michael Welker published a volume of essays with the subtitle Science and Theology on Eschatology. 10 These arose from an eschatology project sponsored by the Princeton University’s Centre for Theological Enquiry. Two years later Polkinghorne published his personal reflections on eschatology. 11
As did Wright, Polkinghorne envisages the renewal of the earth in the new creation and agrees that there will be many continuities between the old and the new. But he is critical of writers who envisage ‘a relatively smooth transition’. There must be elements of both continuity and discontinuity. He argues that ‘the new creation must be endowed with a totally different “physical fabric” from that of the old’, insisting that ‘though the new creation is the transform of the old creation, the distinction between the two must be as sharp as that between death and resurrection’. And, like Wright, he believes that the renewal of earth and heaven ‘must be on a universe-wide scale’. 12
David Wilkinson is a physicist and theologian, and author of a major study, Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe. Like Polkinghorne, he is critical of those who emphasize continuity in the new creation, at the expense of discontinuity, and who suggest that ‘God transforms the Earth and leaves it in its place in the present Universe’. He points out that the transformed earth would still be vulnerable to comet impact. Again echoing Wright and Polkinghorne, he concludes that ‘any transformation of life on Earth must be closely linked with a transformation of the whole Universe’. 13
Taking the resurrection of Jesus as a transformation displaying both continuity and discontinuity, Wilkinson uses it as a paradigm for the future event when the new heavens and new earth will emerge from the old. He is sure that ‘if the resurrection is the model for new creation, then time has to be real in the new creation’ and that ‘continuity stresses the reality of time in new creation’, while ‘discontinuity stresses the way time is now decoupled from decay’. And writing on the impact of relativity theory, he points out that ‘rather than imposing our everyday experience of the world as the pattern for the nature of the Universe, modern physics has encouraged a sense of wonder and openness to novelty and the unexpected’. This is helpful in considering the issues being discussed here, as it reminds us that time and space are much more subtle concepts than they at first appear. ‘Perhaps the relationship between God and time is much more organic, that is, the very existence of time depends on the sustaining creativity of God.’ 14
This is the way the world ends
We return to the issue that provoked this writing. Accepting, as premise and the authentic biblical hope, that a new heaven and a new earth will arise from a radical transformation of the present order, and accepting too that there will be both continuity and discontinuity in the transition, the following issues come into sharp focus:
1. Will Jesus Christ return in bodily form to this earth? 2. Will this occur, like the incarnation, at a definite (albeit unknown) future date in human history? 3. Will the transformation of earth and heaven affect the entire universe, or only this planet?
These questions are framed to avoid any implication that we either know or can predict the day and the time of these events – and also to acknowledge that there are many subsidiary questions we should like, but perhaps do not need, to have answered. For their faith in the Second Coming to be cogent and defensible, however, Christians need to know what they are affirming.
‘When will the end come?’ is an implicit and sometimes explicit biblical question. The New Testament writers seem to expect that the return of Christ, if not imminent, will be ‘soon’. Wright 15 points out that the early Christians were not overly concerned that it had not yet happened, but equally they were sure that it would take place at some point in human history.
According to Polkinghorne, ‘the writings of the systematic theologians seldom seem to reflect the expectation that cosmic history will continue for billions of years and that, before its foreseeable end, humanity and all forms of carbon-based life will have vanished from the universe’ and ‘if God allowed primeval process to unfold over billions of years, why should we not expect the same to be true of cosmic ending? We should not underestimate God’s patience.’ 16 If we follow Polkinghorne here, and allow the possibility that the radical transformation of the universe will take place at a time when human life is long extinct and the earth has become inhospitable for living things, it is hard to see the point of a return of Christ to this earth. Presumably parousia would signify an immediate and evident presence of Christ within the new order.
If, in contrast, we are to expect a physical reappearance of Christ on this planet at a specific time in earth-history, as a preliminary to the transformation of earth and heaven, we are confronted with questions about the extent of this process. Wright, Polkinghorne and Wilkinson insist that the process will be universe-wide, which seems to entail an intervention by God that is wholly unexpected by the cosmologists and that will overwhelm and nullify their predictions. Unlike God’s unnoticed intervention at the incarnation, and even the unobserved resurrection of Christ, God’s stepping in to end earth’s history would be an event that every eye could see.
Insistence on a universe-wide transformation could, however, be incorrect. When Paul speaks of the creation waiting for its rebirth, he may mean just planet earth, which takes on a new existence following the parousia, maybe leaving behind a dying old-earth. This putative scenario would substantially weaken the link between life on the new earth and life on the present earth.
The insights of modern physics can warn us against naiveté in our questioning, but they do not take us very far forward. While Wilkinson sees parousia as ‘an image, which says that sometime in the future Jesus Christ will return in worldwide glory to bring in a new creation’, 17 LeRon Shults, who also derives insights from modern physics states, that ‘questions like “When is Jesus coming back” make no sense in the light of relativity theory and quantum cosmology’. He also warns against ‘depicting the parousia as a future point on a timeline’. 18 It would seem that the question remains: when Christians affirm their belief in the return of Christ and the realization of a new creation, what if anything are they looking forward to in our familiar world of space and time?
Caring for creation
As we have seen, Wright’s strong emphasis on continuity between the present earth and heaven and the coming earth-heaven leads him into a theology in which ‘nothing we do in Christ and by the Spirit’ is wasted. This theology is attractive and consistent with current environmental concerns. But how persuasive is it in the light of Polkinghorne’s and Wilkinson’s insistence on discontinuity accompanying continuity? Perhaps too much weight is being placed on Paul’s insistence that our ‘labour is not in vain’? Wright himself admits that he has ‘no idea’ how the precious and admirable things in the present world will transfer into the next. 19 And the New Testament’s constant exhortations to good stewardship, kindness and compassion arise out of the character of God himself and our calling to reflect the image of Christ, and do not need the reinforcement of a specific eschatology.
Conclusions
The Second Coming of Christ is a central tenet of Christian doctrine, embedded in the historic creeds. The traditional understanding of the phrase, and indeed its plain meaning, denotes a future historical event to which Christians confidently look forward. A cognate accompanying belief is in the life of the world to come: Christ’s return to earth will inaugurate a transformation of the present order into a new and fused earth-and-heaven that will display both continuities and discontinuities with the old. Taken together, these beliefs are inevitably in conflict with the predictions of modern science regarding the planet and its life forms. Must Christians then conclude that a future intervention by God will render the scientific predictions futile? The epistemic and apologetic consequences of this position are profound.
An alternative scenario is to imagine a more limited divine intervention affecting only the earth, which would continue in its orbit around the sun. This option is theologically unattractive, as the renewed earth would still be subject to the decay and burn-up predicted by cosmology, and would hardly qualify as eternal. Or the physical earth could continue its slow path to decay, and a new earth-heaven created to replace it. This would radically weaken any continuity of the old and the new, thus removing a major plank from the new eschatology. Another option is that the new earth-heaven would come into existence only after the billions of years the universe is predicted to survive. By that time life on earth would be long extinct, and any return of Christ would be without evident purpose.
These are matters of much more than solely academic interest. Christian apologetics, teaching and preaching must engage with these aspects of Christian doctrine. And do so by presenting a scenario that is credible in an age of science. I urge the major figures in Christian eschatology to offer the Church some clearer guidance on what Christians should believe and teach regarding God’s plan for the future of human history.