Confessio: Bad Eschatology

Lately, I have been repenting of some bad (tacit) eschatology. I have found that the more I read scripture from an organic perspective, considering motifs like covenant and election, I find how misdirected I have been by trying to (over) systematize and stratify a metanarrative. So it is with my eschatology. I do have to confess that while not everything N.T. Wright says is God's honest truth, I have bought into his paradigm here. But I do so only because he is onto something central to the eschatology (and cosmology) of the Bible. His finding, though he did not invent it, is this: consummation is less about earthlings ascending into heaven via rapture, but more about heaven descending upon earth via parousia. God's desire is to redeem and restore that which we currently experience. This paradisical place is called a New Heaven and a New Earth, which tells me that God digs the present order of things without digging the sin that so corrupts the goodness of it all. And so, Revelation 11:19 got my attention the other day....

"Then God's temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant was seen within his temple. There were flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, an earthquake, and heavy hail."

With the blow of the last trumpet, a heavenly chorus cries out that justice will finally prevail in the cosmos. However, this justice only comes through judgment. The Lord accomplishes what was promised in the prayer taught to the disciples by Jesus himself: the kingdom of God becomes realized on earth. The two-kingdom approach reaches obsolescence as the kingdom of the world becomes the kingdom of our Lord and his Christ. Praise ensues, as it has before in this story, from the mouths of the elders. Their song reflects the long struggle between the Lord and his enemies, a battle whose outcome was never doubted but never fully realized until this moment. The nations raged (language reminiscent of Psalm 2:1, though not as clear in the Greek), but the Lord and his justice prevails. The sign of divine victory is the Temple in heaven which opens. Within this Temple, we see the Ark of the Covenant and various displays of power.

It is most significant that this Temple descends upon the earth, showing that God’s plan in the eschaton is not the annihilation of his creation, but the redemption of it. The way this happens is by the application of his kingdom in heaven to his kingdom on earth. When these two kingdoms cease to be two, but become one, we have the eschaton. Postmillennialism generally takes this line of argumentation and rightly so (where have the Post-mills gone?). We are to pray for this reality in this age (a two-kingdom age) until two kingdoms cease to exist. Heaven and earth, so to speak, will come together and be one. We will not be raptured out of one into the other, but the two will coalesce. This has always been the prefiguration in worship of YHWH. The Tabernacle and the Temple were revered as being holy places (i.e. unique places) because the Jews understood those places as being places where heaven and earth quite literally came together. Jesus Christ in his incarnation functions in the same way. He "tabernacled" among his people (John 1:14) and he considered himself the Temple (John 2:19-21). The incarnate Messiah was the place where heaven and earth met. Now in this post-Pentecostal era, the Church catholic is where heaven and earth meet. We, individually and corporately, are called the Temple of the Holy Spirit (i.e. YHWH) throughout the New Testament (1 Cor. 6:19-20). Though our flesh wages war against the Spirit within us, in imperfect ways we can be considered the Temple: the place where heaven and earth come together for the application of God’s kingdom work. However, when this event recorded here occurs, heaven and earth will be drawn together in actual ways, not prefigured but actually. What had been displayed in shadows will then be pure light. God’s kingdom will be brought to bear on the earth and through that, earth will be redeemed.