NEW HEAVENS AND A NEW EARTH
Christians persist in thinking of heaven in other-worldly terms. This fault contributes to carelessness over climate change…

The wolf and the lamb shall lie down together, prophesied Isaiah. Or as Woody Allen has put it: the wolf and the lamb shall lie down together, but the lamb won’t get much sleep. Buried in this witticism is a flinty realism, a world-weary cynicism that nature could ever exhibit such harmony.

 

Isaiah’s famous prophecy: ‘for I am about to create new heavens and a new earth’, are words echoed at the conclusion of Revelation as God restores all things at the end of time. The beauty of Hebrew thought, the language of the Old Testament, is its sense of unity and integrity. This should be contrasted with the Greek way of thinking which more readily influences modern thought, with its emphasis on dualism.To give you a flavour of this, consider our understanding of heaven. The biblical picture of heaven is, as one distinguished theologian has put it, of creation healed. There is continuity, a sense of things being put right in a place we are familiar with from our human experience. Heaven is a new earth. By contrast, modern people often suffer from dualism when thinking about heaven It is believed to be somewhere else entirely – a strange, ethereal place and thus rather intimidating: like a cool, white minimalist loft conversion you could never quite call home.

 

This goes hand in hand with a belief in heaven and earth as two separate spheres which both continue forever, the former place being populated day by day with migrants from the other place, as a popular hymn suggests in its line: ‘and soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase’.

 

Biblical thinking instead points to a defining moment when God fulfils the promise of a new creation. The apostle Paul likens the resurrection body to the growth of a new organism from a seed. An acorn may not look like an oak tree, but everything it needs to become one is coded within it. If I may vary the metaphor, the new creation is like a photograph with this present creation its negative. The glory is yet to be revealed. It could be argued that speculation about the appearance of heaven now is unnecessary. We are called to an eternal relationship with God and the scenic backdrop is for heaven’s props department to arrange. Yet what we believe of heaven is profoundly important to how we live our lives today.

 

The second letter of Peter says: ‘the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire’. Some have taken this to mean that the earth will be entirely destroyed. Thinking that is only a few steps away from saying that as this world is destined for the scrapheap, it doesn’t matter how we treat it today. And it is just such thinking that has permitted some Christians to be indifferent to climate change. The reasoning being that if the whole house is going to go up in a fire, what does it matter if you turn the thermostat up a few degrees beforehand?

 

Basic human decency is repelled by such an attitude because it shows a lack of love for creation, and especially for those living who will suffer most from climate change. Yet it also shows the power of a faulty theology, which substitutes selfish licence for dutiful freedom. In the same letter, the apostle Peter goes on to draw parallels with Noah’s flood, where the same physical earth emerged after the flood, but one that was purged and cleansed. In the same way, the new creation will be cleansed of the sinfulness which pockmarks this world and transformed into something beautiful. As one writer has observed, ‘God is not going to make all new things, he is going to make all things new’.

 

Such thinking should be a powerful incentive to care for the creation around us not just because it is God’s gift to us, not just because the welfare of others depends on how we care for it, but because this is the earth that God will one day re-create. The vision of a new earth which Isaiah heralds in chapter 65 is full of pertinent images. It is a place where ‘no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress’ (verse 19). Human sadness and personal suffering are not enduring features, they will fade and die. It is a place where there will no more ‘be in it an infant that lives out but a few days’ (verse 20). That cruellest of human emotions, bereavement, will be a distant memory. It is place where ‘they shall build houses and inhabit them (and) plant vineyards and eat their fruit’ (verse 21). Social and economic life is rich: there are no housing shortages and no-one will be deprived of a return from their labour. All these are metaphors for us, mere snapshots of a greater reality, but they offer also a vision of sustainable living which we should aspire to now.

 

Christians have often been accused of not caring about the here and now, and being too preoccupied with their own place in heaven. We should not tolerate any theology which encourages reckless escapism.

If we don’t care about the here and now, we can’t claim to care about heaven either. The prayer we pray most of all co-opts us to say: ‘your kingdom come on earth’. There is a whole world crying in pain for deliverance, not to mention a few sleepless lambs.