What Is God’s Good Future? Right Relationships with All Things

Abstract

Reconciliation is often understood as only having to do with our broken relationship with God. Yet we are alienated not only from God, but also from other people and the natural world. So we need help. Our brokenness extends to all things, thus we need to be put back into right relationships with all things. Such is the good news of Scripture: God in Christ reconciles all things. This is never more clear than in Colossians 1 and Revelation 21–22. In Paul’s lovely song about reconciliation in the first chapter of Colossians, the phrase “all things” sings like a refrain and in John’s mind-boggling vision of God’s good future in the last chapters of the Apocalypse, reconciliation extends “far as the curse is found.” We Christians need to put this theology into practice. We need to acknowledge our broken relationship with the earth, recognize that in Christ we are put into right relationships with all things, and strive, therefore, to be better earthkeepers—serving and protecting this our common home.

Notes

1 As in North America at Christmas, when the sights and sounds and smells of the holiday are virtually everywhere, in Colossae and other cities in Asia Minor the emperor cult “permeated public life and the culture generally as well as public space” (Horsley, 1997, pp. 21–22). In particular, “the imperial image, which emanated from and represented the center [of the empire], became omnipresent and was widely venerated in the Greek cities” (Horsley, 1997, pp. 21–22).

2 See Prov. 8:22 and Wis. 7:25 for the Hellenistic Jewish background for the notion of divine Wisdom personified and described as the image of God’s goodness.

3 Both the merism (heaven and earth) and the inclusio (heaven/earth//visible/invisible) emphasize that nothing is excluded from the “all things.”

4 While these terms, given their uses in Hellenistic-Jewish texts, are usually thought to refer to astral or heavenly powers, the ubiquity and power of the emperor cult makes it difficult to believe that Paul did not have Roman imperial rule in mind. As Elliot (1997) makes clear, in other Pauline writings these terms refer to historical powers and form the context for Paul’s “anti-imperial message of the cross” (pp. 172–176, 179ff).

5 Virtually all commentators assume these terms refer only to heavenly realities. For example, Dunn (1996) claims that “all four terms thus refer only to the invisible, heavenly realm” (p. 92). Thus is the text depoliticized, and any possibility that one or more of these terms might refer to actual historical thrones or dominions, rulers or powers, is dismissed. In other words, that the throne might be Caesar’s or the dominion that of Rome or the power that of the empire is not seriously considered.

6 In the two parallel lines of the middle section of the poem, which thematically connect the two main strophes, the supremacy of Christ is reinforced. See Wright’s (1992) suggestive and insightful literary analysis (p. 104).

7 The cosmos holds together because, in the words of Walsh (2000), Christ is “nothing less than the ontological linchpin of creation” (p. 4).

8 While ekklêsia is usually translated church, the term means assembly, and has both political and religious meanings. As Horsley (1997) comments: “By general consensus, while ekklêsia comes to Paul from the Septuagint (the Jewish Bible in Greek) with strong connotations of the “assembly” of (all) Israel, its primary meaning in the Greek-speaking eastern Roman empire was the citizen “assembly” of the Greek polis. Ekklêsia is thus a political term with certain religious overtones” (p. 208). Thus Paul’s assemblies or churches are alternative local communities which stand over against the Roman imperial order.

9 In language reminiscent of Gen. 1:1 and Prov. 8:22, Christ is here proclaimed to be the beginning. As with the term firstborn, beginning has to do with primacy, whether in time or with reference to sovereignty.

10 See, for example, Gen. 49:3, where both terms, “firstborn” and “beginning,” together designate the founder of a new people.

11 The use of the rare word prôteuôn combined with the seemingly omnipresent “all things” emphasizes (again!) the full scope of Christ’s superiority.

12 Dunn (1996) comments: “The wholeness of God’s interaction with the universe is summed up in Christ” (p. 101).

13 Of all those in the twentieth century to champion the “cosmic Christ” none did so as well as Sittler, whose famous plenary speech at the 1961 meeting of the World Council of Churches in New Delhi, India, was in fact an extended meditation on Col. 1:15–20.

14 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.14.20 and 2.6.1.

15 Such questions, contrary to the views of many, are not idle or speculative or worthless. Such questions are anything but pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by, for inquiry concerning the nature and character of God’s good future is integrally linked to the question of hope. In other words, what we believe about the future influences how we act in the present. Our eschatology shapes our ethics.

16 N. T. Wright’s book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, is a very fine work. However, his book Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church is more accessible to the person in the pew.

17 The Greek term neos is a temporal term which denotes that which is young, new in time, or previously non-existent. The term kainos is an eschatological term, having to do with the promise and realization of the messianic age to come, and denotes something previously unknown or unprecedented, something with a new character. With its background usage in the Hebrew prophets, kainos suggests that which is better, of a superior nature.