“The World to Come”
Posted on 09 May 2009
As N. T. Wright often quips, “Heaven’s great. It’s just not the end of the world.”
“The world to come” names not “heaven” (as popularly conceived) but the kingdom of God. Not a reality that threatens the termination of what we know as “world,” but a reality which is coming to us, and which will mean the complete reconfiguration of reality as we have known it. “The world to come” is the world in which all injustices are redressed, all desires satisified (but not extinguished), and all loves requited; the world in which all creation is put to rights and we ourselves are finally and truly ourselves because God, the Whence and Whether, is finally and truly “all in all.” In the language of the later apostolic writings, “the world to come” means “a new heaven and a new earth” (2 Pet 3.13; Rev 21.1). It means the risen cruified Christ rightly rules all “things in heaven and things in earth” (Eph 1.10; Col 1.15-20). It means a new creation, a (re)new(ed) cosmos, redeemed from all the effects of sin, emptied of all death and Nothingness because absolutely filled with God. It means the best of all possible worlds. It does not mean disembodied existence somewhere “out there,” beyond the earth. That is what we’re hoping for, and nothing less.
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