The [Apostles’] Creed
is a summary of the Big Story. And like the biblical drama of redemption, the
story the Creed proclaims is not just about things that happened a long time
ago. Part of the story still lies in front of us, in an event in the future.
And this event is so crucial to the story told that Scripture
characteristically refers to it as our “hope.”
Hope is such an
essential aspect of human existence that it would not be too much to say that
what we hope for as our ultimate destiny is really an extension of and perhaps
the clearest indicator of what we most value. Hope is not simply what we expect
to happen, but what we long for, what we pray the future will be. How we see
the future, the ultimate future, is the key to grasping everything else about
us right now. Tell me your hope and I will know your heart, how you understand
yourself, and how you relate to everything else. When we get a glimpse into
where God is taking his people and the world, we begin to win an appreciation
of what God considers worthy and valuable, what he loves. So when we talk about
the Christian hope, we are talking about what God cares about, what he
considers worthy of his concern and of the redemptive work of Christ. God's
promise of the future is the Christian hope.
Amazingly, the Creed
declares that the historic church’s hope is “the resurrection of the body.” I
say “amazingly” because the Creed does not, as many might expect, identify
heaven as the believer’s hope. When Christians talk about the point and goal of
salvation, what they hope for, it is almost always going to heaven. Indeed, if
we were to judge by two millennia of Christian art and hymnody, popular
literature and piety, we would have to conclude that the Christian faith is
fundamentally about the belief that the point of salvation is going to heaven.
Yet the Creed does not say that. It declares the Christian hope as the
resurrection of the body. To see what is at stake here, let's review a bit of the
story behind the Creed. The world in which the Apostles’ Creed was born was
deeply influenced by Platonic dualism, which, by the late third century, had
been informing the worldview assumptions of the Greco-Roman world for half a
millennium. Quasi-Christian sects such as Gnosticism and Marcionism, and
religious philosophies such as Manichaeism and Neo-Platonism, were well known.
There were some different beliefs and commitments among these groups, but if
you scratched any of them they bled Platonic dualism.
Plato taught that
reality is made up of two kinds of substances, two kinds of stuff—material
stuff and spiritual stuff—which are always in opposition because they come from
two different sources. The spiritual comes from God, the material from some
lesser being. The spiritual, being from God, is good. Matter, being of more
questionable origin, is less good, perhaps even evil. Human beings are caught
right in the middle of this conflict between spirit and matter, between God and
what is opposed to God. The tension is built right into our very beings, for we
are made of the admixture of the two. The body is material, the soul spiritual.
The soul, our true or highest self, is imprisoned in the lowly body, a
corrupting bag of flesh. Platonists found something of a pun in the similarity
of the word “body” to the word “grave” in Greek: soma, sema. The body (soma) is made for the grave (sema). The body is a tomb. Under such a
philosophical regime, redemption is nothing less than the liberation of the
soul from the body, the movement from the material realm of earth to the
spiritual realm of heaven. That, in a nutshell, is the Platonic story. And
under its influence, Christians of the post-New Testament era came to think of
the created world as at best irrelevant to the life of the soul—the really real self—and at worst as that from which we
must be saved.
The Creed tells a
quite different story, one that was intentionally subversive of all dualistic
conceptions of human beings and the world. “I believe in God the Father
almighty, creator of heaven and earth.” No spiritual stuff versus material
stuff there, just God and stuff made by God, God and God’s stuff. There is no
stuff that isn’t God’s. It’s all his stuff. And all the stuff is good…
The gospel is good
news for the world. It is, after all a gospel, glad tidings, and it is good for
all things. Paul punctuates this in Colossians 1:15-20. The redemptive work of
Christ is for “all things,” “things on earth,” and “things in heaven.” As
Anthony Hoekema notes, the promise of the resurrection in Romans 8 means that
“God will not be satisfied until the entire universe has been purged of all the
effects of man’s fall.” [The Bible and the Future, p. 275.]
We read this same
gospel promise in the Old Testament.
Let the heavens be
glad, and let the earth rejoice;
let the sea
roar, and all that fills it;
let the
field exult and everything in it!
Then shall all the
trees of the forest sing for joy
before the
LORD, for he comes,
for he comes to
judge the earth. (Ps. 96:11-13)
Resurrection is not
just for human beings, it is for creation as well. It will not do for us to
make the gospel small, just for human souls. To do that is to say more about
what we value than to act as fair brokers of the biblical story. Virtually
every biblical term for redemption that we apply to human beings Scripture also
applies to the creation. In his commentary on Romans 8, Calvin was not in the
least reticent to use the language of resurrection for the entire created
order. On verses 19-20 he said: “I understand the passage to have this meaning…
No part of the universe is untouched by the longing with which everything in
this world aspires to the hope of resurrection.”
The story told by the
Creed and the drama of redemption preached by Paul are quite the same. The
Messiah will come from heaven to earth, to rescue his people not by snatching
them away from the earth but by transforming them and the world by way of
resurrection. One way to summarize the entire story is this: God made it, Adam
broke it, Jesus fixes it. What is “it?” All things. God’s stuff. The Creed
tells that story in its declaration of the resurrection of the body. Paul tells
that very same story in Romans 8.
Resurrection is the
baseline for our thinking about the future. What came bursting into the
first-century world was not a philosophy of world-escape—there were already
plenty of those—but the proclamation that Jesus Christ has bodily risen from
the grave, that his people will be raised so that they will be like him, and
that the Creator promises to rid his world of all that harms and frustrates his
works. Whatever we believe about life and death, if it is to be biblical
belief, it must be begin with and make sense in terms of the resurrection of
the body.
From a sermon preached on Romans 8:18-25 in June 2009 by the
Rev Dr Michael Williams, theology professor at Covenant Seminary (St Louis,
MO), “I believe… The Resurrection of the Body,” the transcript of which
appeared in Presbyterion (#36/1;
Spring 2010) p. 1-8.
This entry was posted
at Monday, July 05, 2010
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Covenant Theological Seminary,
Creation,
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