But we must bear in mind it is God’s justice that must be done, not our own. And the character of God’s justice has already been made plain in the face of Jesus Christ. To finally, truly see that face—how could it not bring the beauty of holiness to bear upon us in ways that determine our being, once and always, now and forever?
Fulfillment
Jenson, following Jonathan Edwards, insists that the eschaton does not merely happen to us, but also comes from us. Judged, we are also judges. The end witnesses the realization of the promise that “God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment” (Ps 82:1). With God, we judge—and are judged by—one another, the world, and the angels. Jenson appeals to Edwards, who makes the point forcefully: Christ’s promises to the apostles are not fulfilled until we, like all who follow Christ, share in his judgment in the glorious end of all things (see Matt 19:28; Luke 22:30).
Bliss
In the end, the saints find their bliss in seeing God and all things in God. In Jenson’s words,
Christ will know himself as his people with no more reservation; he will be head of a body that he does not need to discipline. Thus he will eternally adore God as the one single and exclusive person of the totus Christus, as those whom the Father ordained for him and whom the Spirit has brought to him.180
On this point, as so often on other points, Jenson is building on Jonathan Edwards’s speculations. Edwards, drawing on claims in Matt 11:27 and John 6:46, insists that only the Son knows God immediately, while all other creatures know God via means, that is, by “manifestations or signs.” Jesus, in Edwards’s phrase, is “the grand medium” in which all other means have their being, and by which they are judged. In the eschaton, then, Edwards believes that the saints will see God mediately in seeing Christ—and through all of the other creaturely means of grace that the Son draws into his service. Above all, these other means are the creatures, angelic and human, who are “endowed with holiness” so that they share Christ’s character, his image. The saints “converse with God” in the world to come by “conversing with Christ, who speaketh the words of God.”181
In Jenson’s paraphrase of Aquinas, “deification and the beatific vision coincide.”182 In the language of Scripture’s promise, “we shall be like him” because “we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). And we shall know as we are known (1 Cor 13:12). Our hearts, renewed by the Spirit, long for that more than for anything: “I shall be satisfied, seeing your likeness” (Ps 17:15). Even now, we anticipate that vision every time we gather around the Table to hear the Scriptures read and the gospel preached, and to share in the eucharistic meal. As Jenson puts it, “we will know ourselves [then] as Christ’s body as directly as we now know the signs of bread and cup.”183 Every Eucharist, then, is a foretaste of our eschatological existence.
The Nature of Eschatological Existence
Jenson is clear that our share in Christ’s resurrection at his coming effects the creation of “a new material world.” “The achievement of God’s reign” will mean an end of one world and the beginning of another.184 But what will our life be like in this new order of existence? As Jenson envisions it, it will be an existence of new bodies and new times, new ministry and new politics, new pleasures and endless surprises.
New Bodies, New Times
Whenever we pray the creed, we confess our desire for the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting for which resurrected bodies are made. But what kind of embodiment is promised to us in that everlastingly resurrected life? Jenson is blunt: “a body in the new creation must indeed be a something, and a material something.” What kind of materiality? Whatever materiality is fitted to the knowing God as he knows himself. Jenson references the vision of Gottfried Thomasius, a nineteenth-century Lutheran theologian: “the new spiritual body will be much more the transparent expression of the sanctified person, the bright mirror of his inner purity and moral beauty.”185
New embodiment requires a new temporality. Saint Augustine discerned that we, in this “physical” body, necessarily experience time only in losing it. Time exists, he says in book 11 of his Confessions, only in that it passes into the past, dying to us. The jagged edges of this truth gash us whenever we realize what time’s passing means for our relationship with those we love most deeply. But then, our bodies, like the time/space they inhabit, shall be of such a nature that nothing is lost. And all that had been lost shall be restored. As Moltmann explains, “In the ‘restoration of all things,’ all times will return and—transformed and transfigured—will be taken up into the aeon of the new creation.”186 To move to poetics, which Jenson insists we must do, we can say that God will turn the water of history into the wine of eternity; the “loaves and fishes” of our worldly experience will be taken up and multiplied infinitely in the banquet that is our knowing as we are known. “Only this can be called ‘the fulness of the times.’”187 Or, as Jenson himself puts it, “Eternal life is rather the infinite appropriation and interpretation of accomplished lives within the discourse of the triune life.”188
New Ministry, New Politics
Like N. T. Wright, Jürgen Moltmann, and others, Jenson holds that the gospel promises in the end the marriage of heaven and earth, a (re)new(ed) cosmos in which God’s will is finally, perfectly accomplished “on earth as it is in heaven.”189 But Jenson is perhaps clearest in his insistence that our hope, then, is in the absolute establishment of God’s polity, the “New Jerusalem,” as the political and cultural center of the ‘new heavens and new earth, where righteousness dwells.” Jenson poses the shift in Augustinian terms:
“Two loves make the two polities, love of self the earthly polity . . . , love of God the heavenly.” The distinction is eschatological. Every created self will pass away; indeed, love of self is the very principle of historical decay: “He that seeks his life will lose it.” Love of God will not pass away, for he is what all things pass on to. Thus the gates of hell will sooner or later prevail against every polity of this age. They will not prevail against the church, which will be fulfilled precisely by the judgment that burns away its accommodations to this age.190
New Pleasures, New Surprises
We have the promise of new bodies and new times. But what will we do with those bodies in those times? Jenson, following Edwards, imagines that the “saints’ glorified bodies shall be attuned to every physical pleasure, in a way that shall not inhibit but only add to their spiritual pleasure.”191 In Edwards’s own words, “Every perceptive faculty shall be an inlet of delight.”192 Can we speak, then, of an eternally sanctified sensuality? With Edwards, Jenson gives a hearty yes!
After all, will there be no jewelers or goldsmiths in the Kingdom? And will the achievement of their lives provide no matter for eternal interpretation by Jesus’ love? The feast of “rich food . . . of well-aged wines strained clear,” will it have no taste? Will there no be cooks or vintners in the Kingdom? Or even connoisseurs?193
If Israel’s and the church’s experiences with God prove anything, it is that God, while faithful, is never predictable. God is, perhaps above all, surprising. Hence, after all has been said and done, after all our efforts to find the least inadequate ways to give voice to reasons for the hope that makes our lives livable, we have to say simply this: whatever happens in the End will be better, more just, and more beautiful than we can now imagine. “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:8).
The end is music, Jenson says. God is a fugue, and so creation’s end must be translation into that movement. Creation happens as “creatures are summoned into being as this song opens up to allow the participation of singers other than the triune persons.”194 Creation’s consummation happens as these same creatures come to sing their song in ever more glorious, ever more beautiful harmony with God’s own singing.
I once heard an architec
t say that music, unlike paintings or sculpture, cannot be turned away from, because it surrounds you, envelops you. That, it seems to me, is what Jenson means for us to hear: in the end, God will truly, fully surround us, as a space that has no exterior. And in enveloping us as beginning, guide, and end, God will fulfill us just as he himself is all in all. The end is music—a music that does not end, and so is always our beginning. “The harmony in God that is his beauty and the beauty of all things is a harmony of the shocks and revelations that make the history told in Scripture.”195 And so in the world without end, we shall go on experiencing these shocks and revelations in an always ascending cascade of delights.
176. Jenson, Ezekiel, 72.
177. Jenson, On Thinking the Human, 72.
178. Jenson, “The Great Transformation,” 39.
179. Ibid. (italics original).
180. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:339 (italics original).
181. Edwards, Miscellanies 777.
182. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:344.
183. Jenson, “Eschatology,” 416.
184. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:348.
185. Quoted in ibid., 2:356.
186. Moltmann, Coming of God, 294–95.
187. Ibid.
188. Jenson, “Eschatology,” 415.
189. See, for example, Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1043–1265; Moltmann, The Coming of God; and Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 3.
190. Jenson, “Eschatology,” 413.
191. Edwards, “Miscellanies” no. 233, in Works, 13:350–51.
192. Quoted in Caldwell, “Brief History of Heaven,” 67.
193. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:352.
194. Wright, “Creator Sings,” 977.
195. Jenson, “Deus Est Ipsa Pulchritudo,” 214.
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