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| Holy Resurrection Serbian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Il. |
Early in my theological education I spent
a lot of time immersed in N.T. Wright’s work which always seemed to be moving
in a different direction from that of the traditional Reformers and
fundamentalist ideas that had informed my earlier life. There were many things Wright
said that captivated my imagination, but one in particular was the idea that
Heaven/Kingdom of God and Earth were not separate and distant from each other.
Rather, the theology of Jesus as God incarnate, the resurrection and Pentecost
brought about a new cosmic reality in which creation and new creation come
together merging and overlapping Heaven and Earth (Jn. 14:18-20; Rom. 8).[1]
Therefore, theologies that make Heaven a far from Earth pie-in-the-sky type
place that one will someday escape to misses the mark and inadvertently embraces
Gnostic and platonic dualities. What Wright has always insisted is that Heaven,
as the Kingdom of God is a different, but very present, space enveloping the
whole cosmos (See Ps. 24; Acts 25-28).
In
line with this, this last year I officially left behind the protestant world
and began the journey toward becoming Eastern Orthodox. To my surprise the
Orthodox view reinforces Wright. In fact the sacred architecture of the church
design is undergirded by this theology. The church is seen as a microcosm of Heaven
and Earth. There is an emphasis on full sensory involvement from visual
aesthetics, to incense fragrances, to full body participation from making the
sign of the cross, to bowing and venerating icons; it all celebrates this truth.
The truth that the physical is tied to the spiritual; all that is seen is bound
to the unseen and thus is celebrating the Kingdom of God already reigning in
the church as the sign of the macro reality: God’s reign in the cosmos.
The
Western church in general tends to disagree with this, but I believe they do so
without the benefit of actually knowing where this comes from. So, I thought I
might attempt to clarify since it comes up so much in my theology.
First,
many have a pre-existing belief that God is too holy and righteous for this to
be true and must keep separate from his sinful and fully “depraved” creation (which flirts with gnosticism). This
conclusion of exclusion comes from a number of places within scripture (though
lacking sound exegesis), but most often it comes from the views about how
atonement works specifically within the tabernacle and temple settings. Many will point to the segregated Holy of Holies in rebuttal. But, this is ironic because
the Jewish belief (which incidentally is absent of original sin and total
depravity doctrines) theologically interprets the tabernacle as a miniature
cosmos. As Jon D. Levenson says, “It is the theology of creation rendered in
architecture and glyptic craftsmanship… It is for this reason that the Hebrew
Bible is capable of affirming God’s heavenly and his earthly presence without
the slightest bit of tension between the two.”[2]
Terence
Fretheim shows that Exodus narrative, Psalms, and Isaiah all draw together these very thematic
links between creation and tabernacle (Exod. 25-31; 35-40; Ps. 11:4; 78:69;
Isa. 11:9; 66:1-2) because the tabernacle was “…the world order as God intended,
writ small in Israel.”[3] Levenson adds, “the function of these correspondences
is to underscore the depiction of the sanctuary as a world, that is, an
ordered, supportive, and obedient environment, and the depiction of the world
as a sanctuary, that is, a place in which the reign of God is visible and
unchallenged, and his holiness is palpable, unthreatened and pervasive.”[4] The
Holy of Holies itself was to be the manifest, yet hidden, Heaven that is part
of the micro and macro created order. However, within the tabernacle structure
this symbolic Heaven cannot be localized because it is not a place but the
central aspect from which all things receive individualization, meaning and
being.[5] It is the center that sustains the world, but the entire thing stands
as a testimony to convey God as sustaining creator.
To
add to this picture, the tabernacle (ark included) is designed to be portable
and as Fretheim says is “viewed as a means by which the people of God can move
in a secure and ordered way beyond apostasy and through the world of disorder
on their way to a new creation.”[6] God is no separate from creation, but fills his creation with himself which comes into fuller focus when God became a human in Jesus. If the God that sustains creation would have abandoned it to the degree the reformers say, I can only imagine it would cease to
exist. But, the God who covered humanity after their failing and then followed them
out of Eden (Gen. 3:21-4:4) is a God fully invested in the ongoing creative activity.
References
[1] N.T. Wright. Surprised by
Hope (HarperCollins Kindle Edition.), 271.
[2] Jon D. Levenson. Sinai and
Zion: And Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (New York: Harper Collins
1987.),139.
[3] Terence Fretheim, God and
World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation. (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 2005), 128.
[4] Jon D. Levenson. Persistence
of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (San Francisco: Harper and
Row 1988), 86.
[5] Ibid, Levenson. Sinai and
Zion.139-140.
[6] Ibid, God and World in the
Old Testament, 129.
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