Will all creation burn? Moltmann has said:
Since the Middle Ages, a conception of death and resurrection became fixed in Christian thinking that is deeply unchristian: the pictorial world of heaven and hell, the conception of a Last Judgement that rewards good works and punishes bad deeds to order the transition to the world to come. According to this notion, God’s judgement only knows two sentences: either eternal life or eternal death, either heaven or hell. If one asks what will come of the good visible creation, the earth and God’s other earthly creatures, the answer is everything will be burnt to ashes. This world will not be needed any more when the blessed will see directly in heaven without mediation by other creatures.
Where does this idea of “everything being burnt to ashes” come from? Well no doubt largely from 2 Peter 2:10:
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.
This appears pretty conclusive. To me it has always sounded just like the Stoic conception of the end of all things: A massive conflagration in which creation itself is burnt up. But is that the best way to read it? At the recent Tyndale Conference at Cambridge, Jonathan Moo spoke on the topic of “Continuity, Discontinuity and Hope: The Contribution of New Testament Eschatology to a Distinctively Christian Environmental Ethos” – and his paper included an examination of the 2 Peter passage. Drawing on the work of Al Walters, he suggested a different reading:
- But the day of the Lord will come like a thief
- And then the heavens [i.e. the outermost cosmic level] will pass away with a loud noise,
- And the elements [stoicheia: the intermediate cosmic level] will be dissolved with fire [i.e. a fire that refines the next level]
- And the earth and everything that is done on it [i.e. the foundational level] will be disclosed [i.e. made evident]
Thus there is something of a parallel to the “fire” of 1 Corinthians, which refines in order to preserve: The outer levels burn, in order to bring to light – rather than destroy – the earth and everything that is done on it.
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There’s also the parallel with the flood… the flood, while doing destruction to the earth, also didn’t destroy it in full but brought an ethical cleansing. Peter, in the same passage, likens it to the flood. Mike Wittmer has a good, but brief, apologetic for the view that it is not an ontological destruction but an ethical one in his book “Heaven is a Place on Earth.”
I understand the Petrine passage to indicate a fire of cleansing, with which God will purge all corruption from the earth before it’s gloriously made new. I formerly believed in a total destruction of the earth, but have since come to believe differently.
hmm Good thoughts – and particularly useful to see the connection with the flood, which likewise brought “cleansing”. The other concept that I think is helpful is the parallel of resurrection – the Christian hope is not that God will demolish and start afresh, but that God will salvage and amazingly raise his original creative work.
Do Christians really think that people were ‘cleansed’ by being drowned?
Hebrews 1 says
In the beginning, O Lord, you laid the foundations of the earth,
and the heavens are the work of your hands.
11They will perish, but you remain;
they will all wear out like a garment.
12You will roll them up like a robe;
like a garment they will be changed.
Are old , discarded clothes thrown away, or are they ‘cleansed’?
Jesus was dressed in a purple robe and then spat on? Did this spitting ‘cleanse’ the robe, ready for Pilate to wear again, or was the robe then discarded?
I think from 2 Peter’s point of view, it’s cleansing in the sense of refining… so there’s both discontinuity and continuity. Resurrection, I think, is the same – bodies genuinely die and rot and are, in that sense, ‘discarded’ – and God doesn’t use one of those ER-style electricity-to-the-heart machines to revive them – yet somehow he creatively brings new life that maintains continuity with what went before.
In other words, I think there are parts of the Bible that emphasise continuity of the created order at the eschaton, and other parts that emphasise discontinuity – and the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
This was a very standard view.
The world would be reduced to its elements, which being elemental, did not cease to exist. These elsments would then be the material from which the new world was constructed.
A bit like taking apart a house made from Lego bricks and building a Lego garage with them. There is both continuity and discontinuity.
In the Latin text of Life of Adam and Eve 50:1-2 it reads:
“But listen to me, my children! Make now tablets of stone and other tablets of clay and write in them all my life and your father’s which you have heard and seen from us. If he should judge our race by water, the tablets of earth will dissolve and the tablets of stone will remain; but if he should judge our race by fire, the tablets of stone will break up and those of clay will be thoroughly baked.”
Here in this first century work, we see an actual link between the flood and the eschatological fire of 2 Peter.
Matt-
Off topic, but apparently my friend who was in England for a few weeks was at the Grudem talk you were at, so I mentioned your question to him. He started laughing and talking about how awesome it was–small world!
Joseph: That is quite interesting – the idea that God could judge by one of those two methods…
Bryan: Hah! Wow – worlds are colliding!!!
Matt,
You might be interested in Eddie Adams’ LSNT monograph, Stars Will Fall From Heaven. He does a good overall survey on this topic.
Hey thanks for this – I’ll check it out