The Lamb as Lamp (1 of 2)

Chapter 15 ended with the participation in seed form and the promise that the seed and the flower are the same plant. This chapter takes up the flower. The destination of the redemption the volume has been describing is not a disembodied state and not a Platonic dissolution. The destination is a cosmos. A renewed heaven and a renewed earth. A place where the humans who have been made partakers of the divine nature dwell in their resurrection bodies in the unmediated presence of the Son.

John writes around 95 AD on the island of Patmos. The vision he records in the last two chapters of his Apocalypse is the most concentrated description of the final state the New Testament gives. Revelation 21:1. And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. Revelation 21:2. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

Notice the direction of motion. The city comes down. New Jerusalem descends from God out of heaven. The whole eschatological geography of the New Testament moves in this direction — heaven coming to earth, not the saved leaving earth for heaven. The descent of Chapter 7, when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, was the inaugural movement. The descent of Revelation 21 is the completing movement. The same direction. Down. Toward the material order. Toward the body. Toward the cosmos.

The Old Testament had the same expectation seven centuries before John wrote. Isaiah 65:17, written in the eighth century BC, has the LORD saying behold, I create new heavens and a new earth. The promise of a new heavens and a new earth is not a New Testament innovation. The prophets knew the future was embodied, that the cosmos itself was part of what God intended to renew, that the destination of the covenant was not the dissolution of the world but its remaking.

This forecloses the Platonic option that has tempted Christianity from its earliest centuries. Plato had taught that the material world is a shadow of the real and that the destination of the soul is escape from materiality into pure intelligible being. The body was a tomb. The world was a prison. The wise man's task was to practice dying so that the soul could ascend to the realm of forms. This is not what Revelation 21 describes. The new creation is not the abolition of matter. The new creation is matter renewed. The new earth is an earth. The new heavens are heavens. The holy city has streets and walls and gates and a river and a tree. The destination is a place, with material features, where embodied humans dwell.

Irenaeus made the refusal of the Platonic option explicit in Against Heresies Book 5. He said no in the clearest possible language. The flesh is good. The flesh will be raised. The flesh will dwell in the new creation. The promise of God is not the escape of the soul from the body but the renewal of both together. The Apostles' Creed confesses the resurrection of the flesh — not the immortality of the soul. The distinction is doctrinally precise and historically deliberate. The destination of the human is embodied.

Paul makes the cosmic scope of the renewal explicit in Romans 8:19-23. The whole creation is waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creation was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, because the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. Paul's argument is that the renewal is not just for humans. The creation itself — the material order, the physical cosmos, the world we walk in and work in — is part of what is being redeemed. The bondage of corruption that Paul names is the running-down of the world, the entropy of Chapter 1, the asymptote of Chapter 5. The deliverance is not the abandonment of the world but the world's release into the freedom for which it was originally made.

And here is where the chapter's central image lands. Revelation 21:22. And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. Revelation 21:23. And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. The lampless cosmos. The temple-less city. The most extraordinary feature of the new creation is what is not there. No temple — because the entire cosmos is now the temple. No sun — because the Lamb is the light.