Heaven and earth will come together as Christ’s kingship is recognized by all creation. Moreover, we should embrace “the kingdom work” that calls us, as the revised song states. Yet, I also sense that we impoverish our hope for heaven when we turn it into an expression of our current activist emphasis upon “kingdom work.”

Heaven isn’t what it used to be.

A friend of mine’s favorite Sunday school song growing up was “Dwell in Me, O Blessed Spirit,” the first verse of which goes, “Dwell in me, O Blessed Spirit, Gracious Teacher, Friend Divine. For the home of bliss that waits me, O prepare this heart of mine.” But my friend, Laura Smit, who is now a theology professor at Calvin College, notes that this song is now revised in the hymnal to read “For the kingdom work that calls me, O prepare this heart of mine.” Apparently, those revising the song worried that speaking of the “home of bliss that waits me” leads to otherworldly passivity. Rather than prepare our hearts for the “home of bliss” in the age to come, we should focus on “the kingdom work that calls me.”

This revision reflects the broader trend of evangelical scholars and pastors countering a wispy, ethereal view of heaven, separated from our present life. Rather than use “rapture” movies to scare non-Christians into faith so they are delivered from the burning earth, these evangelicals insist that Christian hope is not for the annihilation of the earth, but the restoration of all creation to service of the Lord. Our heavenly hope is that the Lord sets things right, and heaven comes to earth. Our kingdom work now anticipates the new creation to come, in which we reign with King Jesus in the renewed creation.

I embrace the main features of this counter-narrative to the rapture account. Redemption restores God’s good creation. Heavenly hope involves a material, embodied restoration. Heaven and earth will come together as Christ’s kingship is recognized by all creation. Moreover, we should embrace “the kingdom work” that calls us, as the revised song states. Yet, I also sense that we impoverish our hope for heaven when we turn it into an expression of our current activist emphasis upon “kingdom work.”

Resurrection Hope in the Present Age

New Testament scholar Richard Middleton speaks for many in this “kingdom work” movement in insisting that “we need to drop pious ideas of a perpetual worship service as our ultimate purpose in the eschaton.” Instead, we need to focus on what we will do in the new creation. Likewise, in his popular recent book, All Things New: Heaven, Earth, and the Restoration of Everything You Love, pastor John Eldredge laments that “everybody I talk to still has these anemic, wispy views of heaven, as a place up there somewhere, where we go to attend the eternal-worship-service-in-the-sky.” Instead, “the renewal of all things simply means that the earth you love—all your special places and treasured memories—is restored and renewed and given back to you.”

A watershed book for the recent discussion of these issues was N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. Wright presents a forceful counter to a “rapture-based” view of heaven where the earth is left behind. As he does so, he presents a wide-ranging vision of how the church is to “bring real and effective signs of God’s new creation to birth even in the midst of the present age.”

A key verse for Wright is Paul’s admonition at the end of his great exposition of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 to “give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” (15:58). While many interpreters understand this “labor” as preaching the resurrected Christ (referenced by Paul several times earlier in the chapter), Wright claims that all faithful actions in the Christian life will “last all the way into God’s new world. In fact, it will be enhanced there.” These actions give signs of what is to come:

What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future.” Christian identity in the present age and the age to come is framed in terms of what we as humans do. For only will our own actions, as “real and effective signs,” last into God’s future; in the coming age God will undertake “fresh projects” through us as actors “in his new world.”

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