‘If Heaven’s Not My Home’: Reasserting the Christian Hope against Recent Critics

Randall E. Otto

Randall Otto is Affiliate Faculty in Christian Ministries for Southwestern College in Wichita,
Kansas, a Mentor in Humanities for Thomas Edison State University in Trenton, New Jersey,
and Visiting Professor in Critical Reasoning for Chamberlain School of Nursing, global campus.

Keywords:
Cosmos, heaven, land, new heaven, redemption, resurrection

‘If you were to die tonight, do you know you’d go to heaven?’ This question, made

famous by Evangelism Explosion, epitomizes the focus of Christian faith and outreach from

earliest times. Christians understand themselves as adopted children of their ‘Father in heaven’

through faith in Christ who must testify to him even in persecution, ‘because great is your reward

in heaven’ (Matt. 5:12). They thus serve the Lord by giving of themselves, recalling the

command of Jesus to ‘store up for yourselves treasures in heaven’ (Matt. 6:21). Many a witness

for Christ has gone boldly to death recalling Stephen’s vision of ‘heaven open and the Son of

Man standing at the right hand of God’, praying for the Lord Jesus to receive his spirit (Acts

7:56-60).1 Many a minister has comforted those surviving the death of a beloved believer with

the words of Paul, ‘to be away from the body’ is to be ‘at home with the Lord’ (2 Cor. 5:8). Paul

himself expressed this in pondering his own imminent death: ‘I desire to depart and be with

Christ, which is better by far’ (Phil. 1:23). To ‘live in heaven’ (Rev. 13:6; 12:12) has been the

believer’s great hope and it must remain so, for heaven is the place of divine glory, the throne of

God, the paradigm of paradise and pattern of genuine worship (Exod. 25:9, 40; Heb. 8:5-6), the

land that is ‘fairer than fair’.

Since Christians are ‘aliens and strangers in the world’ (1 Pet. 2:11), hymnwriter Albert

Brumley wrote, ‘This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through. . . . If heaven’s not my
1
Of Ignatius (c. 135-140 CE), ‘as one who was about to secure heaven through his good confession’ (Martyrdom of Ignatius 4

[ANF 1:130]); also, the Martyrdom of Polycarp 14, 19 (ANF 1:42-43) perhaps 155 CE;

1
home, then Lord what will I do?’ According to a recent spate of books, however, this viewpoint

is misguided and erroneous. N. T. Wright laments the heavenly focus of many old hymns:

‘Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden, dimension of our ordinary life

—God’s dimension.’2 Brumley’s words are in his view ‘a soft version’ of Plato wandering off

‘unthinkingly in the direction of Gnosticism.’3 Richard Middleton maintains, ‘Heaven was never

part of God’s purposes for humanity’ and ‘has no intrinsic role as the final destiny of human

salvation.’4 Ian K. Smith speaks of this as an ‘anti-Copernican revolution; everything revolves

around the earth.’5 While there are differences among them, each author maintains the believer’s

ultimate hope should not be heaven, but resurrection life on a renewed earth.

One might have thought the Church had gotten away from geocentrism after the

embarrassment of ‘the Galileo affair’ in the seventeenth century. However, on the basis of four

occurrences of the phrase ‘new heaven(s) and new earth’ in the entire Bible (Isa. 65:17; 66:22; 2

Pet. 3:13; Rev. 21:1), these and other theologians, together with popular writers like John

Eldridge, wish to replace heaven as the believer’s eternal hope and home with the merging of

heaven and earth in the end.6

Smith maintains, ‘the Bible is more concerned with God coming down to earth than with

humans going up to heaven’.7 That is a false dichotomy, for the very reason why God came

down to earth in the person of Jesus Christ was to become the way by which God’s elect might
2
Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne,

2008), 18.

3
Wright, Surprised by Hope, 90.

4
Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), 71-72.

5
Smith, Not Home Yet: How the Renewal of the Earth Fits into God’s Plan for the World (Wheaton: Crossway, 2019), 22.

6
Eldridge, All Things New; Heaven, Earth, and the Restoration of Everything You Love (Nashville: Nelson, 2017).

7
Smith, Not Home Yet, 13.

2
go to be where he is, in the Father’s house in heaven (John 14:2-3). Although developments in

the biblical idea of the afterlife lie beyond the scope of this article, the predominant prophetic

view which envisaged a Jewish kingdom on earth with the destruction of the Gentiles or their

submission to Jewish worship gradually evolved by the first century BCE through the

disappointments and adaptations of faith to a view that saw the kingdom on a renewed earth in

early apocryphal literature to a view of heaven as the final abode of the righteous. Heaven had

already appeared as that final abode in some wisdom literature (Ps. 49:15; 73:24, e.g.), recalling

the place to which Enoch and Elijah had been translated, thereby becoming the historic focus of

the believer’s abiding hope.8

There are three primary questions to be addressed in determining whether this hope is

well placed: Is creation fallen? Does creation need redemption? To what does the resurrection

refer? By answering these questions, we can arrive at a better understanding of the scope and

hope of redemption and thus the home to which believers may rightly look in faith. A brief

elucidation of the ‘new heavens and new earth’ as God’s new order in history will follow, with a

closing demonstration from the church fathers that heaven, not a renewed earth, was the focus of

the church’s hope.

I. Is creation fallen?

These authors all speak of the world as ‘fallen.’ ‘Wholeness or well-being is God’s

original intent for creation, and that which impedes wholeness—sin, evil, and death in all their

forms—is fundamentally anti-creational.’9 Given that the Big Bang occurred 13.72 billion years

and our Homo species began some two million years ago, it is not possible to place the onus for

8
Cf., e.g., R. H. Charles, Eschatology: The Doctrine of a Future Life in Israel, Judaism, and Christianity: A Critical History

(New York: Schocken, 1963), 241-46, 287-97, 74-78.

9
Middleton, New Heaven, 79.

3
‘sin, evil, and death in their forms’ simply on humans. Humans have not been around to sin for

most of the earth’s 4.54 billion years of existence, yet there has been physical death since the

first single-celled organisms appeared some 3.5 billion years ago. Middleton’s participation in

Biologos, which integrates evolutionary science with Christian faith, makes his assertion

bewildering. Smith’s assertion, ‘the fall includes all those areas over which humanity has

dominion’ is also not borne out in either Scripture or science. His notion that ‘sickness is a result

of the fall’ or personal sin is simplistic,10 rebutted in Job and in Jesus’s ministry (John 9:1-3).

Physical death preceded the origin of humanity and its fall into sin. Wright, who also

participates in Biologos, nonetheless insists death is ‘not a good part of the good creation’,11

though it is hard to see how it could be otherwise scientifically. Biblically, sin is a violation of

the divine law (1 John 3:4), a lapse limited to rational moral beings and thus to humanity alone

on earth. Sin entered the world by one man, and death by sin, and so death passed unto all human

beings, since they sinned (Rom. 5:12) in the action of their federal head Adam (of the Neolithic

Period c. 12,000 years ago, given the agricultural focus of Gen. 2, and thus not necessarily the

first human being).12

10
Smith, Not Home Yet, 33, 37.

11
Wright, Surprised by Hope, 99.

12
David N. Livingstone has traced the challenges to conventional views of Adam as the first man resulting from acquaintance

with the cultural memories of other peoples through travel, particularly from the Renaissance on. ‘The sheer presence of

America, with its own peoples and cultures, the existence of physical artifacts such as the Aztec Calendar Stone, and the

uncovering of chronological traditions with time scales hugely incompatible with biblical genealogy, all prompted a number of

thinkers to flirt with the suspicion that all races might not be descended from the one biblical Adam’ (Adam’s Ancestors: Race,

Religion & the Politics of Human Origins [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008], 24). The ‘pre-Adamite scandal’

became historically associated with Isaac La Peyère, a Jewish Calvinist of Bordeaux, France, in the mid-seventeenth century,

when he tried to reconcile the existence of aboriginal peoples on Greenland who could not have arrived there by travel from

North America. This began a series of proposals for how to account for the existence of such indigenous peoples and races, some

4
 The cosmos is not fallen.13 Only humanity is. Common theological expansion of the curse

on the ground in Gen. 3:17 to the entire cosmos must reckon with the fact that ‘Genesis 3 is not

alluded to anywhere else in the Old Testament’.14 Rom. 8:20-21 is the only passage in the NT,

apart from a possible illustrative use in Heb. 6:8, for which the Nestle-Aland Greek text suggests

any allusion to Gen 3:17. Gen 3:17 is never quoted anywhere in the Bible.15 The fact that it is

never quoted or clearly alluded to suggests it has been inappropriately expanded in scope. Few

theologians exhibit greater concern for the environment than Paul Santmire, who yet says, ‘It is

important to note that there is no doctrine anywhere in the Bible of any kind of “cosmic fall”. Sin

comes into the primaeval world by Adam and Eve’s “grab for wisdom”.’ Sin is a ‘social, not a

suggesting that whites, blacks, and Indians derived from ‘multiple Adams’. This controversy antedates Darwin, whose work

brought this issue into bold relief, eliciting a variety of suggestions for how to understand Adam in light of evolutionary theory

(see, e.g., Matthew Barrett and Ardel B. Caneday, eds., Four Views on The Historical Adam [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013]).

13
For more on this, see, e.g., Bethany N. Sollereder, God, Evolution, and Animal Suffering: Theodicy Without a Fall (New York:

Routledge, 2019), 13-43, and C. John Collins, Science and Faith: Friends or Foes? (Wheaton: Crossway, 2003), 147-60; John J.

Bimson, ‘Reconsidering a Cosmic Fall’, Science & Christian Belief 18 (2006), 63-81.

14
J. W. Rogerson and Philip R. Davies, The Old Testament World (2nd ed.; Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2005), 118.

15
There is also little indication in apocalyptic and pseudepigraphical literature of any cosmic fall; as Donald E. Gowan (‘The Fall

and Redemption of the Material World in Apocalyptic Literature,’ Horizons in Biblical Theology 7 [1985], 83-103) concludes: ‘I

came to this study of Jewish apocalyptic literature prepared to find evidence for a strong tradition growing out of Gen 3:17,

concerning a fallen world in need of redemption, and hoping to find a creative development of the vision in Isa 11:6-9, but I

found neither.’ (101). The idea of a cosmic fall likely originated with Origen, who in Against Celsus says, ‘If, then, the whole

earth has been cursed in the deeds of Adam and of those who died in him, it is plain that all parts of the earth share in the curse’

(7.29 [ANF 4:622). Ironically, the Platonism our authors seem so eager to avoid was the basis (along with Stoicism) of Origen’s

suggestion that the earth is ‘rational’ and thus ethically responsible: ‘Who knows whether the earth also is subject to some sort of

sin according to its own nature, because accursed and held liable? For if it is a living being, if it is rational, if it needs to hear the

prophetic voice’ (Origen: Exegetical Works on Ezekiel [ed. Roger Pearse; Ipswich: Chieftain, 2014], 129).

5
cosmic reality’, resulting in alienation from God and other human beings; it does not

ontologically alter the soil or wider world in which humanity dwells.16

II. Does creation need redemption?

If creation is not fallen, it is difficult to see how it needs redemption. Notwithstanding,

Middleton maintains, ‘the creator has not given up on creation and is working to salvage and

restore the world (human and nonhuman) to the fullness of shalom and flourishing intended from

the beginning’.17 Middleton is among those who place great emphasis on the ‘flourishing’ of all

things, with ideas of personal fulfillment, meaning and accomplishment drawing more on

Positive Psychology than on biblical theology. Such assertions ‘call into question the myriad

ways in which God has acted in history to deny such fulfillment by destroying portions of

creation, judging peoples, and bringing about premature death’.18

Middleton’s contention that God is more concerned with culture and the environment

than with divine worship is anthropocentrism run amok. Scripture’s clear emphasis is on a right

relation with God and our fellow human beings, as demonstrated in the two tables of the law and

the two great commands. Because we fall short, we are condemned in our sin, which is why

Christ came, to fulfill the law in our place, to lay down his life as the spotless sacrificial lamb

and make atonement for the sins of those chosen in Christ.

There is no place in Scripture that even intimates Christ died for any reason other than the

redemption of human beings. Humans are uniquely made in the image of God and alone have

responsibilities before God and hope of redemption. The famous dictum of Gregory of
16
Santmire, ‘Partnership with Nature according to the Scriptures: Beyond the Theology of Stewardship’, in Environmental

Stewardship, ed. R. J. Berry (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006), 264.

17
Middleton, New Heaven, 27.

18
Randall E. Otto, ‘Made to Flourish? Positive Psychology and the “Chief End of Man”’, Touchstone 33 (July/August 2020),

19-20.

6
Nazianzus (c. 382), ‘That which He has not assumed He has not healed’ (Epistle 101), has been

widely abused by ‘creaturely theologians’ and advocates of Niels Gregersen’s ‘deep incarnation’

who maintain the Logos took on ‘flesh’ in the widest possible sense of animate or inanimate

creation so as to take it all up in a ‘deep resurrection’ of all things. Contrary to such

universalism, Gregory was speaking against the deficient Apollinarian Christology and asserting

the incarnation of the Logos in the full humanity of Jesus alone from the moment of conception,

lest there be no salvation for humanity. It is because Christ ‘gave himself for us to redeem us

from all iniquity and to purify for himself a people of his own’ (Tit. 2:14) that he had to be fully

human, as the Fathers maintained, so that he is able to save completely those who come unto

God by him (Heb. 7:25). The biblical and patristic focus on the cross as central to redemption for

humanity called forth the patristic emphasis on the necessity of Christ’s being like humans in all

ways except for sin.

III. To what does the resurrection refer?

Though the cross is incontestably the focus of the New Testament, it gets little attention

in any of the aforementioned books. Rather, their emphasis is on resurrection. ‘The resurrection

points to the renewal of God’s creation. . . . . Jesus is going to raise the universe!’19 This, Wright

and Middleton emphasize, gets us beyond a purported Platonic downgrading of bodies and the

created order. Wright’s assertion that, ‘for Plato, the present world of space, time, and matter is

a world of illusion,’20 evinces a deficient understanding of Plato, particularly as found in the

Timaeus, where the materiality of the world is viewed as good and worthy of study because

rationally ordered.21 Indeed, Plato viewed the universe as an eternal body, not unlike what these

authors envision for the cosmos through resurrection.

19
Smith, Not Home Yet, 12.

20
Wright, Surprised by Hope, 88.

7
 The fundamental problem with these and other creaturely theological and ‘deep

resurrection’ views of a universal cosmic resurrection is that Scripture never says anything

whatsoever about the resurrection of the universe. The idea of resurrection does not appear in the

Old Testament until after the exile, in apocalyptic literature or prophetic interpolations (e.g., Isa.

26:19).22 In the book of Daniel (second century BCE), we read of those who awake to everlasting

life and those who awake to everlasting contempt (Dan. 12:2), recalled by Paul in Acts 24:15 as

the resurrection of the just and unjust (cf. also John 5:28-29). There were also in this period

views of the resurrection of the just only and, in the Sadducees, no resurrection at all. On one

thing all should be agreed: resurrection in Scripture only has to do with human beings. Though

many assumptions are made about ‘the groaning of creation as in the pains of childbirth’ in Rom.

8:22, resurrection is not even mentioned there, or anywhere else with relation to nonhuman

creation. The only reference to redemption there is to ‘our bodies’ (Rom. 8:23).23

Christ’s resurrection is paradigmatic: ‘the only real prototype’, Wright acknowledges, is

the resurrection of Jesus. At Jesus’ resurrection his body was raised in its glorified state and

21
‘Outrageous is the view . . . that Greek thinkers from Plato onwards denigrated and despised the material world’ (Edward

Adams, ‘Graeco-Roman and Ancient Jewish Cosmology’, in Cosmology and New Testament Theology, ed. by Jonathan T.

Pennington and Sean M. McDonaugh [London: T. & T. Clark, 2008], 18). What Wright describes is closer to the Hindu view of

the world as taught by Shankara, that ‘the world was Māyā, illusion, a dream, a mirage, a figment of the imagination’ (A. L.

Basham, The Wonder That Was India [New York: Grove, 1954], 328).

22
Wright sees in this passage, as well as Ezekiel 37, ‘God’s renewal of the whole cosmos’ (The Resurrection of the Son of God

[Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003], 117), though there is little to indicate that.

23
Space and focus forbid further analysis of this passage, but, as T. W. Manson observes of taking κτίσις as ‘cosmos’, ‘it is not

clear how the material world can “obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God”. If, as seems more likely, “creation” =

“mankind”, the main contrast of the passage is between those who already “have the first fruits of the Spirit” (23) and the rest of

mankind still “subjected to futility” and “decay” (20 f.)’ who ‘long for release from their bondage into the freedom of God’s

children’ (Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, ed. Matthew Black [Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1962], 946).

8
united with his spirit committed to the Father at death to demonstrate his victory as the Second

Adam over sin and death, the firstfruits of the resurrection. This must be accented against notions

propounded by Middleton and others, following Oscar Cullmann, that there is a contradiction

between belief in an enduring soul or spirit and the resurrection of the body.24 As James Barr

recognized, ‘it is a comparatively modern position to believe in an irreconcilable conflict

between resurrection of the body and immortality of the soul’.25 ‘We should not be beguiled into

the old antithesis of “immortality” versus “resurrection”; for a future resurrection to happen,

there needs to be continuity between the present life and the future one’.26 Jesus asked God to

receive his spirit at his death and his body was resurrected three days later. Paul said absence

from the body for the believer nonetheless means being at home with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:8). A

form of dualism, or better psychosomatic unity, may not be fashionable in contemporary

theology, but these texts make little sense apart from it.

When Jesus came forth from the tomb, he proclaimed the kingdom for forty days, and

then ascended in his glorified body to heaven. There is clearly no tension between the

resurrection of the body and an atemporal, immaterial realm, despite Middleton. Indeed, the way

heaven is depicted in Ezekiel 1 and 10, as well as Rev. 1:12-17 and 4:1ff., as well as

pseudepigraphal literature, suggests something quasi-material, albeit spiritual. For instance, 1

Enoch, known to some NT writers (cf. Jude 14, e.g.), speaks of heaven as ‘a great house which

was built of white marble, and the inner walls were like mosaics of white marble, the floor of

crystal, the ceiling like the path of the stars and lightnings between which (stood) fiery cherubim

and their heaven of water; and flaming fire surrounded the walls, and its gates were burning with

24
Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead: The Witness of the New Testament (London: Epworth, 1958).

25
Barr, Old and New in Interpretation (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 53.

26
Wright, Resurrection of the Son of God, 184.

9
fire’, with a second house greater than the former ‘built with tongues of fire’ in which the Great

Glory was enthroned (14:10-12).27

After Jesus arose, he ascended in his resurrection body to the right hand of the Father in

heaven, there to reign over all things, ‘far above all rule and authority, power and dominion’

(Eph. 1:20-22; cf. Matt. 28:19). ‘God exalted him to the highest place’ (Phil. 2:9; cf. Acts. 2:33).

If exalted to the highest place at the Father’s right hand, is Christ to be humiliated again in

returning to earth, as this form of chiliasm supposes, and as Scripture never actually says?28

IV. What of the new heaven and new earth?

None of our authors addresses the origin of the ‘new heaven(s) and new earth’ occurring

twice in Second (or Third?) Isaiah, something Charles termed ‘a new development’ so out of

context as to ‘be rejected’, since the ‘older doctrine was the eternity of the present order of

things’ (Ps. 93:1; 94:10; 104:5; 147:6; Eccl. 1:4).29 That stability came into question with Amos’s

proclamation of the Day of Yahweh (5:18-21) in the eighth century BCE as a period of darkness

and destruction couched in cosmic terms (8:8-9), coming upon Israel from God through the

27
‘When we speak, therefore, of heaven as a material world, let not the reader’s imagination present to his hopes a world like this

earth, as though this was the only form in which it is possible for matter to exist’ (Henry Harbaugh, Heaven: or an earnest and

Scriptural inquiry into the Abode of the Sainted Dead [12th ed.; Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1856], 31).

28
Wright maintains that ‘the return of Jesus from heaven to earth, the parousia, was formulated, probably by Paul himself’ as a

political counter to Caesar (Resurrection of the Son of God, 231). Wright interprets parousia as an ‘almost technical term’ taken

from pagan sources which portray civic leaders gathering outside a city to escort a dignitary back into the city itself (217-128);

hence, resurrected believers are to meet Christ and join his reign on earth as in heaven (so also Middleton, New Heaven and New

Earth, 223-224). This ‘technical’ use is not borne out, however, in any of its apocryphal uses (Judith 10:18; 2 Macc. 8:12; 15:21;

3 Macc. 3:17 [of a high official’s visit]) and assumes connotations not necessarily found even in pagan literature (see A. Oepke,

‘παρουσία’, TDNT 5:859-871).

29
Charles, Eschatology, 127, 165.

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Assyrians and Israel’s exile there. This may be seen as the beginning of eschatology in the OT.30

This has nothing to do with an end of time, the world, or history, but of a radically new order

brought about by God in history. Noteworthy is that in Amos there is the restoration to the land

(as a new Eden, Amos 9:13-15), liberation from exile for a remnant (5:15), and an end of

suffering Wright sees as coterminous with resurrection hope, apart from any mention of

resurrection. On the other hand, Wright can argue for a resurrection hope in the eighth century

prophet Hosea (6:1-2; 13:14) apart from any real emphasis on restoration to the land (2:23).

Lastly, the clearest statement of resurrection in the OT, Dan. 12:1-2, involves no national focus

at all, let alone land, but may rather be of righteous Israelites, dead and those living at the end, or

classes of the persecuted.31 Hence, while a correlation can be drawn between resurrection and

restoration to the land, it is not a strict one. This dampens the force of Wright’s assertion that

‘“bodily resurrection for dead humans” and “national restoration for exiled/suffering Israel” are

so closely intertwined that it does not matter that we cannot always tell which is meant’.32

The origin of the idea of ‘new heaven(s) and new earth’ is disputed. Konrad Schmid

thinks ‘the text is anchored strongly within the Book of Isaiah itself’, though none of his texts

mentions or implies creation or new creation.33 Charles thought it likely derived from ‘Mazdean

30
Jakob H. Grönbaek, ‘Zur Frage der Eschatologie in der Verkündigung der Gerichtspropheten’, Eschatologie im Alten

Testament, ed. Horst D. Preuss [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978), 137-138. See also George E. Ladd, The

Presence of the Future: The Eschatology of Biblical Realism (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1974), 57-58 (and literature

cited there), to whom Middleton acknowledges a particular debt (New Heaven and New Earth, 13).

31
B. J. Alfrink, ‘L’idée de resurrection d’après Dan. XII, 1.2’, Biblica 40 (1959), 355-371, e.g.

32
Resurrection of the Son of God, 124.

33
‘New Creation instead of New Exodus: The Inner biblical Exegesis and Theological Transformations of Isaiah 65:17-25,’ in

Continuity and Discontinuity FRLANT 255 [eds. Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer and Hans Barstad; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,

2014], 180-198, here 198.

11
sources’, i.e., Zoroastrianism, during the sixth century exile, though ‘the way for such a doctrine

was prepared for’ by poetic texts like Isa. 51:6 portraying the destruction of the heavens and

earth (without any recreation).34 Zoroastrianism has ‘a well-defined eschatology’. At the end of

time

a “Savior” will come to renew all existence. He will raise the bodies of the dead and unite

them with their souls, there will be a mighty conflagration, and all men will have to wade

through a stream of molten metal which will seem like warm milk to the just and be in

very truth what it is to the wicked. The sins of the damned are, however, purged away in

this terrible ordeal and all creation return to its Maker in joy.35

All of this may have influenced Jewish and subsequent Christian eschatology.

Wright thinks this suggestion a recurrent nuisance of sorts, though he admits sources such

as Theopompus and Eudemus in the 4th C. BCE confirm that classical authors were familiar with

the Iranian doctrine of a millennium and final restoration of the world, as attested by the 2nd C.

CE biographer of ancient Greek philosophers Diogenes Laertius.36 Further, Wright’s assertion

that the Ezekiel 37 dry bones pericope cannot have Iranian influence because the Persians

exposed and did not bury their dead founders on the fact that the dry bones envisioned are

exposed and not buried (vv. 1-11); the allusion to opening graves and bringing Israel back to the

land is derivative (vv. 12-14).37

34
Charles, Eschatology, 127-128.

35
R. C. Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1961), 58.

36
See Albert De Jong, Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 205-228, esp.

224-225 where Diogenes’ quote of the Magian ‘permanence of the world’ after resurrection appears.

37
On this, as well as potential Iranian influence in Daniel and elsewhere, see Jason M. Silverman, Persepolis and Jerusalem:

Iranian Influence on the Apocalyptic Hermeneutic (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 130-171.

12
 Isaiah 65 may then modify this Iranian idea of cosmic renewal as a counterpart to OT

depictions of cosmic disturbance and dissolution associated with the day of the Lord (e.g., Isa.

13:9-13; 34:1-15). In Isa. 65:17, after speaking of this new creation, God says, ‘I will create

Jerusalem to be a delight and its people a joy. I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in

my people’ (v. 18). As H.-J. Kraus observed, ‘the new creation is Jerusalem’.38 There is here no

hint of resurrection, but rather of the renewal of their relationship with God and way of life as

they return to the land. ‘No cosmic transformation is expected, but rather newly formed concrete

living relations in favor of the servant of YHWH’.39 The renewed people still build houses and

plant vineyards, but for themselves, not in subjection to others. People still die, though one ‘who

dies at a hundred . . . will be considered accursed’ (v. 20), poetic language of divine blessing, not

of ‘incalculably long lives’.40

The return to the land and rebuilding of the temple was for Israel a renewal of the

cosmos, since every ancient Near Eastern temple was viewed as the center of the world and point

from which creation occurred.41 Jon Levenson explains, ‘the reconstruction of the temple-city

was not only a recovery of national honor, but also a renewal of the cosmos, of which the

Temple was a miniature. It is for this reason that YHWH is here said not to build Jerusalem, but

to create it . . ., just as he creates . . . the new heaven and the new earth’.42 The renewal of

Jerusalem is thus the renewal of heaven and earth. This is also why what follows in Isa. 66:20 is

38
Kraus, Das Evangelium der unbekannten Propheten: Jesaja 40-66, (Neukirchen-Bluyn: Neukirchener, 1990), 241.

39
Ulrich Beges, ‘Der Neue Himmel und die Neue Erde im Jesajabuch: Eine Auslegung zu Jesaja 65:17 und 66:22’, in F. Postma,

K. Spronk, E. Talstra, eds., The New Things: Eschatology in Old Testament Prophecy (Maastricht: Uitgeverij Shaker, 2002), 13).

40
Anthony A. Hoekema, The Bible and the Future (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1979), 202, takes Isa. 65:17-25 to speak

of ‘everlasting blessedness’, but recognizing there cannot be ‘death on the new earth’, prefers the NIV rendering ‘he who fails to

reach a hundred’, which still implies some terminus to life, incoherent with everlasting life.

41
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 14-16.

13
a focus on worship, when ‘all mankind will come and bow down before me’ (v. 23), for

humanity’s chief end is indeed the worship of God. Later developments in Isaiah, Micah and

particularly the NT emphasize the universal call of God to Jew and Gentile to join his people in

worship.

The land was central to the covenantal promise made to Abraham. ‘The continued

existence of the temple guaranteed the existence of the ordered and inhabited world’, so that life

in the land was ‘integrally related to the cultus at the Temple in Jerusalem’.43 When, however,

the divine glory left the temple (Ezek. 10:18), the land also lost its significance, forsaken by God

(cf. Ezek. 9:9). The identification of Jerusalem with the temple meant the destruction of the

temple was not merely the loss of Jerusalem, but the end of the Jewish world, if not the world

altogether.44 ‘Land-loss means the end of history’.45 With the return to land and rebuilding of the

temple, the Jewish world was renewed.

Eschatological views of the return to the land and rebuilding of the temple gave rise in

Isaiah 65 to a universalization of a nationalistic soteriology and ‘hyperbolic talk of an absolute

end of the world/renewal of the world’ and a turn toward ‘the transcendentalizing of salvation in

the historical dualism of the apocalyptic movement’.46 This apocalyptic turn continued in the

42
Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1988), 89-90.

43
W. D. Davies, The Gospel and the Land: Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial Doctrine (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1974), 94.

44
‘For Ezekiel the end of Israel might as well be the end of the world’ (Daniel I. Block, Ezekiel [NICOT; Grand Rapids: Wm. B.

Eerdmans, 1997], 1:249).

45
Walter Brueggemann, The Land (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977), 111.

46
Ulrich Mell, Neue Schöpfung: Eine traditionsgeschichtliche und exegetische Studie zu einem soteriologischen Grundsatz

paulinischer Theologie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989), 66-67.

14
Qumran community, which understood itself as a spiritual sanctuary (miqdash) in which God

would ‘dwell with them forever’ (11QT 29.7; cf. Ezek. 37:27), as it awaited in exile the temple’s

destruction and the subsequent eschatological temple.47 They had been raised spiritually from the

earthly depths to the heavenly heights and participated in the heavenly service of God and

eschatological salvation, much of which anticipates Jesus’s prophecy of the temple’s destruction

(Matt. 24:1-2) and repudiation of it as the place of worship (John 4:21) in light of its fulfillment

in his body and the church (John 2:19-22). These are themes taken up by Paul, who views the

earthly Jerusalem as a slave in contrast to the Jerusalem above that is free and “our mother” (Gal.

4:26). ‘The logic of Paul’s Christology and missionary practice . . . seems to demand that the

people of Israel living in the land had been replaced as the people of God by a universal

community which had no special territorial attachment’.48 Resurrection in the NT is not

associated with restoration to any land.

If Isaiah 65-66 envisions a new order, should something utterly different be expected in 2

Pet. 3:13, when the writer speaks of the day of the Lord, words oft used in the OT for

cataclysmic judgments and a new order (κόσμος)? There is no more reason here than in Isaiah to

think the writer prophesies the literal destruction of the physical universe; rather, he envisions a

time of ‘judgment and destruction of ungodly men’ akin to the flood (2 Pet. 3:7), which did not

destroy the earth. If 2 Peter was written by Peter or an amanuensis, it was before the destruction

of the temple in 70 CE,49 which in keeping with what has been said above would have been

47
Judith L. Wentling, ‘Unraveling the Relationship between 11QT, the Eschatological Temple, and the Qumran Community’,

Revue de Qumrân 14 (1989), 61-73.

48
Davies, Gospel and Land, 182. Cf. also, e.g., Heb. 11:8-10.

49
‘The most notable absence,’ says J. A. T. Robinson, ‘is any reference to persecution, or for that matter any echo of the Jewish

war, let alone the fall of Jerusalem’ (Redating the New Testament [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976], 197-198).

15
considered a ‘cosmos’, with God ushering in a new order. Again, there is no mention in the 2

Peter 3 passage of resurrection. It is thus difficult to see how Peter’s readers should ‘look

forward’ (vv. 12, 13, 14) to the day of the Lord, with the heavens disappearing, the elements

destroyed by fire and everything on earth laid bare, for, if literal, it would mean their

annihilation. This is instead a figure similar to Isaiah 65-66 of a new order of things, ‘of the end

of a particular historical cycle’.50 It is a judgment on the distortion of God’s word by ‘false

prophets among the people’ (2:1), similar to the days preceding the flood (3:16, 5) and exile. As

when God brought destruction upon the temple in 586 BCE, the imminent destruction of the

temple in 70 CE by the Romans may be in view, vindicating the true temple of Christ and his

people (1 Pet. 2:4-8; Eph. 1:14-22; 1 Cor. 3:16-17; John 2:19-22).

The last reference in Rev. 21:1 speaks of a new heaven and earth after the first had passed

away, with no more sea, clearly symbolic since life cannot exist apart from water. The holy city,

the new Jerusalem, is not itself heaven, but is ‘coming down out of heaven’ (21:2, 10); its

description as ‘a bride’ should make clear this is not a place but a people, the people of God, the

church (Eph. 5:22-33; cf. Hos. 2:2-7). It is the culmination of God’s dwelling with his people, a

fundamental biblical theme foreshown in the tabernacle (Exod. 25:8; 29:45) and embodied in the

incarnation (John 1:14). In Revelation 21, there is no temple in the city, ‘because the Lord God

Almighty and the Lamb are its temple’ (v. 22).

There is no need for the sun or moon, because ‘the glory of God gives it light, and the

Lamb is its lamp’ (v. 23). ‘Nations’ that ‘walk by its light’ does not cohere with heaven on earth,

since ἔθνη are foreigners to the household of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise.

While nations, or Gentiles, are invited into the church in the gospel, the use of the word here

50
Eliade, Cosmos and History, 66.

16
clearly demarcates those outside the church. They may walk by the light of the people of God,

the new Jerusalem and new creation, and bring their glory into it, but nothing of their impurity

may enter (vv. 24-27). Those may enter the city who ‘wash their robes’ and enter its gates in

joining the Israel of God (‘on the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel,’

21:12), but all others must remain outside. They are ‘dogs,’ unclean in their sin, ‘those who

practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves

and practices falsehood’ (22:15).51 None of this could refer to ‘heaven on earth’, indicating

continued unbelief outside of the gates, albeit not in any hell, which recedes into obscurity in the

aforementioned authors. Though Middleton says, ‘universal salvation is highly unlikely,’ he

wishes to ‘take seriously that the gates of the new Jerusalem are always open.’52 Given that he

takes the ‘new Jerusalem’ as a place within a resurrected universe, it is difficult to see where any

hell could be.

VI. The early Christian view

If the view in question is indeed a ‘reclaiming of biblical eschatology,’ as Middleton

maintains, one would expect clear evidence this was the view of the early church. That is not the

case, however. In fact, ‘new heaven’ appears very infrequently in the works of the Ante-Nicene

Fathers.53 The goal of heaven, on the other hand, is quite common.

51
G. K. Beale’s modified idealist approach considers ‘the new creation and the city’, the new Jerusalem, to be ‘probably

synonymous concepts’ (The Book of Revelation New International Greek Testament Commentary [Grand Rapids: Wm. B.

Eerdmans, 1999], 1142), so that it is with the consummation that the exile of the ‘dogs’ and others mentioned in Rev. 22:15 are

concerned. His observation, ‘Isaiah’s prophecy of Israel’s final redemption finds fulfillment in the church since Rev. 3:12

identifies both Jewish and Gentile Christians in the church of Philadelphia with the “new Jerusalem”’ (1045), agrees with what is

argued here.

52
Middleton, New Heaven, 208.

53
A computer search of the Schaff edition of the 9 volumes of works (disregarding the vol. 10 index) in the ANF under ‘new

heaven’ yields a mere twelve hits. H. E. W. Turner’s study, The Patristic Doctrine of Redemption (London: Mowbray, 1952),

17
 Justin Martyr (100-165) draws analogies in pagan thought to those who, like Christ,

‘ascended to heaven’ or ‘rose to heaven,’ since he maintains the pagans misconstrued what they

heard from the biblical prophets.54 He quotes Isa. 65:17-25 with reference to a millennial reign of

Christ. While ‘many who belong to the pure and pious faith, and are true Christians, think

otherwise’, he says of those ‘who say there is no resurrection of the dead, and that their souls,

when they die, are taken to heaven’, ‘do not imagine that they are Christians’.55 Justin’s emphasis

here is clearly on the resurrection as the dividing point between genuine faith, since ‘I and others,

who are right-minded Christians on all points, are assured that there will be a resurrection of the

dead, and a thousand years in Jerusalem, which will then be built, adorned, and enlarged, as the

prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah and others declare’.56

Papias, followed by Irenaeus, speaks of ‘different grades of beatitude for the just,

according to each one’s merit’.57 The new heavens and new earth are for both a lower ‘gradation’

of salvation compared to heaven. Writing between 95-138,58 Papias said, ‘As the presbyters say,

then those who are deemed worthy of an abode in heaven shall go there’, heaven being ‘the

habitation of those who produce an hundred-fold’, whereas those who produce sixty-fold (‘the

second class’) will be in Paradise and those who produce thirty-fold will be in ‘the city’,

does not even mention ‘new heavens and new earth’. He notes the ‘steady decline in the interest of the early church in

eschatology’ and cites ‘the fortunes of the doctrine called chiliasm’ as ‘a kind of barometer of the fortunes of eschatology’ (25).

54
The First Apology of Justin 21, 54 (ANF 1:170, 181).

55
Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 80 (ANF 1:239).

56
Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 80 (ANF 1:239). Middleton (New Heaven, 288n.) seems to take this quote as a position against

‘souls, when they die, [being] taken to heaven’, which is not Justin’s point here.

57
Brian E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1991), 31.

58
Monte A. Shanks, Papias and the New Testament (Eugene: Pickwick, 2013), 52.

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presumably ‘the new Jerusalem on earth’.59 Irenaeus (130-202) also quotes this as indicating ‘the

gradation and arrangement of those who are saved’.60 Earlier, however, he had said, ‘it is

manifest that the souls of His disciples . . . shall go away into the invisible place allotted to them

by God, and there remain until the resurrection, awaiting that event; then receiving their bodies,

and rising in their entirety, that is bodily, just as the Lord arose, they shall come thus into the

presence of God’,61 a clear reference to heaven as the highest goal of Christ’s followers.

Methodius of Olympus (260-312) appears to limit heaven to ‘angels, thrones of powers,

luminaries of ministers; and the more divine spots, and the undefiled and untainted luminaries,

with seraphim, who attend the Supreme Council, and uphold the universe’, with resurrected

humans dwelling ‘in a renewed world’, ‘without change or decay’.62 While Methodius does not

speak of creation as ‘fallen’, but only ‘subject to corruption’, it is hard to see how resurrection

extends beyond humanity, since ‘the term “resurrection” is not applied to that which has not

fallen, but to that which has fallen and rises again’.63

Origen (c. 185-254) also sees ‘three classes [of] the whole universe of things’ in the final

subjection to Jesus of those ‘who are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth’ (Phil. 2:10),

‘arranged . . . in accordance with their desert’:

59
Fragments of Papias 5. The editor of the ANF (1:154n.), Cleveland A. Coxe, makes this notation regarding the city.

60
Against Heresies, 5.36 (ANF 1:567). Middleton thinks this is ‘not a fixed hierarchy’ (New Heaven, 289), which is unclear,

since Irenaeus previously spoke in this chapter of the new heaven and new earth ‘in which the new man shall remain’; on the

other hand, he later says in this chapter, ‘they advance through steps of nature’. Origen clearly suggests such advance; e.g., ‘it is

possible that, in the many and endless periods of duration in the immeasurable and different worlds, it [the soul] may descend

from the highest good to the lowest evil, or be restored from the lowest evil to the highest good’ (De Principiis 3.1.21).

61
Against Heresies, 5.31.

62
Methodius, From the Discourse on the Resurrection 9-10 (ANF 6:366).

63
Methodius, From the Discourse on the Resurrection 12 (ANF 6:367).

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 Certain of those, indeed, who remained in that beginning which we have described as

resembling the end which is to come, obtained, in the ordering and arrangement of the

world, the rank of angels; others that of influences, others of principalities, others of

powers, that they may exercise power over those who need to have power upon their

head. Others, again, received the rank of thrones, having the office of judging or ruling

those who require this; others dominion, doubtless, over slaves; all of which are

conferred by Divine Providence in just and impartial judgment according to their merits,

and to the progress which they had made in the participation and imitation of God. But

those who have been removed from their primal state of blessedness have not been

removed irrecoverably, but have been placed under the rule of those holy and blessed

orders which we have described; and by availing themselves of the aid of these, and

being remoulded by salutary principles and discipline, they may recover themselves, and

be restored to their condition of happiness. From all which I am of opinion, so far as I can

see, that this order of the human race has been appointed in order that in the future world,

or in ages to come, when there shall be the new heavens and new earth, spoken of by

Isaiah, it may be restored to that unity promised by the Lord Jesus in His prayer to God

the Father on behalf of His disciples: ‘I do not pray for these alone, but for all who shall

believe on Me through their word: that they all may be one’.64

Origen believes those in the temporal worlds which are seen and those in the eternal worlds

which are not may improve and be restored by the instruction of angels to advance ‘through each

stage to a better condition’ and ‘reach even to that which is invisible and eternal, having travelled

64
De Principiis, 1.6.2. Ignatius distinguishes the three as ‘those in heaven . . . possessed by incorporeal natures,’ ‘those on earth

the Jews and Romans and those present at the crucifixion, and those under the earth, the multitude’ that arose along with the Lord

(Epistle to the Trallians 9 [ANF 1:70]).

20
through, by a kind of training, every single office of the heavenly powers’.65 That the goal of

heaven remains for the saints seems quite clear, since Origen observes that Lucifer ‘had been at

one time in heaven, and had had a place among the saints, and had enjoyed a share in that light in

which all the saints participate, by which they are made angels of light’.66

Elsewhere ‘Justin seems to mean that the renewal of heaven and earth dates from the

incarnation’ in speaking of Christ as ‘He after whom and by whom the Father will renew both

the heaven and the earth’, ‘the eternal Priest after the order of Melchizedek’.67 Joining Trypho

among the Jews in the OT wilderness, Justin speaks of Christ symbolized by ‘a cloud [that]

followed you for a shade from heat, and covering from cold, declaring the manner and

signification of another and new heaven’.68 Tertullian (155-240) cites Isa. 65:22 for the

resurrection of flesh, not of a renovation of the entire universe.69 Origen speaks of believers as

stones in the temple of the body of Christ rising again from persecution and affliction: ‘For the

third day will rise on the new heaven and new earth, when these bones, the whole house of

Israel, will rise in the great Lord’s day, death having been overcome.’70 This too seems a

reference to resurrection rather than creation’s renewal.

A questionable attribution to Hippolytus (170-235) on the end of the world has a

concatenation of texts in which the trumpet sounds, all awaken and stand upon the face of the

earth in a general resurrection awaiting the coming Judge, with a river of fire burning up the

65
De Principiis, 1.6.3

66
De Principiis, 1.5.5.

67
The analogy to the incarnation is in Dialogue 113 (ANF 1:255), where editor A. Cleveland Coxe (ANF 1:255n.) comments.

68
Dialogue 121 (ANF 1:265).

69
Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh 31 (ANF 3:567).

70
Origen, Commentary on John 20 (ANF 9:400).

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mountains and hills and vanquishing the sea, the atmosphere dissolving, stars falling, the sun

turned to darkness and the moon to blood. The whole earth shall be burned up and ‘there shall

be the new heaven and the new earth. Then shall the holy angels run on their commission to

gather together all the nations, whom that terrible voice of the trumpet shall awake out of sleep’,

an idea that had already been listed, evincing the difficulty of putting these varied texts into

systematic chronology.71

The Ante-Nicene Fathers also use ‘new creation’ sparingly and without clear reference to

physical recreation. In his Exhortation to the Heathen (c. 195), Clement of Alexandria says of

‘the end of the new creation’, ’The Sun of Righteousness’ has ‘through the cross brought death

to life; and having wrenched man from destruction, He hath raised him to the skies, transplanting

mortality into immortality, and translating earth to heaven’ in ‘deifying man by heavenly

teaching’.72 There is a clear accent here on the believer’s being raised to heaven rather than

heaven coming down to earth. This coheres with Clement’s contention that ‘those who run down

created existence and vilify the body are wrong’, that while the ‘soul of man is confessedly the

better part’, the elect rise in soul and body, ‘readily following him that leads him away from life’

and ‘embracing the mansion that is in heaven’.73 He sees degrees of glory in heaven

corresponding to degrees of knowledge, use and perfection in the earthly church.74

From the outset, the church’s focus has been on heaven. Through Christ, Clement of

Rome wrote c. 96, ‘we look up to the heights of heaven’.75 The Epistle to Diognetus (c. 200)

71
Appendix to the Works of Hippolytus 37-38 (ANF 5:251-52).

72
Clement, Exhortation to the Heathen, 11 (ANF 2:203).

73
The Stromata 4.26 (ANF 4:439-40).

74
The Stromata 7.13-14 (ANF 4:504-506).

75
Clement of Rome, 1 Clement 36 (ANF 1:14).

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urges Christians to ‘know what it is to live truly in heaven’.76 In The Epistle of Ignatius to the

Ephesians, dating from the 140s,77 Christians ‘are raised up on high by Christ, who was crucified

for you, making use of the Holy Spirit as a rope, and being borne up by faith, while exalted by

love from earth to heaven’.78 In Tatian’s Address to the Greeks, he laments how demons deceive

people with ‘scenic representations, that they may be disabled from rising to the path that leads

to heaven’.79 Scenic representations of ‘a role for national Israel in the eschaton’, as well as ‘for

Canada, Jamaica, Haiti, Ghana, Korea, and so on’,80 demonstrate how unbiblical this

‘eschatological naturalism’ is, since none of these latter nations is known to Scripture.81

Middleton wishes to repristinate a period in history savory to him. Why not a period in, say, the

Dark Ages?

VII. Conclusion

There are many problems with the view under discussion here, but a larger concern is

why the authors deem their view so important that they must caricature the traditional view as

‘Platonic’ and ‘Gnostic’ when it is clearly not. Furthermore, why would Middleton speak of

coming ‘to repent of using the term “heaven” to describe the future God has in store for the

faithful’,82 as though it is sinful to believe what Scripture and the history of the church provide

76
Epistle to Diognetus 10 (ANF 1:29).

77
Timothy D. Barnes, “The Date of Ignatius,” The Expository Times 120 (2008), 119-130.

78
Epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians 10 (ANF 1:53).

79
Address of Tatian to the Greeks 16 (ANF 2:72).

80
Middleton, New Heaven, 174n.

81
Michael Allen (Grounded in Heaven: Recentering Christian Hope and Life on God [Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2018])

characterizes Middleton’s view this way, offering some criticisms (48-57), specifically a loss of the beatific vision, while yet

retaining the same basic eschatology.

82
Middleton, New Heaven, 237.

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good grounds for believing? Eschatology is subject to a wide range of views and divisions within

the body without exacerbating these with allegations that the traditional view of heaven is a

heresy or sin. Let us entrust ourselves to Christ and seek those things which are above,

encouraging people to repent of what Scripture terms sin, doing good and bearing witness for

Christ. In the words of another ‘otherworldly’ hymn, ‘we’ll understand it better by and by’.

24
 Abstract

The historic view of heaven as the abode of the departed saints has recently criticized as

incompatible the biblical idea of resurrection. The alternative view that heaven melds with earth

in a ‘resurrected’ universe is shown to be based on flawed assumptions. The cosmos is not fallen,

so it does not need redemption, and resurrection does not pertain to any but human beings in

Scripture. The ‘new heavens and new earth’ are rather shown to be a new order of God’s

working within history, the counterpart to ideas of cataclysmic destruction figuratively spoken of

in the day of the Lord. The early Christian view had a clear focus on heaven, with the paucity of

attention to ‘new heavens and new earth’ associated with chiliasm, gradations of salvation or the

resurrection of humans.

25