The Renewed Earth: Why it is Denied (and My Critique) Or What is the Doctrine of Salvation?
Author: Bobby Valentine | Filed under: Christian hope, eschatology, Exegesis, Heaven, Hebrew Bible, resurrection
I have read many critics of what is called (at times) renewed earth eschatology or the new heavens and new earth. I call it simply “salvation” or “redemption.” Last night I read through an entire issue of a magazine that self-proclaims dedication to biblical truth that supposedly showed the false teaching of the renewed earth for what it was, false.
There is (in my view) a great deal of misreading. Not only of the biblical text but of those who teach this CLASSIC Christian doctrine. That’s right “classic” Christian doctrine. One that is held across span of the Church Fathers, the Protestant Reformers, and the Stone-Campbell Movement as well. It is in fact the “doctrine of salvation/redemption.” It is not some esoteric will-o’-wisp Johnny Come Lately “innovation.” It is the cosmic gospel itself beloved.
Underneath the poor exegesis of specific passages lies three + 1 issues that seriously impact reading and hearing specific passages. Here are the three +1 reasons that cause one to reject that which is the common understanding of salvation since the beginning.
#1) The utter failure to take the Hebrew Bible (i.e. “Old Testament) seriously as a theological resource for Christian faith. This the crux. It is the beginning, the middle and the end. Alexander Campbell for all his emphasis on “New Testament” Christianity understood this with clarity. The New Testament means what it means BECAUSE (emphasis not shouting) of the Hebrew Bible. Campbell stresses, repeatedly, that Jesus, Paul, Peter, James, John, etc are JEWS. The speak and THINK as Jews. Jesus and the apostles are literally disciples of Moses and not Plato. The first huge gulf between the Hebraic worldview and that of Plato is that God CREATED material reality. Material reality IS SPIRITUAL. Read that again. It is “Spiritual” because it is from the Holy Spirit. It is good. It is holy. The Incarnation in the FLESH is the ultimate compliment the Creator God can give to “matter.” Matter is Spiritual. Yes, Spiritual. The word spiritual in the NT never – ever – is the opposite of materiality.
#2) Because the Hebrew Bible is either ignored, denigrated, or even outright rejected as the theological lens to understand the NT, we western disciples REDEFINE the New Testament itself by reading it through Platonic and Epicurean lenses. We are products of the Enlightenment. The NT is not! The chasm here is almost infinite. The Greeks also spoke of souls, salvation, redemption, etc but meant something radically different than Jesus, Paul, James (Moses, the Psalms, Isaiah, etc). Plato taught the “Immortality of the Soul.” The physical world is not “spiritual” in Platonic “theology.” The Bible never heard of such a doctrine. The New Testament teaches as clearly as can be taught, the resurrection of the material Human BODY. The apostle Paul never once says anything about saving “souls” or “spirits” as if those where something different than the complete person. For Plato the “soul” is one thing and the “body” is another INFERIOR thing. This is completely unbiblical. Instead Paul speak, in good Jewish talk (because of the Hebrew Bible) that the Holy Spirit will give “life to your MORTAL BODIES” and we wait for the “redemption of our BODIES” (Romans 8.11, 23f). The very definition of “spiritual” through Hebraic eyes or Platonic dualism (as it is called) directly impacts such classic texts as 1 Corinthians 15. Paul talks about (in English) “Spiritual bodies.” Those reading this with Platonic definitions this means (naturally) IMMATERIAL. That is a body MADE OF SPIRIT or COMPOSED OF SPIRIT. But Paul is a Jew. Not only is he a Jew, he is a Pharisee dedicated to the resurrection of the body. Paul did not pull a “bait and switch” on those poor confused Corinthians. But Paul is not talking about the composition of the resurrected body but what gives it power or life. And that is the Holy Spirit. To illustrate this with common sense English, requires no Greek to understand. If my grandson says “there’s the steam train” there is not a person on the planet that thinks he is talking about a train MADE OF STEAM. The steam is what POWERS the train. And we will have bodies ANIMATED BY, POWERED BY, the Holy Spirit, not made of non-material casper the ghost. God “redeems” the BODY, just as he did the Lord Jesus Christ. Again, as Alexander Campbell said, “It is not the doctrine of Plato that the resurrection is proof and pledge.” This is the doctrine of salvation brothers and sisters. It is THE hope!
#3) Is directly related to the previous two. We do not take seriously the Incarnation of God in human flesh, nor do we take the resurrection of that Incarnate body in the flesh seriously. The Logos did not RENT a human body for 33 years. The apostle John leaves absolutely zilch wiggle room on this (but neither does Paul!). The Word BECAME flesh. Forever. Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 is not about baptism (sorry Church of Christ folks, it is not!). It is about the fact that the Creator God of Israel refused to let the FLESH of the King of Israel see “decay” (Acts 2.24,26-28,30-31).
Some have so Platonized (paganized!) the Resurrection that it simply means life after death and has nothing to do with the material of our Body at all. They have literally redefined the word “resurrection” to fit within a Platonic worldview rather than a Hebraic one. Luke goes out of his way to have Jesus give no wiggle room to Gnostics, Jesus’s said “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see, for a ghost does not have FLESH and BONES as you see that I have.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet” (Luke 24.39-40). Jesus is the Pattern for resurrection. When Paul speaks of resurrection always say to yourself, that’s Luke 24!
The Resurrection guaranteed the ongoing reality of the Incarnation of God in the Flesh. This is why Matthew calls him “Immanuel.” That was not on Jesus’s birth certificate rather Jesus is now the God of Israel dwelling with Israel and all the Nations … just as the HEBREW BIBLE SAID HE WOULD (emphasis not shouting).
The Sermonator, in Hebrews, hangs his entire sermon on the fact that the Jesus, from the “tribe of Judah,” was raised in his body and his resurrected body of flesh (10.20, etc) is at this moment in the presence of God “waiting” until God says it is time for him to appear. The apostle John affirms this in both 1 John 4.1-2 and 2 John 1.7 when he uses both the Perfect tense and the Present tense to describe Jesus’s coming in the flesh. That is he has come and never left! God did not destroy the human resurrected body of Jesus. Jesus and his Jewish body are one and the same. To cast off, to get rid of that resurrected body is to get rid of Jesus the Son of David himself. The Human body matters to the Creator God because God created the matter. God refused to let Satan have the “body” of Moses (God will redeem it in the resurrection just as he did Jesus’s, Jude 1.9).
The Human Body is made up of the material world. The Jewish Body of Jesus is made up of the material world. As the material world shared (participated in sin) through the human body so it will also share in the GLORY of the resurrection. This is stated explicitly in Romans and Colossians. Creation, the material world, is the inheritance of Jesus the Christ. As Paul states it was created both by him and FOR him (Colossians 1.15-17). God loves the world! The Gospel is cosmic. The blood of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus is for the salvation of the WORLD. The fate of the world and the fate of humanity are tied together in redemption just as they were in creation. Again, this is classic Christian doctrine. This is salvation. It is not a minor cord.
#4) Finally. Early Christians were utterly aware of the difference between resurrection of the body and the mere notion of life after death. The word resurrection NEVER is a synonym for life after death. It is God reanimating our material body with life. Jesus’s resurrection is the Pattern for all resurrection. The Philosophers in Acts 17 all believed in the Immortality of the Soul. All of them. But the resurrection of the body was anathema. The body is to be cast OFF in pagan salvation. Paul was not a Pagan but a dyed in the wool rabbi who proclaimed the resurrection of the body as the “hope of Israel.”
The only people, check it out, the only people who denied the the physical resurrection and the renewal of creation came in the second and third centuries … they are called Gnostics! And they knew their doctrine was radically different than biblical faith so they had wrote their own Gospels … The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Judas, The Gospel of Truth, The Treatise on the Resurrection, etc. It is ironic beyond belief that many today sound more like the Gospel of Judas and the Gnostic Treatise on the Resurrection than Luke 24 or Romans 8 or Revelation 21 and 22 for that matter.
April 19th, 2024 at 5:20 am
Your message needs to be grasped within our CoC faith tradition. Glad you took the time. The story of Redemption IS the story! A proper biblical understanding of the details of redemption does matter.
We tend toward schizophrenia too often in interpreting scripture. Just one example here: a CoC preacher teaching that God’s miracles in Egypt (among others he cited) were “natural disasters”! We insist that a few NT passages are commands to worship on the first day of the week, including required accoutrements such as the so-called “acts of worship – “communion”, “giving”, singing acappella, etc. But then, we spiritualize-away virtually all eschatological oriented scriptures as having already happened – an amillennial type explanation. Even when scripture reveals that many “events” clearly have not and could not have yet occurred.
Blessings
August 12th, 2025 at 5:44 am
I am searching for complete truth as much as we can know it today, and I am feeling discouraged at the differences in understanding that are held to be absolute truth with no room for discussion or consideration. The idea of someone being out of fellowship with believers based on the bible having at least four instances of the phrase “a new heaven and a new earth”, and someone reading these and coming to believe them as a literal happening to be told they are utterly lost is a shame. I would appreciate any guidance on how to navigate this understanding that certainly wasn’t just made up out of thin air. I am going to keep seeking in the greek and as many translations as I can get my hands on to wrap my head around the two camps on the reality of our eternity (Heaven alone – or New Heaven and New Earth).