What is ‘the Point’?

What do Christians believe the future holds in terms of the ultimate goal or ‘point’ of history? Some recent Newbigin reading has helped clarify this question for me. Christian belief about the future generally falls into one of two categories:

• Christian hope is placed in the gradual improvement of the world until God’s rule is perfected and realized here on earth.
• Christian hope is placed in a future immortal state beyond death where they will share in the life of God forever.

Newbigin rejects the idea of progress (understood as humanity’s inevitable improvement of life here on earth) as unrealistic and naive. The ‘point’ cannot be restricted exclusively to the here and now. Aside from the fact that our faith in progress has been severely damaged by a century of unprecedented warfare and violence, the reality is that death mocks all of our achievements. Even if we managed to create a world of peace and harmony that effort would be fatally undermined from the outset by its temporary nature. Whatever goodness we come up with is doomed to the ‘rubble of history’.

He also rejects the understanding of ‘the point’ as being individual immortality in heaven. His critique is based on the idea that this vision of Christian hope means that human history and the world itself are essentially meaningless.

“This purely individualistic conception of the Kingdom robs human history as a whole of its meaning. According to this view, the significance of life in this world is exhaustively defined as the training of individual souls for heaven. Thus there can be no connected purpose running through history as a whole, but only a series of disconnected purposes for each individual life.”

So if Christian hope is not centered (in an ultimate sense) around either the idea of progress or the idea of individual souls going to heaven then what is ‘the point’.

Newbigin centers Christian hope on the resurrection of Christ. This world and the world to come are related in the same way that Jesus’ pre-resurrection life was related to his post-resurrection life. Jesus’ life before he died was like ours, characterized by limitations, hardship and ultimately mortality. But Jesus was identifiably the same person after his resurrection. Most people recognized him, he ate and drank and had what seems to have been a physical body. Essentially his post-resurrection life looks like a perfected version of his pre-resurrection life.

Newbigin argues that this is what the future holds, both for ourselves and for our world. Death first, and then resurrection. There is continuity between our current world and the world to come. We will be recognizable, our world will be recognizable, life will be recognizable. It will not be exactly the same but neither will it be something entirely different.

This seems to answer the question: “How does what I do now matter?” Newbigin is not optimistic about our ability to perfect the world on our own. Yet he is not interested in a vision of heaven that makes us irresponsible and careless in the present (”just holding on for eternity”). Instead he believes that our efforts will not be lost but will survive into the world to come as we commit them to the God who raised Jesus from the dead.

“Christian action… is a kind of prayer offered to God that he may hasten his kingdom. It is a prayer that he can and will answer, because it is one where praying itself makes us and the world more fit to receive the answer.”