Whenever I decry the popular lie of mainstream pseudo-Christianity – this idea that we believe in Jesus in order to go to heaven as disembodied spirits or “souls” when we die – I typically meet with one of two basic responses:

1. Shock and outrage and scandal – quite understandably – because they cling to the belief I am attacking as the very essence of Christianity itself, or
2. Bored indifference, or even annoyance.

I’ve devoted plenty of space in this blog to addressing the former response, since it is by far the most common, but lately I’ve been increasingly confronted by the much more alarming nature of the latter.

I’ve been told that, by making such an issue out of it, I am preoccupied with “theological trivia.”

As in, these people agree with me on the facts – they agree that the Bible actually knows nothing of humans going to heaven in death as disembodied spirits, despite the virtually universal misconception that it does.

They agree with me, but they think it’s … just not a big deal.

Despite their typically much greater hostility to me and my message, I am far more sympathetic to the former category of people, because they at least somewhat understand the implications of what I’m saying and take it seriously enough to acknowledge that it matters.

The depth of error at work in the latter category is so profound and far-reaching that it’s difficult to know where to even to begin to address it. The words of the prophet Jeremiah (6:14) echo as I consider it: “They treat the wound of my people lightly, saying ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace … ”  

The distinction is not minor and the wound to the Church this error represents is not trivial. It is crippling and fatal. Fortunately, we serve a God who raises the dead, so our affliction is reversible. But, the Church indeed lies effectively dead until we treat this grievous wound.

The gospel has nothing to do with going to heaven – as disembodied souls or spirits or in any other sense. It is, rather, about heaven coming here, to earth. It’s right there in the Lord’s Prayer we’ve all been reciting all along: “ … Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” 

That might seem like a minor distinction – a bit of “theological trivia” – but only by the barest, most superficial, surface-level reading.

These two ideas are antithetical. They represent two entirely opposed, mutually-exclusive conceptions of salvation.

Which is to say that they represent two entirely opposed visions of Who God is and what His purposes are, the mission of Jesus Christ and, by extension, that of the Church. In short, these are two very different paradigms of life itself – of existence and reality, two mutually-opposed religions entirely.

And if we, the Church, could get a hold of that difference and wrap our minds around how starkly and profoundly different these two visions are, it would be nothing short of revolutionary.

Genesis, Again

Every other religion in the world that preceded or existed alongside early Christianity had that idea of going away in death to some otherworldly afterlife as a disembodied spirit. Death was just accepted as a normal part of life and being enlightened and spiritually mature a matter of coming to terms with it. Life (and death) is just the way that it is – it has always been this way, and it always will be, and it is simply the destiny of man to appear ever-so-briefly on earth in corporeal form and then shed that form in death as his disembodied consciousness translates into another world, to remain for all eternity. This world is basically just a ghost factory to populate the afterlife and the life of man is just a vanishingly brief prelude to that disembodied existence.

In contrast, the Bible treats death as a hated, bitter enemy. Humans were never supposed to die in the first place, and we were certainly never meant to placidly embrace death and call it “enlightenment” to do so. Death is a curse and an indignity and a separation from God, and the sin that leads to it a disgusting, defiling poison.

Mankind was made for this world, and this world for mankind, and the salvation offered through Jesus Christ is in the form of physical, bodily resurrection from the dead to eternal life here, on this very earth, renewed and restored.

That is the consistent message found throughout the Bible, as the apostle Peter told the Israelites in the early days of the Church:

“This is how God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, saying that his Messiah would suffer. Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Messiah, who has been appointed for you – that is, Jesus. Heaven must receive him until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets.” (Acts 3:18-21)

So, Heaven is not our destination, and it is only a temporary detour for Jesus himself, until he returns to this world.

When Jesus spoke of his future revelation as the Son of Man who would rule from a throne of glory, he likewise characterized that event as “the renewal of all things,” and those “all things” to be renewed were plainly understood to be in and of this world, not another (Matthew 19:27-30).

So, what does that mean – that he will “renew all things”?

What, exactly, is being “restored”?

Terms like “restoration” and “renewal” indicate a return to what was: a reestablishment of an earlier, ideal and pristine set of conditions.

In the opening chapters of the Bible, God is depicted – not just creating the world, but setting it up as His temple: As the renowned Old Testament scholar John Walton explains in his “Lost World of Genesis One,” the language of the Seventh Day – of God “resting” at the conclusion of His work of ordering the world – is found throughout the Bible and in the ancient Near East as characteristic of temple function: the temple is God’s dwelling place on earth, where He rests and His Presence resides among His people. The motif of God’s “rest” on the Seventh Day is repeated when He settled upon the Ark of the Covenant within the tabernacle in Exodus 40, and when He dwelled within Solomon’s temple in 1 Kings 8, and this language recurs throughout the Bible, and in the Psalms in particular, whenever God’s dwelling in the temple is discussed. 

In the ancient world, a “temple” was understood to be a microcosm of the world, and the idol in the temple represented that deity ruling over the world.

In Genesis 1, the “idol” God installs in the temple of creation to represent His rule over it … is Man.

That’s what it means that Mankind is “made in God’s image.” The earthly image of a deity is, by definition, an idol, and so when ancient audiences read Genesis 1, they would have immediately understood it to mean that Mankind is the very Face of God within creation. God’s dwelling within and rule over this world was to be through us – not for us or with us or alongside us or even over us, but through us: look for God’s Presence within creation, and Man is whom you find, according to the opening chapter of the Bible.

(And, as an aside, this is one of the reasons idolatry is so hatefully condemned: primarily, because it is unworthy of God Himself, but also because it is so far beneath the dignity of Man.)

God’s rule of creation through Man would consist of Man fulfilling God’s command to “be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over … every living creature.” In fact, the text reads that God made Man in His Image so that he would rule.

If we take that understanding of “Man as God’s ‘idol’ in the ‘temple’ of creation” in Genesis 1 and continue reading, Genesis 2 can be understood as a more focused elaboration on the concept: After forming him from the dust of the earth and breathing into his nostrils “the breath of life” to make him “a living soul,” God then took the Man and placed him in the Garden to work it.

And how does Man “work” the Garden?

First, note that in Genesis 1, God creates by speaking order into the world: “’Let there be …,’ He said, ‘… and it was.” Then, He makes Man in His image and sets him in authority over the earth, and then in Genesis 2, He brings all the animals to the Man to see what he will name them. As in, Man continued God’s work by speaking another dimension of order into creation by naming the animals. Just as God created and ordered the world through language, Man would extend divine order into creation through the power of language.

(There are implications to this “creation through language” concept for our current culture wars over transgenderism and other Postmodern philosophical quarrels within our media-saturated, increasingly computer-simulated civilization, which I’ve touched upon in an earlier article, but might bear further exploration in a future article.)

The implication is that the Garden, being set apart from the rest of creation, was the original temple, in a more primary and local sense, through which God dwelled with Man – it is the archetype after which the tabernacle and the Jewish temple would later be modeled, and that Mount Hermon and the Tower of Babel and other places of pagan worship would be attempts to counterfeit.

Man’s mission to be fruitful and increase in number to fill the earth and subdue it meant cultivating the Garden as he multiplied, with his children expanding the Garden as humanity grew in numbers, gradually transforming the untamed, chaotic wilderness of creation, generation by generation, into a paradise filled with the glory and presence of God, by their exponentially-increasing promulgation of divine order. 

(And, knowing what we now know about the unfathomable vastness of the universe and the endless array of worlds within it, it seems that this mission was never intended to be confined to this tiny blue dot on which we presently find ourselves, but that might be a topic best left for another article as well.)

Of course, we know what happened next: paradise was lost through the fall of Man and humanity was rendered mortal and the image of God in us corrupted; we were relegated back to the dust from which we were taken, just like the rest of the animals, and then our power of language was fractured and confused at the Tower of Babel, lest our divine power of speech lead to even greater corruption. Humanity was given over to the rule of lesser “gods,” to advance a “divine order” in opposition to the true God. 

In the New Testament, Jesus is frequently referred to as “the New Adam” or “the Second Adam,” because he is the first of a new order of humanity. In Jesus’ own person, God and humanity are reconciled, both natures coexisting within one Man, and it is that very human-divine Nature which Jesus gives to us through his death and resurrection and ascension, beginning on the Day of Pentecost when the glory cloud of God’s Presence descended upon the Church as the New Temple.

Because humanity was supposed to be the source of divine order in the world, but it was through humanity that corruption and sin entered instead, God’s absolute justice and His immutable resolve to implement His design for Man both demand that it must also be through humanity that the world is renewed and divine order restored: Because of our corruption, we are incapable of doing it on our own, but He cannot do it for us without compromising His justice and His design for us, so He must do it through us.

In Matthew 19:28, when Jesus speaks of “the renewal of all things,” the Greek word is “palingenesia,” from the root “palin,” meaning “again” and “genesis,” meaning “origin” or “birth.”

The same word is used elsewhere in the New Testament to refer to the salvation of individual believers in the form of regeneration through the indwelling of the Spirit of God. The same word is used for both because they are one and the same thing. It’s all the same process: one that begins with our individual regeneration as believers and followers of Jesus Christ and that continues through us – if our salvation is genuine, that is – to the restoration of the world itself.

The word doesn’t literally mean “The book of Genesis, again,” but it could just as well be taken that way, because it is a return to that unfallen, original state described in the opening chapters of Genesis, but perfected and complete (more on this in Part 2).

The kingdom of God comes to earth, then … through us. “Salvation” is our restoration to that original function of Man in the Garden of actively advancing the divine order throughout creation. Every individual Christian is like a portal through which God’s kingdom comes into the world, and the Church – the collective assembly of believers – is that kingdom.

The kingdom will be consummated and completed at Christ’s return, but it begins here and now, in this world, and its completion will be the perfection of this world.

A Forge for Saints

The Church, then, is the new Garden of Eden.

But just as the Serpent invaded the original Garden to seduce Man into abdicating his dominion of the earth, so have the followers of the New Adam been deceived into abdicating our mission to reclaim the earth.

And, while his methods have grown more subtle and nuanced and insidious over the millennia, his objective remains the same: “Did God really say … ?” he whispers. He subverts language and meaning to make evil appear good and death to seem like salvation and to make Christians believe we are serving Christ when we are actually working against him. 

And he has done such a complete and thorough job of this that Christians can be shown the differences between what is commonly preached and what the Bible actually teaches, and even fully acknowledge those differences, but still be totally blind to their implications. They default to their programming and the attitudes and patterns they’ve been conditioned to associate with Christianity and church culture, which they have internalized as their identity and tribal membership. They don’t see the profound and irreconcilable differences because all of the social and psychological incentives pressure them against it, and so they focus solely on the contrived similarities and so frame them as interchangeable and insist that the distinction is purely academic.

“We go to heaven, or heaven comes here … What’s the difference!” they will argue. “The end result is the same, and it’s still something that only happens when we die, that God will do in His own timing. Our job is to just believe.”

Consequently, by all measurable criteria, Christians do not live any differently than non-Christians. Divorce rates, out-of-wedlock birthrates, teen pregnancy rates, sexual abuse, domestic violence, abortion, drug addiction and alcohol abuse – all of these are no better among Christians than they are among non-Christians, and some are even worse in predominantly Christian regions of the country.

Christians will typically try to litigate this away by one of two contradictory arguments:

First, they’ll argue a distinction between nominal “Christians” and sincere, practicing Christians, and point out that the latter demonstrates better outcomes, therefore, Christians are different after all. Which is, of course, a valid distinction, but the same is generally true when you compare committed atheists against the general population. For instance, the divorce rate among atheist couples is also lower than the general population, and by about the same margin as devout Christians, which indicates that any couple who marries on the basis of shared values is less likely to divorce and more likely to be more conscientious in living according to those values, whatever those values happen to be and wherever they are sourced. So, it has nothing to do with the supernatural, regenerative power of God at work within Christians to transform us; it has everything to do with the power of cultural pressure and social conditioning. 

The bottom line is that there is not a single objectively-identifiable, meaningful difference in how Christians in general live from how non-Christians live – certainly not to the degree of difference we should expect of people who are imbued with the very Nature of God Himself, compared to everybody else. Whatever differences there are can be much more easily attributed to socio-economic factors.

The second line of argument is that “the Church isn’t a museum for saints, but a hospital for sinners.”

As in, Christians aren’t actually supposed to live differently than non-Christians: we’re sinners, too – “Christians aren’t better, just forgiven.” Or so the thinking goes.

Even apart from the glaring heretical error lurking behind it, that bromide just isn’t true on its face. A hospital is where people go to be cured of their affliction. We say our churches are “hospitals,” but what we really mean is that they are hospices for sinners: the Christian life within our churches is really just a holding pattern to offer palliative care as we live out our lives and wait for “salvation” on the other side of death, with no real expectation of change in our condition. That catchphrase keeps the emphasis on our sinful nature as our inescapable default setting, while the supposedly proper context for saints is in a museum, which insinuates that a “saint” is just a stodgy, lifeless, dust-collecting statue to exhibit a dead past and an unrealistic ideal of which we are all doomed to fall short, and so it is futile – or even sinfully arrogant – to try. The slogan has the effect of normalizing failure and treating the spiritual transformation described in Scripture as a quixotic fantasy, and all of this from behind a pious-sounding veneer.

In Scripture, all believers are, by definition, saints: we are “set apart” in Jesus Christ by the fact of bearing God’s Presence within us through the Spirit of God, and if anyone does not have the Spirit, we do not belong to Christ and are not Christians. Christians are referred to as “saints,” i.e., “holy ones,” in virtually every book of the New Testament. We do not become Christians and then aspire to sainthood as an unreachable and futile ideal. Becoming a Christian is to be a saint, definitionally — in fact “saint” and “Christian” are used interchangeably and synonymously in Scripture.

But, the Enemy has persistently whispered, “Has God really said … ?”

Our die-hard presumption of the futility of sainthood is directly related to our delusion about getting into heaven: both are inseparable facets of the same “pie in the sky when we die”-mentality that renders all of God’s promises to be nothing but out-of-reach abstractions with no concrete impact on the real world in which we actually live, which keeps Christians collectively passive and indolent and feckless as we await “salvation” in death.

Consequently, we don’t do any of what the Church is supposed to be doing as God’s agents and avatars for enacting and embodying divine order in the world, which is why we see no practical impact: Christians are just products of culture, nothing more, just like everybody else.

We keep insisting that it’s all for God to do, when salvation itself means restoration to our original destiny as God’s agents through whom He wants to be present and active in the world.

If we lived out the gospel, we’d find that the Church would become neither a hospital for sinners nor a museum for pious statues, but a forge for saints: a wellspring of divine life in which a new order of humanity is birthed from the fire of God’s Spirit and unleashed upon the world to radically transform and save it.

What does a “forge for saints” look like in practical terms?

Honestly, I couldn’t claim to know. I’ve never seen one myself.

But I think history and the Bible gives us enough information that we can envision and recreate it, which I will explore in parts 2 and 3.