Imagining a New Millennium
In an era of cynicism, the Bible offers hope for an ideal world, a world in which God’s activity serves as the foundation of our human efforts.
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The new millennium is here, without cosmic catastrophe or computer collapse.
Now what? Will the personal impact of the millennium last no longer than the average New Year’s resolution? Will our dreams of a better world, a more just society, a peaceful, livable earth, vaporize with the millennial hype?
History is not encouraging. Utopian communities tend to collapse under the weight of human failings. Ideal republics from Plato to Communism have stumbled on human selfishness, greed and ambition. Heaven, as the traditional ideal world in Judaism and Christianity, seems to attract less of a following each year. After a century of wars and genocide, appeals to human progress lack the power to inspire. Has cynicism prevailed? Is there any place to turn to with realistic optimism?
Hopes for an ideal world live on in the Bible but require confidence in God’s activity as the foundation of our human efforts. Until recently, our confidence in human reason and mastery of the physical world excluded God more and more from daily life. But suddenly spirituality has sprung up all over. From Falun Gong in China to “new religions” in Japan to a bewildering multitude of movements, churches, havurot and cults in the United States, individuals are searching for a vital, nourishing and all-encompassing way through life. How can the more traditional biblical metaphors and narratives contribute to this search?
Though Jews and Christians often associate heaven, the afterlife and spirituality with an immaterial or vaporous reality dissociated from the world in which we live, the biblical tradition tightly links God and the heavenly world to the realities and difficulties of everyday life. Consider the vision of Ezekiel. A priest exiled from Judea and the Temple in 598 B.C.E., Ezekiel re-created in words the holy land of Israel. At the center stood Jerusalem, the holy city presided over by God rather than an idolatrous king (Ezekiel 40–48). Although the Jerusalem Temple had been completely destroyed by the time Ezekiel had his vision, the renewed Temple of this vision is no vague fantasy, no castle in the clouds. Ezekiel describes its dimensions and ornamentation in great and loving detail. Ezekiel envisions a renewed people of Israel living in their own territory and worshiping at a Temple served by faithful priests according to precise rituals. The subsequent history of the people of Israel was never as perfect as Ezekiel envisioned it, but the Temple was rebuilt and remained central and sacred to Israel until the Romans destroyed it in 70 C.E. Vision, confidence in God, perseverance in the face of oppression and commitment to the concrete realities of life are the backbone of God’s people in the Hebrew Bible.
The Dead Sea Scrolls testify that Ezekiel’s vision of a holy Temple, territory and people was no impotent fantasy. Five Qumran caves contain tantalizing fragments of Aramaic manuscripts describing a New Jerusalem based on Ezekiel’s vision but with greater detail. The streets and the Temple, the doorways, stairways and bedrooms, all of them are measured; offerings, rituals and roles are recorded with precision. But why? The priests and other Judeans at Qumran fled from a city and Temple that, they believed, their opponents had profaned. Precisely because the Qumran community valued the holiness and purity of the Temple and Jerusalem, they re-created the holiness of the Temple in exquisite words that rival Ezekiel’s. They considered their holy community a substitute for the Temple. The community was “a holy house for Israel and the foundation of the holy of holies for Aaron…to atone for the earth” and “a house of perfection and truth in Israel” (Community Rule, col. 8). Voluntarily exiled from the holiest and most essential place in Israel, they became that place. A concrete commitment to the land, city and “house” (Temple) that God had given them sustained them even in self-imposed exile.
This tradition of the holy commonwealth on earth was not lost on the early Christian community. Late in the first century C.E., John of Patmos concluded his apocalyptic vision of the end of the world with a perfect city of Jerusalem descending from heaven to earth. The city is meticulously measured and described, as in Ezekiel and the New Jerusalem texts from Qumran (Revelation 21–22). Interestingly, it has no Temple. Rather, “the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb” rule from their thrones and are worshiped directly. All of this happens by the power of God and of agents from the heavenly world but takes place on earth. In the most ambitious urban renewal project and environmental cleanup ever envisioned, a protracted and violent war rages between God’s heavenly armies and the demonic and earthly armies of Satan, a war that purifies the world. In the Book of Revelation, as in the great battle recounted in the Qumran War Scroll, heavenly and human forces cooperate to bring human hopes to completion.
In both the Jewish and Christian traditions, humans do not “make it happen” on their own; nor do they prevail by their strength of will, much less by New Year (or 050millennial) resolutions. In the prophetic and apocalyptic traditions, the heavenly and the earthly worlds are closely tied to one another. Prophets inform kings about what God plans to do in the ancient Near Eastern political world. In the New Testament John speaks of Jesus as a divine being who came down from heaven and became human (John 1:9–14) in order to instruct humans and give his life for them. Jesus then returns to heaven to prepare a place for his disciples in the heavenly world (John 7:33–34, 13:33, 14:2–3) but sends an advocate to guide his followers on earth (John 16:7). The traditional image of heaven demands constant commerce with earth, not separation. The most fundamental metaphor for God’s relationship with humans, embodied in the kingdom of Israel in the Hebrew Bible and the kingdom of God in the Synoptic Gospels, draws its power from its solidity and scope. It encompasses all of society and all people. Whether it arrives in an apocalyptic crisis or emerges in the daily messiness of life, God’s kingdom is not a private, evanescent consolation in a quiet corner of our minds. It is the people of God, Israel and the Christian church, ruled by God, held together by hope and motivated by the promise of a real society uncorrupted by human evil.
The new millennium is here, without cosmic catastrophe or computer collapse. Now what? Will the personal impact of the millennium last no longer than the average New Year’s resolution? Will our dreams of a better world, a more just society, a peaceful, livable earth, vaporize with the millennial hype? History is not encouraging. Utopian communities tend to collapse under the weight of human failings. Ideal republics from Plato to Communism have stumbled on human selfishness, greed and ambition. Heaven, as the traditional ideal world in Judaism and Christianity, seems to attract less of a following each year. After a […]
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