So in my state of bodily groaning I am going to remind myself of some quotes from NT Wright’s Surprised by Hope. Wright argues for an understanding of hope that isn’t based on an escapist pie in the sky end times, but a time in which God makes the world right again like it was originally in the garden. God will redeem all creation and blur the line between Heaven and Earth. In Kingdom living we both experience a foreshadowing of the time of redemption and we also currently participate in this redemption.
God did not want to rescue humans from creation any more than he wanted to rescue Israel from the Gentiles. He wanted to rescue Israel in order that Israel might be a light to the Gentiles, and he wanted thereby to rescue humans in order that humans might be his rescuing stewards over creation. That is the inner dynamic of the kingdom of God. (202)
It (Jesus’ work and death) is the story of God’s kingdom being launched on earth as in heaven, generating a new state of affairs in which the power of evil has been decisively defeated, the new creation has been decisively launched, and Jesus’s followers have been commissioned and equipped to put that victory and that inaugurated new world into practice. Atonement, redemption, and salvation are what happen on the way because engaging in this work demands that people themselves be rescued from the powers that enslave the world in order that they can in turn be rescuers.
Salvation only does what it’s meant to do when those who have been saved, are being saved, and will one day fully be saved realize that they are saved not as souls but as whole and not for themselves alone but for what God now longs to do through them.
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