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“Is there any way the new heavens and new earth could be happening now?”
The idea that the new heavens and new earth prophesied in scripture exist today “in seed form” is a concept embraced by a subset of the post-millennialist prophetic school. They would say this seed “grows and spreads and becomes more and more manifest until it finally culminates in the Final Coming of Christ, which introduces the Eternal State”.
I feel like that’s a major stretch.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
In Ecclesiastes, Solomon makes the argument that God has put a longing for the eternal into the human heart, yet seems to have provided less revelation about eternity than some of us might wish. And notwithstanding the fact that we’ve had plenty more prophetic revelation since the book of Ecclesiastes was written, we still have a tendency to speculate about what lies in store for us at the end of history as we move into eternity.
Tom: We’re discussing a recent Todd Billings post at Christianity Today entitled “The New View of Heaven Is Too Small”. What was your last point, IC?
Immanuel Can: Serious Christians need some kind of counter to the common misconception that the eternal state involves a lot of unrelenting, undifferentiated, disembodied, white-clad, purposeless hanging about on clouds …