In a previous post I explored how shalom shapes what we think the task of academy should be, and how we understand our place in it. I now want to widen the focus a little and think about shalom as a paradigm of culture-building that bridges this world and the next. This second way in which shalom shapes a Christian perspective on our disciplines comes from verses 10 and 11 of Jeremiah 29:
10 “For thus says the LORD: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. 11 For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for shalom and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.
If we look at how the Old Testament deals with the end of exile, it is clear that verse 11 is an eschatological statement. God will fulfill his promise and bring his people to himself. But what is his eschatological plan in verse 11? It is shalom. God’s promise to his people is that he will give them shalom.
Notice something very important here: God’s plan for the return of his people from exile is not qualitatively different from his plan for them now. Now, they are to seek the shalom of Babylon. For the future, God plans shalom. Quantitatively there will, to be sure, be all the difference in the (new) world between the two states of shalom, but the fact remains: what they work for in the midst of the pagan city now is the same thing that God promises them at the end of the age.
God’s eschatological plan is shalom. That is the goal of salvation. That is what we are saved unto, what awaits those who finally return home to God from exile. And that is what we academic exiles are to seek right now, in the messed-up pagan contexts we find ourselves in.
So Judah’s seeking of the shalom of Babylon is an eschatological, prophetic action: it points forward in a small way to the much greater shalom that the same LORD has promised them. In like manner, our shalom-driven cultural engagement is eschatological, a moment of “heaven in ordinary” to quote George Herbert, a contemporary foretaste or tuning up exercise for God’s promised eschatological shalom.
In their prayers the people of Judah reach out to the LORD from the midst of the city, and in the shalom for which they work God reaches down into the midst of that same city with a taste of his eschatological blessing.
So let’s put Genesis 1 and Jeremiah 29 together in our understanding of what it means to be “aliens alongside” in academia. According to the word of God, Both the arche and the telos of human existence, the activity of the garden and the business of the new Jerusalem, are culture-making shalom. The last days are a chapter in that story, the chapter we live in now, and therefore of great importance to us, But the last days are not the whole story. The new earth is not the end of human culture, but it is the end of the glorious work of salvation. As C. S. Lewis’s characters find out at the end of the Narnia chronicles:
And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before. (C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle, 173)
On the throne of heaven is the Lamb who was slain, the eternal, victorious, glorious reminder of the salvation that was wrought for us on the cross. And the culmination of that salvation victory as the bible presents it is cultural: we fill our resurrected lungs and sing (the 144 000 in Revelation 14). There is nothing more fitting or right for the celebration of the consummation of all things in the final glorification of God’s crucified and risen Son than a rapturous hymn, an artifact of culture.
In the tones, rhythms and lyrics of that unimaginably beautiful anthem, human culture fulfils its promise. The God-imaging capacities of language and aesthetic appreciation are woven together in perfect shalom and offered to the Lamb.
So on the new earth, culture will not cease: it will become more than it ever was, than we can ever imagine it now to be, in the full flourishing of shalom wholeness. As C.S. Lewis remarked and John Piper is fond of reminding us, delight in God is incomplete until it finds expression:
I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. (C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, 93-95)
In this respect Piper also quotes Jonathan Edwards:
So God glorifies Himself toward the creatures also in two ways: 1. By appearing to… their understanding. 2. In communicating Himself to their hearts, and in their rejoicing and delighting in, and enjoying, the manifestations which He makes of Himself…. God is glorified not only by His glory’s being seen, but by its being rejoiced in. When those that see it delight in it, God is more glorified than if they only see it. His glory is then received by the whole soul, both by the understanding and by the heart. God made the world that He might communicate, and the creature receive, His glory; and that it might [be] received both by the mind and heart. He that testifies his idea of God’s glory [doesn’t] glorify God so much as he that testifies also his approbation of it and his delight in it. (Jonathan Edwards, The “Miscellanies,” ed. by Thomas Schafer, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 13, ed. Thomas Schafer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 495, Miscellany #448)
Lewis’s praise and Edwards’s testimony are expressions of culture: she shaping of linguistic, auditory, visual or other media into a fitting response that is beautiful, good and true. And the more it’s shaped, the more complex and rich the response.
On the new earth, culture will be the supreme medium of expressing, celebrating and therefore consummating the triumph of the Lamb, so we’d better sharpen our pencils, dust off our instruments, warm up our voices and get practicing, because the task will require all the skill, erudition and passion that our grace-glorified earthly learning will be able to muster.
On that day won’t we cry out for more poets to proclaim the beauty of the Lord, more musicians to interpret his glory, more choirs to voice his praises—O for a thousand tongues!—more gardeners to reflect God’s image in ordering the new creation after Him and more minds to strain themselves in plumbing and expressing the unfathomable depths of God’s thoughts and ways?
Listen to “Worthy is the lamb…” from Handel’s Messiah:
Isn’t that in just hands down better, more appropriate, more adequate, more whole, than just speaking the words “worthy is the lamb who was slain”? Does it not reach parts of our God-imaging humanity that the words alone cannot reach? Isn’t it a richer fulfillment of bringing of everything that we are before God in expressing His praise? Listen again to Archbishop William Temple’s famous gloss on the meaning of worship:
Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God.
It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness,
nourishment of mind by His truth,
purifying of imagination by His beauty,
opening of the heart to His love,
and submission of will to His purpose.
And all this gathered up in adoration is the greatest of human expressions of which we are capable.
Imagine, then, what will be wrought by the minds of sanctified poets and the pens of glorified composers on the New Earth, how its engineering will buzz with God-glorifying genius, its mathematics with awe-inspiring complexity in plumbing the depths of God’s world and God’s logic, how the reasoning and rhyme and writing of the new Jerusalem will reach, excite and capture for God a range of human faculties that as yet remain unexplored and unimagined. Come Lord Jesus!
