To the End of the Age: The Judgment of History, The World Transfigured
In Christian eschatology, the end of the world is not conceived as an absolute destruction or annihilation of the created order so that it might be replaced by a different world entirely discontinuous with the former; were this so, the old world would be without purpose, a failed creative project. Such an arrangement is not congruent with the ways of the Most High God revealed in Jesus Christ, whose mercy, love, and wisdom are absolute and incomprehensible. Rather, through a final divine judgment, Christ in the Spirit will enact a transfiguration of that which is imperfect, relative, and temporal into that which is perfect, eternal, and teeming with the fullness of its significance in relation to all other things in God: the ascension of the old world purified in Christ, conveyed to a plane of manifest uncreated light and illumined—all of creation resurrected and glorified. Humanity, in Christ, is the locus of this creative transformation. As in the beginning man fell, so the rest of creation fell through him; and as man will be resurrected at the end of time, so will all of creation be raised up with him in eternity. In this regard, God made a world integrally bound up in the heart of man, which contains all things, precisely as a vehicle for his journey into God:
The very fact that humankind is destined to resurrection (whose basis was laid by Christ), and specifically to a resurrection in solidarity with others on the plane of an absolute and eternally happy life, shows that God has prepared something much higher for humankind, and the history of creation is only a phase of human existence in which humankind too may contribute to its growth toward this absolutely happy life.1
Regarding the continuity between the ages, the inhabitants of the world to come will be the same as those who indwell the present world as mortal and corruptible, but in Christ will be made immortal and incorruptible. Indeed, the age to come will not follow upon the present age as a natural mechanical unfoldment or continuous evolution of the latter, but this does not imply that these two ages are entirely without continuity. What mediates between them is the active, personal judgment of Christ, who became incarnate in the present age and attained to complete perfection as man, ascending with human nature to the right hand of the Father in the highest heaven; because Christ brought humanity into union with divinity within His Person, the saints, who dwell in Christ, thus will participate in this judgment with a posture of intercession for the world, a posture which Christ Himself as man established and assumed on the basis of His becoming the Passover sacrifice for the life of the world. The faithful, who have also become this offering to the Father together with and in Christ through their incorporation into His Body and partaking of the Eucharist, take their place as fellow intercessors for the world and helpers of men in their striving for salvation. Christ gave all divine revelation and apostolic teaching, which continues to shine forth from within the Church, with a functional orientation toward this common goal: namely, the salvation of all who would enter together into communion with Christ to become kings and rulers of the new creation with and in Him. Inherent in this gift of salvation is the responsibility to take up one’s cross now and become a sacrifice in this age for the life of the world and the salvation of others—to be a Christian, to prepare oneself and others, on the basis of the light of this revelation which radiates from the Church, to stand before Christ at the final judgment. St. Dumitru Stăniloae says:
All the teachings communicated through revelation and all the gifts given by Christ have spiritual depths and endless levels. Christ as a man, or as the perfect union of humanity with God the Word, has an endless depth of meanings and of powers that lead toward love. These deify us and help us; they call us and continually lead us further and higher in our understanding and way of life, so that we may discover ever-higher horizons that we must make known to the world as modes of superior relationship.2
And again, contextualizing this spiritual trajectory of progress within a Christotelic framework, St. Dumitru says:
Christ is the target for creation and its leader toward this target. As such, He gives meaning to its unfolding. Christians see this leadership of Christ and contribute to its advancement, but they also continually surpass any point already attained as they live in an increasingly deeper way.3
In Christ’s Person and work, we discern the purpose of history; broadly, this purpose is the union of creation with God, and more specifically, the union of man, who was made to contain all of creation within himself, with God. The beginning of the proper fulfillment of this purpose is the incarnation of the Word through the Virgin and Theotokos Mary in Bethlehem. Because man fell from Paradise through deception, pride, and disobedience, the incarnate Christ, coming from a mother who in truth submitted herself in humility to God, subjected Himself to the Father as a sacrificial Passover Lamb on a cross, opening the way for fallen man to be reconciled to the Father in Him. From a temporal perspective before the incarnation, the telos of history pointed toward this miraculous birth of God on earth. From the temporal perspective after the incarnation and subsequent crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of the Son of God, the telos of history points out from this sacrificial offering of Christ on the cross toward the general resurrection and final judgment of man after the consummation of time. At this point, the eschatological purpose of the incarnation will be fulfilled: God as all in all. Because Christ has purposed to fashion a Body out of all the faithful throughout history, He remains in a sacrificial and intercessory posture before the Father, bringing all the faithful into Himself to be a part of this sacrifice, to be transformed thereby, until the fullness of time, at which point He will transfigure the entire cosmos through His justificatory judgment of all things. Until then, the Lord together with the saints, both with supreme love for all, are working to prepare the world for this judgment, and for genuine and unmitigated communion among themselves and with God, so that eternal well-being and happiness might result instead of, through rejection of this communion, eternal condemnation. St. Dumitru says:
Christ suffers with all of humanity, and in this His efforts for our perfection are manifested, even if our efforts do not always cooperate with His. He strives for all of us to be included in Him, so that He may subject Himself wholly, that is, with all the members of His body, to God the Father.
Since the moment He was crucified, Christ has not drunk the wine of joy, and He will only drink it again with all of us in the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt 26:29). He actualizes His sacrifice until the end of the world. In its striving for God, the entire human life on earth is the path of the cross—an ascent toward Golgotha and crucifixion with Christ, through the power continually poured out by His Crucifixion for the sake of the world—but it is also a rejection of this path. Human life on earth is a ceaseless partaking of the cross of Christ, but also the refusal of this cross, a fight against partaking of it. Human life on earth is a mixture of the attachment to evil and the fight against evil; it is to repent of sins and to overcome them, but also to continue to commit them. It is a life with Christ through the power of Christ, but also a life of powerlessness and the rejection of Christ’s path.4
This ambiguity spoken of by St. Dumitru will persist throughout history until the end, when all of those who set themselves against the path of the cross will be exposed by the penetrating and revelatory sword of Christ’s Spirit. The eternal Word, being the express image of the Father, is Himself the telos of creation and thus the standard of perfection in comparison to which it will be actively judged and set aright. When God sees that history has come to the fulfillment of its purpose, namely, the completion of Christ’s Body through incorporation of all who are known by the Father, time will end with a universal judgment of the world, visible and invisible, as a historical whole.
After this unfoldment of history, upon time’s consummation, through the final judgment all things will be revealed in the full light of their contribution to the cosmic transfiguration of the world in Christ and, insofar as they have served positively toward this end, they will find their place of eternal rest in the age to come: their fullness of being and life in perfect coherence and harmony with all other things. The true happiness of a person or the realization of the significance of all other creatures vis-à-vis humanity is only possible in the context of the spiritualization and ascension of the entire creation into the heavenly realm of God’s perfect life and light; only on this new plane of existence, to be revealed by Christ at His parousia, can the meaning of history as a whole be fully apprehended and the wise, loving providence of God be celebrated by all in the joy of complete knowledge. Even so, this end is a dynamic, living perfection: the tendency of the growth of all things deeper into the bosom of God, where the limitless depth of their significance may be unearthed endlessly and ever rediscovered at continuously deeper levels of meaning, as is suggested by St. Dumitru above. This is so because God—in whom all things live and move, and in whom are contained the unsearchable riches of Christ—is infinite, inexhaustible, truly living, and life-giving. If the potential depth of the human person in living communion with another is without limit, how much more is that of the Person of the Father with the Son and the Spirit, the communion out of which all other communion springs forth, and into which the Son conveys all who receive Him with humility and love. The actualization of this new, eternal, and divine state of creation—fundamentally characterized by a universal communion of joyous harmony among all persons and things as one unified incarnation of the Word—is the purpose of Christ’s active judgment through self-revelation at the end of time. St. Dumitru describes this world as follows:
The world will thus be a construction of objects; an ensemble of works of art that have profound significance and spiritual richness; and a continual medium for revealing the realities of the spirit, in order to communicate the spirituality that shines through the spirit. The world will be like a familiar expression of itself; it will be a medium for and an intimate content of its spiritual life, an intimate organ of the common spiritual life or of the communion with God and with neighbors. Each person will fully absorb the world in a spiritual way within himself, and for each one it will be wholly and perfectly familiar, yet still inexhaustible as a means of manifesting the divine Spirit’s plenitude. The world will be fully personified by each person, and it will be the common body of all; each person will inherit the entire earth.5
If, as generally outlined and suggested above, the purpose of history is the permanent establishment of communion between man and God in a perfect world of inexhaustible newness and divine love, and God is omnipotent, then why do we find ourselves in the midst of what might seem an arduous and extraneous detour through time, full of blood, sweat, and failure? The beginning of an answer to this question lies in the fact that God’s goal is not merely to achieve a world with some set of external conditions. Rather, God created man to be His dialogical and creative partner, to co-reign with His Son and steward creation as His image-bearer. A machine with an algorithm that guarantees obedience and the avoidance of sin could perhaps ensure that some set of external conditions in the world would eventually be realized, but such a creature could neither exercise freedom nor love God and offer genuine thanks to Him for the life bestowed upon it. Only a creature like man, imbued with God’s image, is capable of loving like God, reigning in humility like God, and exercising creativity in the production of that which is genuinely new. These and all man’s other powers, especially in light of the responsibility of personal freedom, must be strengthened and conditioned alongside the virtues, else he will not be capable of fulfilling his royal vocation in the conditions of the age to come. For this reason, God in His providence has employed the fallen conditions of this world, and even death itself, toward man’s preparation for truly divinized life, the fullness of which Christ will reveal at the final judgment.
St. Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Vol. 6, p. 147.
Ibid, p. 134.
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 125.
Ibid, pp. 158-159.