Quotes about Creation

Resurrection and forgiveness are not strange things that might perhaps happen in the old creation.

The "goal" is not "heaven," but a renewed human vocation within God's renewed creation. This is what every biblical book from Genesis on is pointing toward.

He was a Jew who believed in the goodness of the original creation and the intention of the Creator to renew his world. His gospel of "salvation" was about Israel's Messiah "inheriting the world," as had been promised in the Psalms. What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul's perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new "otherworldly" hope.

The whole truth is that Jesus himself, in his risen physical body, is the beginning of God's new creation.

Called to responsibility and authority within and over the creation, humans have turned their vocation upside down, giving worship and allegiance to forces and powers within creation itself. The name for this is idolatry.

the principle that God's kingdom, inaugurated through Jesus, is all about restoring creation the way it was meant to be. God always wanted to work in his world through loyal human beings.

Did Paul think that Jesus was the Messiah? Of course. Did recognizing someone as Messiah imply that God's people were regrouped around him? Naturally. Was that a non-Jewish or even anti-Jewish thing to suggest? Of course not. The point, anyway, is that for Paul the Messiah's people are both a 'new creation' and the fulfilment of the divine intention for Israel.

thoroughly focused on heaven that anything to do with the present creation is regarded as worldly, dangerous, a distraction from the task of saving . . . but saving what? Well, often it is saving souls. But there's nothing about souls in Romans 8. No mention of heaven, either, if it comes to that. It is all about bodies: resurrection bodies, because that's what we will need in the new creation, which will be more physical than the present world, not less.

Maybe what we are faced with in our own day is a similar challenge: to focus not on the question of which human beings God is going to take to heaven and how he is going to do it but on the question of how God is going to redeem and renew his creation through human beings and how he is going to rescue those humans themselves as part of the process but not as the point of it all.

The early Christians believed, on the authority of Jesus himself, that the original vision for creation, and for Human within it, had been recaptured and restored through Jesus's inauguration of God's sovereign rule. What Jesus did and said was designed to give a decisive answer, in deeds as well as words, to the question, What would it look like if God was running things?

Conservatives have said that Jesus was bodily raised, while liberals have denied it, but neither group has seen the bodily resurrection as the launching of God's new creation within the present world order.

not for a rescue operation that would snatch Israel (or humans or the faithful) from the world, but for a rescue operation that would be for the world, an operation through which redeemed humans would play once more the role for which they were designed.