by Zack Hunt
The earth does too.
New heaven, new earth
At the heart of the incarnation-versus-escape dynamic is the issue of climate change. In the beginning, God commanded Adam and Eve to care for the creation God had given them—care for, not exploit. The word dominion often appears in our English Bibles, but the Hebrew word being translated as “dominion” (radah) isn’t about exploitation. Radah is the sort of responsibility Old Testament kings were called to have. The kings of Israel weren’t anointed by God to exploit their subjects however they saw fit. They were called to care for the people of Israel by ensuring justice for the poor and defending the weak. In the same way, the call of Genesis to have “dominion” over the earth is a call to care for the earth, not exploit it for our own selfish ends. We’ve obviously not done a great job of that task to steward the earth, and as a result, the climate is changing rapidly. Temperatures are rising, and sea levels with them. Glaciers are disappearing and so are animal species and entire ways of life for people in coastal communities.8
As caretakers of the garden—people with a divine calling to care for creation—we should be at the forefront of caring for creation. But we’re not. In fact, the very idea of climate change is anathema to many American Christians, particularly dispensationalists. Part of the refusal to accept the truth about climate change is the result of a never-ending stream of propaganda from right-wing media. The years-long effort to brainwash people on behalf of the oil and gas industries can’t be overstated. But when we talk about the church and climate change, we cannot overlook the role that dispensationalism plays in neglecting creation.
When most of us read the last two chapters of Revelation and hear about a new heaven and new earth, where there will be no more sickness or death or sorrow or mourning, for the old things will have passed away and all things will be made new—when we read that, our hearts are warmed and our souls are filled with hope. That’s true for dispensationalists as well. But end-times theology also gives them a pass—a “get out of jail free” card—for caring about the environment. After all, why do we need to make sure our oceans are clean and the air is breathable if Jesus is just going to set it all on fire and start over again?
While climate change denial might be new, escapism and ambivalence are not. They’ve been around as long as Revelation itself. In the sixteenth century, long before fossil fuels were invented or factories were chugging out smoke, the famous reformer Martin Luther is said to have confronted this attitude directly. What was his apocryphal response to a laissez- faire attitude about caring about the here and now if Jesus is just going to start everything over again? “Even if I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree.” It’s a defiant statement, one that speaks to our call to incarnate faith in the here and how. But it also hints at the fact that a new heaven and a new earth is about renewal of what we have here. God isn’t starting over from scratch. This is why Paul said the form of this world is passing away, not the world itself (1 Corinthians 7:31). Think of it in terms of the resurrection. When Jesus was raised from the dead, he was raised in a glorified body, but it was still the same body that had hung on the cross. His hands still had holes from the nails, his forehead scars from the crown of thorns, and his side gashes from the spears.
We have to take care of the earth because this is the only one we have, because God has called us to do so, and because this is the one God will be renewing, not re-creating. Our job as God’s hands and feet in the world is to begin that renewal in the here and now, not to wait for God to do it at some unknown point in the future. Creation care is an act of resurrection, the firstfruits of the final restoration that is to come. It restores to life what we’ve destroyed, and in doing so, lays the groundwork for Christ’s return, when God will bring to completion the work begun in the garden of Eden.
This brings us back to the fundamental problem with the rapture: it calls us to escape, while Jesus calls us to incarnation. The rapture calls us to look only at ourselves, while Jesus calls us to die to self and live our lives for others. For all the rapture’s focus on going off to heaven to live with Jesus forever, the life it calls us to lead in the here and now is, at its very core, antichrist.
7
Undragoning
Blood was dripping slowly but steadily from my thumb as if it were a water balloon that had sprung a leak. As it ran out of real estate on my hand, it began to cascade down to the ground, staining the green Florida turf a dark crimson red. But I didn’t notice. It wasn’t until someone tapped me on the shoulder and said “Uh, Zack, I think you’re bleeding” that I looked down and saw the horror show unfolding beneath the blazing summer sun.
In my rush to open up a can of tomatoes, I forgot that I am utterly incapable of multitasking. So when a group of kids at the church camp I was working at started asking me questions about a game being played on the field next to us, I took my eyes off the can. It slipped in my sweat-drenched hand and sliced a deep gash in my thumb. The other counselors were urging me to go see the camp nurse, but there was no time for that. I had to get the tomatoes into the kiddie pool for Tomato Bobbing, check on the plates of old spaghetti for the Clean the Plate relay race, and make sure the cartons of eggs were ready to go for Raw Egg Ultimate Frisbee. The Gross Games Olympics were my baby, and there was no way I was going to let them fail. The show had to go on, whether or not I had a thumb. Some things are just more important than appendages.
You see, a few months earlier, my former youth pastor Tony, who at the time was working in the admissions department at Trevecca, approached me on campus one day about joining what the school called the Summer Ministry Team. Essentially, it was a public relations group that would help bring attention to the school across the Church of the Nazarene’s southeast region. In practice that meant traveling around to district teen camps, where we would lead worship and recreation, and hopefully convince a few kids to go to Trevecca. At first I told Tony I had changed my mind about going into youth ministry. The passion I once had for ministry had evaporated with my faith in the rapture. I was too bitter about my misplaced faith to care about the faith of others. But he didn’t give up, perhaps because he had been there when I first felt called to ministry and had let me job shadow him. Maybe he thought spending the summer working with teenagers at summer camps was the thing I needed to rediscover my passionate call to ministry. Or maybe he was just desperate for help. Either way, I wasn’t convinced until he mentioned there was a paycheck and free Chick-fil-A involved. Miraculously, I felt the Spirit calling me again.
I went into that summer trying to have an open mind about considering youth ministry again. College was ending soon, and my only training was in ministry—well, that and a few law classes, but one practice LSAT was enough to scare me away from law school. So a summer hanging out with teenagers it was. Maybe I would at least make a few connections that could lead to a youth ministry job, and thus a paycheck, while I figured out what I really wanted to do with my life.
Bags packed, I hopped into a white fifteen-passenger van with the other members of the Summer Ministry Team, and we hit the open road. My job was to lead recreation at the different camps and occasionally fill in playing the guitar with the worship band when our regular guitar player couldn’t make the trip. We traveled all over the southeastern United States, from Tennessee to Florida, leading worship, playing elaborate games we wished we had played when we were in youth group, and promoting Trevecca with free swag.
I had a blast. For the first time in a long time, I felt that I was doing what I was meant to do. I don’t mean leading games and playing the guitar; I mean all the moments in between, getting to know the teenagers we were working with at the camps. Listening to them imagine what college was going to be like, sharing a laugh as they gave each other grief after an epic game of kickball, and being a shoulder to cry on when the boy or girl they were absolutely, positively in love with now and forever didn’t feel quite the same way.
I discovered th
at summer that I really did love working with teenagers. Positive reinforcement from youth pastors at the camps we worked at encouraged me to rethink my call to ministry. Slowly but surely, I began to realize that maybe ministry wasn’t a punishment for changing worship songs into fart songs as a kid. Nor was it a way to feel spiritually superior to others while scaring them into heaven. Maybe ministry was actually an invitation to join God in doing amazing things in the lives of others.
What I thought would just be a summer of free food and paid travel had suddenly become a time of confirmation of my call to ministry. The summer after I graduated from college, Tony invited me and another member of the Summer Ministry Team on another adventure, this time to intern at the church where Tony was now serving as youth pastor. It was in the small and swelteringly hot town of Venice, Florida.
The big thing Venice does have going for it is its proximity to the beach. The church where I worked was just a mile or two from the ocean. In my head I thought I would be spending my entire summer lounging on the beach when I wasn’t hanging out with teenagers at church. Want to guess how many times I went to the beach that summer? Once. Not because the beach in Venice isn’t great. It is. I hear you can find shark teeth in the surf. But living at the beach is nothing like vacationing at the beach. You actually have to go to work and do all the other things that come with regular, boring, everyday life, like going grocery shopping, cleaning your house, getting your oil changed, yada yada yada.
Plus, going to the beach means going outside, and just going outside in the south Florida summer is a chore in itself. The humidity is unbearable. And I say that as someone born and raised in the South. It gets uncomfortably hot and humid in my home state of Tennessee, but south Florida is literally a swamp. In the summer, the swamp earns its reputation as an inhospitable wasteland. Forget trying to save money on electricity by leaving your windows open. You’ve got to keep those things sealed shut and crank the AC as high as it’ll go; otherwise you’ll die. Probably. I can’t say for sure, as we never risked it.
One afternoon, on our quest to stay wrapped up in the sweet embrace of ice-cold air conditioning, Tony, the other intern, and I found ourselves wandering around a small Christian bookstore. To be fair, we probably would have done that regardless of the weather. We were pastors and pastors in training, and pastors and pastors in training like spending afternoons in Christian bookstores. So there we were, soaking up the air conditioning and finding something to spend our humble intern checks on.
After wandering aimlessly, taking books off the shelves, reading the back covers, and putting them back on the shelf, I was beginning to run out of books to look at. But then I found my eyes drawn to a small yellow book with red typeface on the lowest shelf. The artwork looked interesting, so I picked it up to get a better look. It was titled Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse: The Official Field Manual for the End of the World, by Jason Boyett. I had no clue who Jason Boyett was, but the title was catchy.1 So I started thumbing through it.
It was unlike anything I had ever seen in a Christian bookstore before. It was hilarious. Way funnier than it should have been, hidden away on a humble bottom shelf in a random bookstore in a retirement community. The endorsement alone deserved some sort of award: “This guy is gonna be so left behind. —Jerry Jenkins”
That would be the Jerry Jenkins, as in coauthor of the Left Behind series Jerry Jenkins. Obviously it was tongue in cheek, but the faux endorsement worked. I bought the book immediately and rushed home to read it.
The book was exactly as described: a small pocket-sized guide to all things end times. There was a chapter on the origins of end-times theology, a glossary of important end-times terms and ideas, a chapter chronicling all the failed predictions of Jesus’ return, a list of potential candidates for the Antichrist (according to self-proclaimed experts), and much, much more. While there was tons of great information such as you might find in a textbook, it was all done in a hilarious, tongue-in-cheek sort of way. I loved it for what it was: a clever approach to an often murky and controversial subject. But what I loved even more was what it did for me.
It gave me permission to laugh at myself.
I was only three years removed from being the sort of person who could have had his own entry in the rogues’ gallery of failed rapture predictions. I was finally coming to grips with how wrong I had been and only starting the process of rebuilding my faith. I was still deeply embarrassed by my apocalyptic past. The Pocket Guide poked good-natured fun at people like me, or at least people like I had been. It wasn’t an attack. It let me put my guard down and see how not alone I was in my arrogance.
It wasn’t an instantaneous revelation. My defenses were still strong, and it took a while for me to recognize that the person I was laughing at in that book was myself. Even then, it took still more time to let go of the embarrassment. But once I did, I didn’t find humiliation; I found liberation. The chains of dogmatism and the need to be right fell off. I felt theologically free for the first time, maybe ever.
But it wasn’t an easy process. In fact, it was often quite painful. Still is. I’m nowhere near being done learning to have the humility I need.
Dragonhide
When my faith got unraptured, it wasn’t a humbling experience so much as a humiliating and painful one. It was kind of like what Eustace goes through in C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eustace is a spoiled, know-it-all self-centered brat when he lands with his cousins in the magical land of Narnia, and he finds himself magically transformed into a dragon. It’s a transformation that eventually sees his character transformed as well. But the transformation process isn’t easy, painless, or one he can do alone.
While hiding from his fellow travelers so as not to burden them with the decision of whether to leave him behind (since as a dragon he can’t fit back on their boat), Eustace meets the great lion, Aslan. Aslan, the Christ figure in the Narnia series, has the power to transform Eustace back into a boy, but it won’t be easy. Aslan tells him he can enter a pool of healing water, but first he has to get undressed—a command that confuses Eustace, who is still a dragon and thus not wearing any clothes. It eventually dawns on Eustace that dragons are snakelike creatures, and that snakes can shed their skin. So he begins to scratch at his dragon scales until they all fall off. But he still can’t enter the healing waters, because Aslan tells him that he still needs to undress. Once again Eustace stands befuddled, thinking he has done what was asked of him, and yet there is somehow still more work to do. Eventually he begins to claw at his raw, scaleless skin. It is incredibly painful, but he keeps going because he’s desperate to be healed.
Unfortunately for Eustace, it turns out that he still has not removed enough of his old self to enter the healing waters. What remains—the raw core of who he is—is something only Aslan can remove. And he does, tearing the last bit of dragon flesh away from Eustace with his great lion claws. It is an excruciating process but a necessary one—one that fully opens up Eustace to the healing power of the water, which he is finally able to enter. Stripped fully of his old self, he can be healed and made new. Stripped of his arrogance and self-centeredness, he finds himself welcomed back into community by those who never rejected him but whom he could never before embrace as equals.
As a child, I never gave much thought to the undragoning of Eustace. If it hurt, I thought back then, he was just getting what he deserved for being such an insufferable pain to others. I now realize that I was Eustace. Clothed in a thick hide of dragon skin built up over years of memorizing Bible verses, studying prophetic charts, learning airtight theological defenses, surrounding myself only with Christian people, listening only to Christian music, and wearing only Christian clothes—donned in my spiritual armor, I thought myself invincible, a devastating force of destruction should anyone dare try to tell me I was wrong about anything. I had the dragonhide of Christ and couldn’t be stopped.
But unlike Eustace, I didn’t have the wisdom or courage to start peel
ing off my arrogant exterior. I had to have it ripped off for me. But it didn’t come off quickly like a cheap Band-Aid. What started in my professor’s office that day in college took years to see through, and it still hasn’t reached completion. My faith may be more open and inclusive now, but real Christlike humility often remains elusive. Thankfully, though, humility is no longer something I see as the Achilles heel of the spiritually weak.
That day in my professor’s office and the years that followed did teach me one thing: how much I don’t know. That’s the ironic thing about learning. The more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know. Properly done, learning should make us more humble, not less. It should open our eyes to our own finitude, and when done in the context of faith, learning has the power to reveal the beauty of the divine at work in ways and places and people we never thought possible.
I still have a long way to go, but learning how much I don’t know may be the most important lesson I’ve ever learned. It broke me away from the pathology of fundamentalism: an arrogant need to be right about everything. More importantly, it allowed me to look at the Bible with new eyes and embrace its mysteries and complexities without trying to reconcile and fix everything so that it all fit neatly inside my theological box.
