Redemption For The Material World: Abe Cho

I still remember the day I thought I had become a heretic. I was in my second year of seminary learning some really heady stuff—Systematic Theology, Biblical Hebrew, New Testament Exegesis, and so on. But it wasn’t my coursework that led me to believe I had recklessly wandered off the path of orthodoxy. It was my personal Bible reading. And that made it all the more alarming to me.

In my devotional readings, I kept coming across texts that seemed to talk about our final destination with God as a place that was an entire material world made new, rather than an immaterial place in the clouds that many may usually think about when they hear the word “Heaven.” (I can’t remember exactly which passages they were, but they must have been texts like Isaiah 60 or 65, or Romans 8, or 1 Peter 3, or Revelation 21-22.)

This idea was perplexing to me. I was a child of the immigrant Korean church, which held fervently to an earnest evangelical faith. I was raised on early morning prayer meetings, loud Sunday lunches, Saturday Korean school, youth group lock-ins, and parking lot football (while the grown-ups had deacon meetings and choir practices and mission drives). In all of those hours spent at church, I was convinced that Christians believed Jesus died to save our souls from a hopelessly lost material world so we can live with God forever in an untainted, disembodied heaven—a place totally unlike the physical earth we know. This was the gospel truth to me. I couldn’t conceive of anything else. In fact, the idea of saving eternal souls from a ruined material world was the reason I went to seminary. if I had to give fifty hours a week, for fifty weeks a year, for fifty years to something, I wanted it to matter.

But now there were all these pesky Bible verses that made me think Heaven might not be exactly how I’d pictured it in my youth. Finally, one day I was forced to conclude that the Bible—at least according to my reading of it—taught that our final eternal home with God was a renewed material creation, not some intangible place. It felt like a terrifying theological innovation! I was convinced that it was true, and yet I felt like I had somehow betrayed the faith I had grown up in. For the rest of that week, I sulked around that crisp New England campus completely despondent. I would walk by classmates thinking to myself, “You have no idea what just happened. You just walked past a real-life heretic.” It was, I admit, a bit dramatic.

Then, I went to church on Sunday. Toward the end of the service, just like we did every time, we recited the Apostles’ Creed before celebrating the Lord’s Supper. We repeated those unison words I had said all my life. In its final section we asserted, “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins…” and then the five words that opened the floodgates of heavens “…the resurrection of the body…”

A thought struck me. If we believe in the resurrection of the body—first Jesus’s and then ours—then we surely have to believe in a ground that holds up our feet. And once that ground is in place, it doesn’t seem so hard to believe in air above it, or water running through it, or food and sleep and clothes and homes and streets and trees and all sorts of other creational goodness now redeemed. Suddenly the entire material world, which my previous theology had evacuated of all ultimate meaning, had been repopulated with beautiful, material glory. The world, it turned out, was crowded with the glory of God—and all of our work mattered profoundly to God regardless of if we went to seminary or not.

O, the relief! I wasn’t a heretic after all! “My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth and followed thee.” And it had been here all along. Right there in plain sight—in those old words I’d heard so many times. The oldest statement of the Christian faith. And I had been telling the whole world over and over again that I believed it for my entire life. But now, in those five little words, I felt like I had received all of creation back as a gift of God’s grace. I felt like Scrooge on Christmas morning.

This joy of understanding the gospel is why we at City to City labor to see not just churches renewed by the gospel, but entire cities. Why? Because we believe in the resurrection of the body. Jesus came back from the grave in order to give all of creation back to us as a gift. So as Christians all across the world prepare to gather for Easter Sunday, I pray that the Lord would repopulate not only our theology or our imaginations with the glory of his resurrection. I pray that he would repopulate our cities with it. For he is risen, indeed.

*Originally published on Redeemer City to City’s website titled: “The Day I Thought I Became a Heretic”