Dad, will we have Chinese food in heaven?” That was the earnest and innocent question I received from my nine-year-old daughter as we were enjoying a culinary delight from the Far East. I quickly replied “Yes.” Why would a father go out on a tenuous limb and disappoint a child? But I knew she was not asking an easy question. She had asked a deeply profound and wide-ranging question involving nearly every loci of systematic theology. This can be illustrated by rephrasing it: “Dad, is this human cultural artifact known as ‘Chinese’ food, crafted with human ingenuity from the raw materials of God’s original creation, going to survive the eschatological cataclysm of the Last Day and exist and be enjoyed in the New Heavens and the New Earth?” That way of putting it, as it happens, is far more controversial.

Further considering the question, I recalled a vested interest of my own: a letter in my email inbox from the late Professor John Webster, regarding a conversation we had had about another scholar. He poignantly signed off with this promissory note: “The celestial Bavinck club will include us all, I trust, with me in charge of paradisial gin and tonics (always that first sip, never a hangover).” I confess wishing to share his trust that paradisial gin and tonics are real, and that in eternity none other than John Webster will tend the bar for the Bavinck club.^[1]

The faith and work movement has, it seems, more or less successfully recovered a robust doctrine of human vocation—that work and labor is something intrinsic to what it means to be human. As a pre-fall, creational reality, distorted by sin, our work and labor is, in Christ, redeemed. It is “bought back,” liberated from the dominion of sins like envy, greed, malice, abuse, and self-seeking, the thorns that “infest the ground”  (as Isaac Watts had it) are gradually overcome, and work is reoriented to the glory of God and love of neighbor and made fruitful. However, it is much more controversial to extend Christ’s redemption of work to include work product—that is, the fruits themselves. That is, are the artifacts of human cultivation (culture) included in Christ’s redemption of the cosmos?

It is already evident that this question cannot be answered solely from the theological locus of redemption, narrowly considered. The answer will necessarily require an ontology of creation and culture, an anthropology, a doctrine of sin, and certainly a well-defined eschatology.

I propose to answer the question, as I did to my daughter, in the affirmative, but to ground it in something more robust than my fatherly say-so. I shall argue that certain fundamental biblical concepts about creation and re-creation—particularly as they have been articulated in neo-Calvinism—lead to only one conclusion. That is, given a basically neo-Calvinistic orientation to creation and re-creation, and notwithstanding a large measure of ambiguity in the tradition itself on the question, it is inescapable that work product should be considered as included in Christ’s redemption of the cosmos. One may and many do, of course, reject the neo-Calvinist framework in favor of a more cataclysmic eschatology or radical spirit/matter dualism; but I will at very least suggest that neo-Calvinists themselves should openly embrace (with, we shall see, certain necessary epistemic limitations and caveats) this affirmative answer as the only fully consistent one.

Detractors

One candidate who takes up the offer to simply reject neo-Calvinism in order to answer the question in the negative is David VanDrunen. In his book Living in God’s Two Kingdoms, he adamantly insists that artifacts of human cultural labor are destined for destruction. He does so on the grounds that the new creation is essentially a totally new creation. Commenting on Romans 8 and Paul’s teaching regarding the liberation of the creation from its bondage to decay, he writes:

To understand Paul’s point, it is important to remember that this present world was never meant to exist forever. The first Adam was commissioned to finish his task in this world and then to rule in the world-to-come (Heb. 2:5). Thus when creation groans (Rom. 8:22) for something better, for ‘the glory’ that is coming (8:18), creation is not seeking an improvement of its present existence but the attainment of its original destiny. It longs to give way before the new heaven and new earth spoken of in 2 Peter 3 and Revelation 21.^[2]

This is untenable as a purely exegetical matter. Paul’s “liberated from its bondage to decay into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (v.21) cannot possibly be glossed as “giving way.” Paul is not talking about euthanasia, creation dying a good death to make way for a new and better world. The prepositions are clear: “From (apo) bondage into (eis) freedom.”^[3] It is the same subject, “creation”—the very same ktisis Paul speaks of in Romans 1:20—on both sides of the ledger.

It is also untenable as an anthropological matter. If the present creation completely passes away to make way for the new creation, what is one to make of the resurrection of the body? VanDrunen senses the problem and goes on to write, “Our earthly bodies are the only part of the present world that Scripture says will be transformed and taken up into the world-to-come.”^[4] This is a remarkable claim that cannot be squared with Paul’s argument in this very passage. Paul is explicitly drawing a continuity between creation’s “groaning” and expectation of liberation (vv.21-22) and our “groaning” and expectation of the “redemption of our bodies” (v.23). Paul’s point is not that our resurrection hope and expectation is granted while creation’s hope for liberation is denied.

Given these convictions, however, it is understandable why VanDrunen would answer the question in the negative. Nothing in the present world is redeemed and destined for glory except our earthly bodies. Ergo, there will be neither Chinese takeout nor paradisial gin and tonics in the new heavens and the new earth.

But one  need not do such exegetical violence, or hold to such a minimalist doctrine of redemption, or maintain a cataclysmically disjunctive eschatology to answer the question negatively. In an essay for Christianity Today, J. Todd Billings pushes back against the fashionable notion that our cultural work has redemptive significance that will last into eternity.^[5] That this is a different sort of critique is evident from the start:

I embrace the main features of this counter-narrative to the rapture account. Redemption restores God’s good creation. Heavenly hope involves a material, embodied restoration. Heaven and earth will come together as Christ’s kingship is recognized by all creation. Moreover, we should embrace ‘kingdom work’ that calls us […] Yet, I also sense that we impoverish our hope for heaven when we turn it into an expression of our current activist emphasis upon ‘kingdom work.’^[6]

In particular, Billings takes exception to N.T. Wright’s Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, which argues that

What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future.^[7]

“While I celebrate Wright’s holistic vision in Surprised By Hope,” Billings writes, “his account here creates more problems than it solves.”^[8] In particular, Billings asks what it means for our actions to “last” into the new creation? Wright suggests, for example, that Bach’s music will be played in the eschaton, but Billings counters: “A friend of mine is facing death; he spent his life as an auto mechanic. Will his repaired cars make their way to the new creation? If not, why does Bach’s contribution have kingdom value, while my friend’s does not?”

That is an excellent question, but Billings does not suggest any possible answers, as though the answer is obvious. It is not. The rest of his essay is a thoughtful and well-taken exhortation to recover the centrality of worship in our resurrection hope. But arguments about “centrality” and competing “emphases” are notoriously slippery and easily devolve into false dilemmas, pitting harmonious things against one another.^[9] Is it true that a focus on kingdom work comes at the zero-sum expense of worship? Is loving your neighbor as yourself somehow in competition with “Love the Lord your God with all your, heart, and with all your mind, and with all your strength?” Surely not. The vertical and horizontal dimensions of creaturely life have gone hand-in-hand from the very beginning, and the fault for sinfully neglecting one or the other is not a matter of focus; it is a matter of the one focusing.

Recently, Hans Boersma has leveled a similar criticism of neo-Calvinism, and especially Herman Bavinck. His view is that the notion of believers “carry[ing] our cultural accomplishments over into the hereafter, and also [that] in the eschaton we will be actively engaged in social and cultural endeavors of various kinds” is in contradiction to or rejection of the visio Dei or “beatific vision.”^[10] So “creation-affirming” is Bavinck’s theology that Boersma thinks it is actually “glory-negating.” The same skepticism of false dilemmas ought to be applied here. In the hereafter we either “gaze eternally into the face of God” or we engage in cultural endeavors? But if believers in the here-and-eschatological-now, the “down payment” stage of Spiritual heavenly life, engage in cultural endeavors mindful of being coram Deo (Eph. 2:10)—“before the face of God”—I see no reason why that same phenomenon in a perfected and glorified way should be thought impossible or unthinkable in the hereafter.

That is quite enough stage-setting. To the criticisms of Billings and Boersma we shall return. Clearly, at the very least, my daughter was not asking a meaningless or silly question. Let us now explore neo-Calvinism’s account of creation and re-creation in order to grasp or at least to approach a satisfactory answer to her question.

Creation & Re-Creation

It has long been accepted that the very beating heart of neo-Calvinism is the conviction that “grace restores and perfects nature.” Jan Veenhof called it the “central motif” of Herman Bavinck’s theology, and it is not difficult to see why.^[11] Over and over again, in relation to nearly every theological loci, Bavinck is at pains to emphasize that grace opposes sin, not nature.

For Bavinck, in fact, “grace restores and perfects nature” is something of a shorthand summary of a cluster or complex of ideas. It is a pithy description of a creational eschatology that involves the doctrine of the covenant of works (i.e., eschatology precedes soteriology; grace in Christ does not merely restore humanity to the beginning of Adam’s journey, but to its end in eschatological perfection).^[12] But it also involves the Augustinian notion of sin as privation, having no ontological existence of its own and, because of this, that nature or creation is susceptible to redemption. It can be saved because sin can be removed and destroyed without removing or destroying the substance.

Arguably nowhere does Bavinck tie together in one place these various threads more clearly and forcefully than in his 1894 rectorial address at Kampen entitled, “De Gemeene Genade,” or “Common Grace.”^[13] Not only is it a compact and striking example of Bavinck’s theological raison d’être, it also directly relates the neo-Calvinist concept of creation and re-creation to human vocation.

By means of this organic way of relating nature and grace, the Reformation in principle overcame the mechanical juxtaposition and dualistic worldview of the Catholic Church. And thereby, too, the significance of the cosmos increases greatly. It still represents that primary, original, and natural state that the Christian religion, the foedus gratiae [covenant of grace], leads back to. While it is true that the world has been corrupted by sin, it nevertheless remains the work of the Father, the Creator of heaven and earth. Of his own will he maintains it by his covenant, and by his gratia communis [common grace] he powerfully opposes the destructive might of sin. He fills the hearts of men with nourishment and joy and does not leave himself without a witness among them. He pours out upon them numberless gifts and benefits. Families, races, and peoples he binds together with natural love and affection. He allows societies and states to spring up that the citizens might live in peace and security. Wealth and well-being he grants them that the arts and sciences can prosper. And by his revelation in nature and history he ties their hearts and consciences to the invisible, supra-sensible world and awakens in them a sense of worship and virtue.^[14]

Here we have the beginning of a line of argument: “God so loves the world” and all that is within it, culture and civilization, arts and sciences, and the rest. But why? Why does God do all this, Bavinck asks? “Does he squander his own gifts? Is he acting purposelessly?” By no means!

Is it not because natural life, in all its forms has value in his eyes in spite of sin’s corruption? The love of family and kin, societal and political life, art and science are all in themselves objects of his divine good pleasure. He delights also in these works of his hands. They all together constitute, not in their mode of being but in their essence, the original order that God called into being at creation and that he still preserves and maintains, sin notwithstanding. Contempt for this divine order of creation is thus illegitimate; it flies in the face of experience and conflicts with Scripture. Here all separatism or asceticism is cut off at the roots. All world-flight is a repudiation of the first article of our Apostolic Creed. Christ indeed came to destroy the works of the devil. But more than that, he came to restore the works of the Father and so to renew man according to the image of him who first created man.^[15]

God so loves the world because he made it, continues to delight in it, and he intends to redeem it. Elsewhere Bavinck puts it this way, with a hint or twist of an Anselmian “honor code” satisfaction view of atonement:

God’s honor consists precisely in the fact that he redeems and renews the same humanity, the same world, the same heaven, and the same earth that have been corrupted and polluted by sin.^[16]

How is such a cosmic redemption possible, given the corruption of sin? Is this a mild view of sin and depravity? Bavinck explains:

Hereby we have not denied the serious character of sin. Sin is certainly not a substance but a quality, not materia [matter] but forma [form]. Sin is not the essence of things but rather cleaves to the essence; it is a privatio [privation], albeit actuosa [active], and to that extent accidental, having penetrated from the outside like death. Hence sin can be separated and removed from reality. The world is and remains susceptible of purification and redemption. Its essence can be rescued, and its original state can return.^[17]

While God’s common grace preserves the world by restraining sin’s power to dissolve and destroy, it is not enough. “It compels but does not change; it restrains but does not conquer. Unrighteousness breaks through its fences again and again.”^[18]

To save the world, nothing less was needed than the immeasurable greatness of the divine power, the working of his great might which he accomplished in Christ when he raised him from the dead and made him sit at his right hand in the heavenly places (Eph. 1:19-20). To save the world required nothing less than the fullness of his grace and the omnipotence of his love.^[19]

All of this precedes what appears to be the only quotation people know or remember from the essay: “Christianity does not introduce a single substantial foreign element into the creation. It creates no new cosmos but rather makes the cosmos new.”^[20] That is a line that is every bit as worthy of quotation and adulation as Kuyper’s famous “every square inch,” but it only comes into its own in the context of the foundational theology of nature and grace Bavinck has explained and continues to explain at length. In fact, that quote must be continued:

It restores what was corrupted by sin. It atones the guilty and cures what is sick; the wounded it heals. Jesus was anointed by the Father with the Holy Spirit to bring good tidings to the afflicted, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captive and the opening of the prison to those who are bound, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and to comfort those who mourn (Isa. 61:1,2). He makes the blind to see, the lame to walk; the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised, and the gospel is preached to the poor (Matt. 11:5). Jesus was not a new lawgiver; he was not a statesman, poet, or philosopher. He was Jesus—that is, Savior.^[21]

All these powerful images are that of restoration, the great reversal of sin and its effects on God’s good creation. And, Bavinck insists, this restoration is not narrowly tailored.

Christ did not come just to restore the religio-ethical life of man and to leave all the rest of life undisturbed, as if the rest of life had not been corrupted by sin and had no need of restoration. No, the love of the Father, the grace of the Son, and the communion of the Holy Spirit extend even as far as sin has corrupted. Everything that is sinful, guilty, unclean, and full of woe is, as such and for that very reason, the object of the evangel of grace that is to be preached to every creature.^[22]

And then follows: “Therefore Christ has also a message for home and society, for art and science.”^[23] Liberalism limits the gospel to the inner chamber of the human heart, but this is a woefully inadequate grasp of the kingdom of God:

But if the kingdom is not of, it is certainly in this world, and is intended for it. The word of God which comes to us in Christ is a word of liberation and restoration for the whole man, for his understanding and his will, for his body and his soul. Sin entered the world, and for just that reason, ‘God so loved the world…’^[24]

It is a powerful and energizing and, well, liberating theological framework, and it is no surprise that neo-Calvinism became the cultural force it did. Notwithstanding a variety of controversies about common grace and diverse emphases or excesses in various geographical quarters, it remains a powerful idea that dignifies human cultivation and labor as something “Holy to the Lord.” But to what end?

Eschatological Discontinuity is Ethical

Whatever one makes of Bavinck’s doctrine of creation and re-creation, even his detractors ought to admire the sheer adamance and consistency with which he carried it through. One might have thought that the impending cataclysm of divine judgment at the Last Day would give some pause to this enthusiastic (some might even say “triumphalist”) embrace and endorsement of the whole warp and woof of human culture.

Bavinck never seems to even tap the brakes.

He is well-aware that the New Testament speaks of heaven and earth “passing away” (Matt. 5:18; 24:35; 2 Pet. 3:10; 1 John 2:17; Rev. 21:1) that they will perish and wear out like clothing (Heb. 1:11), dissolve (2 Pet. 3:10), be burned with fire, and be changed (Heb. 1:12). Bavinck views all this as proving rather than undermining his point: “[N]one of these expressions implies a destruction of substance.”^[25] Peter’s burning fires are purifying flames. The “passing away” of the world “does not imply a destruction of the substance of the world but a vanishing of the world in its present, sin-damaged form. Paul, accordingly, also states very clearly that the present form (to schēma) of this world passes away (1 Cor. 7:31).”^[26]

It is, in other words, only sin and its corruption that is destroyed by God’s judgment. The point of the fires of judgment is that the “earth and all its works shall be exposed” (hurethēsetai—2 Peter 3:10). One might well gloss it as “found out” or “brought to the surface.” Our works are, in other words, alloyed. There is impurity and ungodliness in them, a “falling short of the glory of God” that will be exposed, brought to light, and then destroyed so that, presumably, the substance (of our works, note) will remain pure and unalloyed. In light of this Peter immediately asks the “how then shall we live?” question: “Since, therefore, everything will be dissolved in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives …” (2 Peter 3:11). Strive, in other words, to be the kinds of people whose works are unalloyed.

This is in such precise conformity with the Apostle Paul’s understanding in 1 Corinthians 3:12-14 that one imagines the two might have compared notes:

If any man builds on this foundation [i.e., Christ] using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.

“All that is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, and commendable in the whole of creation, in heaven and on earth,” writes Bavinck, “is gathered up in the future city of God—renewed, re-created, boosted to its highest glory.”^[27] For Bavinck, and neo-Calvinism more generally, the discontinuity between this world and the next is never a matter of ontology, but rather of ethics. However transformed, renewed, or re-created, the unalloyed substance (the ontology) remains.

So now to the not-so-trivial question: what is Chinese food? What is a gin and tonic?

Work Product is Ontological

They are ontological substances crafted and cultivated by divine image bearers. Everything in neo-Calvinism presses in the direction of an affirmative answer to our question.

But here some neo-Calvinists somewhat understandably pause in the face of many real and even bewildering complexities. Brock and Sutanto, for example, in the midst of their otherwise superb rebuttal to Hans Boersma, rightly note that Bavinck follows Kuyper in the conviction that “although the accidents of the world will indeed perish, the substance of the world will not.”^[28] Then follows this sentence: “The individual accomplishments of common grace will fade, but the germ will be re-born.”^[29] The reader is pointed to Bavinck’s discussion in volume four of the Reformed Dogmatics (717-20), but nowhere in that discussion does Bavinck say anything about individual accomplishments fading. The “accidents,” for Bavinck, are sin and corruption.

It turns out there is some ambiguity or hesitation on this point in neo-Calvinism. For his part, Kuyper appears to be of two minds. On the one hand, he writes that the “honor and glory” mentioned in Revelation 21 is

nothing other than the progressive communal development that our entire human life achieved and will achieve in the history of the nations. And we are told that this profit, which of course is nothing else than the fruit of common grace, does not simply perish and is not simply destroyed in the universal cosmic conflagration, but such profit will have an abiding significance for the new Jerusalem, that is, for the new earth, for this honor and glory attained by our human race will be carried into this new Jerusalem.^[30]

But his next sentence seems to pull the punch:

Now we understand, as we used the word a moment ago, that carrying in is not meant literally. No book, no work of art, no product as such will be transferred. ‘All these things will perish’ [see 2 Peter 3:11], just as the corpse is entrusted to the earth, and the entire body becomes the prey of maggots and worms.^[31]

Perhaps this is not a contradiction or being of two minds. The “substance” may remain, but on this account it isn’t much. It is a “seed” or “germ” from which something new will grow in the hereafter. This seems a dogmatic and rather speculative assessment of the degree to which cultural artifacts will undergo transformation, and most charitably Kuyper is attempting to take seriously his reading of 2 Peter. But that reading is a misleading one. Understanding luthēsetai as “dissolved” (in keeping with the metallurgical analogy) instead of “perish” goes a long way to solving Kuyper’s difficulty or hesitation to affirm that any artifact “as such” enters the new creation.

Further ambiguity emerges when Bavinck suggests that the kingdom of God has a “hidden spiritual dimension and an external, visible side.”^[32] No one would doubt that to be true; problems emerge when he seems to suggest that the former is the “already” and the latter is the “not yet” of the eschatological kingdom. That is, that the benefits of the kingdom in the present age are “all internal and invisible: forgiveness, peace, righteousness, and eternal life [….] Whereas Jesus came the first time to establish that kingdom in a spiritual sense, he returns at the end of history to give visible shape to it.”^[33]

This is probably too neat and tidy a mapping of the already/not-yet, with the “already” grouped with “hidden, spiritual, internal, invisible,” and the “not-yet” grouped with “external and visible.” It comes uncomfortably close to contrasting “spiritual” with material, visible, or physical. Richard B. Gaffin, Jr.’s exhortations in this regard, that we ought to understand Paul’s “spiritual” (pneumatikón) as referring specifically to the person of the Holy Spirit, ought to be heeded.^[34]

The Holy Spirit is and always has been fully capable of empowering and creating and indwelling very much material, physical, and visible things. Bezalel and Oholiab fashioned the tabernacle by the Spirit’s power. Under that same power the disciples very publicly and audibly proclaimed the gospel of the kingdom at Pentecost. The Holy Spirit inspired the physical and readable words of Holy Scripture. The Spirit is present in the very public and physical elements of water, bread, and wine. The sinner who publicly repents; the angry husband visibly softened under conviction; the jealous woman turned contented; the believer who visibly pours forth love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control; the one who is God’s workmanship walking in the good works God has prepared in advance (Eph. 2:10)—are these not tangible, tactile, and visible Spiritual works in the present world?

More complex still is the fact that human cultural work product is a matter of both ethics and ontology. Somehow, in some way, the fruit of labor reflects the religious and ethical character and orientation of the cultivator. Something of ourselves is embedded in our “work product.” Paul says clearly that our works will be purified by fire and the dross burned away: “It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward” (1 Cor. 3:13-14).

Naturally, we wish to know whether our work product—say, a painting, a song or composition, a cocktail, a product or service provided to others—is pure enough to survive the judgment fire. How would one go about even beginning to assess such a thing? Answer: it is precisely the wrong question. The extent to which there is a “falling short of God’s glory,” some residue of sin and corruption tainting our works is something only exposed (hurethēsetai) by fire at the Last Day. We are here at the outer limits of our epistemic capabilities. We cannot possibly know beforehand. We have simply been given our instructions: seek to live a godly and holy life (Peter) and build on the foundation that is Christ (Paul).^[35]

At long last this brings us back to J. Todd Billings’s excellent question: “A friend of mine is facing death; he spent his life as an auto mechanic. Will his repaired cars make their way to the new creation? If not, why does Bach’s contribution have kingdom value, while my friend’s does not?”

Two rejoinders come to mind. First, this is an argument against a seeming inequity that could just as easily be made against the notion of varying degrees of heavenly reward (which, as we have just seen, Paul clearly teaches) or a protest against our Lord’s own clear insistence that there will be “greatest” and “least” in the kingdom of heaven.^[36]

Second, and perhaps more comforting, is that the inequity is merely perceived instead of real. Cultural artifacts or human “work product” are not merely physical or material (or, in Bach’s case, audible) things. Human knowledge—perhaps above all—ought to be considered a cultural artifact or work product. It is perhaps true that moths and rust will destroy that 1976 Ford F-150 the mechanic spent hours repairing and maintaining. But why should we think the mechanic’s knowledge of the physical and material world, knowledge gained by way of his whole-hearted devotion to his vocation, rusts or is destroyed? The workman knows marvels; he has tapped into secrets of the physical world: how an alternator works (really, it is a marvel) or how an internal combustion engine operates. Bach’s manuscripts may all rot away just as much as a Ford; but the music exists. The Ford may rot away; but the physical knowledge embedded in that artifact exists. Ideas are just as real as an aria.

If such knowledge, as a product of human labor and enterprise and cultivation is to be considered as something destined to perish, is not the implication that we arrive in the resurrection tabula rasa? Will we even know ourselves? Will we have to re-learn from scratch how to invent fire? Will our auto mechanic friend have forgotten how a wheel works? Will the Chinese Christian have forgotten how to master the wok?

There are no good grounds to pit the cultural labors of Bach against the labor of others. If Bach’s music will be remembered, why will not the individual and collective mastery over mechanics or culinary arts or hospitality or service be remembered? And this is a pleasant thought, for a certain someone will also know how to make a glorified, “paradisial” version of a gin and tonic.

Plus Is Not Minus

“Paradisial” is a key word that must not be omitted. No one thinks that human cultural artifacts enter the world-to-come unchanged, and perhaps that is what Kuyper sought to indicate with his “as such.” Grace restores and perfects nature. It does not remove sin to thereby take us back to the Garden; it takes us back to the future. It removes sin and restores, but additionally brings us and the whole creation to its intended end in the consummation of all things. On this, nobody has written more compellingly than Bavinck :

The state of glory (status gloriae) will be no mere restoration (restauratie) of the state of nature (status naturae), but a re-formation that, thanks to the power of Christ, transforms all matter (ὑλη, hylē) into form (εἰδος, eidos), all potency into actuality (potentia, actus), and presents the entire creation before the face of God, brilliant in unfading splendor and blossoming in a springtime of eternal youth. Substantially nothing is lost. Outside, indeed, are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood (Rev. 22:15). But in the new heaven and new earth, the world as such is restored; in the believing community the human race is saved. In that community, which Christ has purchased and gathered from all nations, languages, and tongues (Rev. 5:9; etc.), all the nations, Israel included, maintain their distinct place and calling (Matt. 8:11; Rom. 11:25; Rev. 21:24; 22:2). And all those nations—each in accordance with its own distinct national character—bring into the new Jerusalem all they have received from God in the way of glory and honor (Rev. 21:24, 26).^[37]

“Substantially,” he says, “nothing is lost.”  Redemptive grace in Christ is more than restoration, but it is not less than restoration. And if Bavinck is correct and Revelation 21 means what it appears to mean, that all the nations “each in accordance with its own distinct national character” bring their gifts into the new Jerusalem, we have a definitive answer to our opening question: Yes, Daughter, we will have Chinese food in the new heavens and the new earth. But it will be better than any you’ve ever tried in this present age. And perhaps the gin and tonics really will always have the character of the “first sip,” and “never a hangover.”

Conclusion

Neo-Calvinism’s view of creation and re-creation points only one direction, and whatever hesitation there is ought to be overcome. That is not to say we should not exercise great modesty; we do not know what “glorified” and “perfected” cultural artifacts will look like because we do not know in the first place how and how deeply they are embedded with the alloy of sin and corruption. This will all be revealed at the Last Day.

But to the extent one suggests that the eschaton brings about a subtraction of some kind, it is in my estimation a contradiction of core principles.³⁷ The continuity between this age and the age to come is ontological: the same bodies, the same material reality, the same heaven, the same earth—granted, of course, with the “plus” of perfection and glorification. The discontinuity is ethical: it is the purging of sin and corruption. The moment one categorically denies outright a place for human cultural artifacts in the new heavens and the new earth, the discontinuity is suddenly and inescapably ontological, thus reversing the whole neo-Calvinist construal of nature and grace.

Jesus Christ came to destroy the works of the Devil, not the works of his brothers and sisters, the adopted sons and daughters of God. Indeed, those works were prepared for us beforehand in Christ (Eph.2:10), and from that vantage point one might justly say that all our work and cultural labors are the fulfillment of the Second Adam’s dominion mandate. Does the Father destroy the works of his own beloved Son? I propose a brief thought experiment: take away any and all dualism or antagonism between spirit and matter; take away a radically cataclysmic eschatology and its notion of a totally new creation, even with the human body as the token exception. Take away false dilemmas that pit worship against cultural life. What would lead one to think that God, who made the world and all that is therein, who preserves it, gave it to the care and cultivation of his image-bearers, loves it so much as to send his Only Begotten Son to die and rise again to redeem it, who is himself “the Lord, the Lord, compassionate and gracious God,” would at the consummation of all things destroy all of the “in Christ” things he prepared for his creatures to produce for the glory of his name? I can think of no rationale. It seems much truer to God’s character that he instead lovingly and lavishly perfects and adorns and delights in them and rewards his children.

Maybe—maybe—even with paradisial gin and tonics. My daughter will at present choose the paradisial take-out.

^[1] I had thought, as did my computer spell-check, that the good Professor had misspelled “paradisal.” But the thought occurring that this was Professor John Webster, I did my due diligence and found the word in the Oxford English Dictionary. The learned man had used an irregular but elegant form of the word used by George MacDonald.

^[2] David VanDrunen, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 65.

^[3] For a rebuttal to his interpretation of 1 Peter 3 and Revelation 21, see Brian G. Mattson, Cultural Amnesia: Three Essays on Two Kingdoms Theology (Billings: Swinging Bridge, 2018 ), 39-41.

^[4] VanDrunen, LGTK: 66. A latent spirit/matter dualism is evident here. Are not souls part of this “present world”? The framing suggests that the soul or spirit has its natural home in the age-to-come, and the body will accompany it somewhat begrudgingly in spite of its “this-worldly” character.

^[5] J. Todd Billings, “The New View of Heaven Is Too Small,” Christianity Today  (February 15, 2018). https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2018/february-web-only/new-view-of-heaven-too-small-resurrection-hope.html

^[6] Billings, “The New View of Heaven Is Too Small.”

^[7] N.T. Wright, Surprised By Hope, cited by Billings.

^[8] Billings, “The New View of Heaven Is Too Small.”

^[9] C.f., John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg: P&R, 1987), 182-83.

^[10] Hans Boersma, Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in the Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018): 33. There is no need here to duplicate the outstanding rebuttal to Boersma in Cory C. Brock and N. Gray Sutanto, Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction (Bellingham: Lexham Academic, 2022), 168-183.

^[11] Jan Veenhof, Revelatie en Inspiratie (Amsterdam: Buijten & Schipperheijn, 1968), 345-6.

^[12] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008) 2:573. C.f., Brian G. Mattson, Restored To Our Destiny (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

^[13] Herman Bavinck, “Common Grace,” trans. Raymond C. Van Leeuwen, Calvin Theological Journal 24 (1989): 35-65. Surprisingly, “Common Grace” remains somewhat neglected in secondary literature. It deserves more and continued attention.

^[14] Herman Bavinck, “Common Grace,” 60.

^[15] Herman Bavinck, “Common Grace,” 60, emphasis added.

^[16] Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:717.

^[17] Bavinck, “Common Grace,” 61.

^[18] Bavinck, “Common Grace,” 61.

^[19] Bavinck, “Common Grace,” 61.

^[20] Bavinck, “Common Grace,” 61.

^[21] Bavinck, “Common Grace,” 61.

^[22] Bavinck, “Common Grace,” 62.

^[23] Bavinck, “Common Grace,” 62.

^[24] Bavinck, “Common Grace,” 62.

^[25] Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:717.

^[26] Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:717.

^[27] Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:720.

^[28] Brock and Sutanto, Neo-Calvinism, 169.

^[29] Brock and Sutanto, Neo-Calvinism, 169.

^[30] Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace: God’s Gifts for a Fallen World, Volume 1, ed. Jordan J. Ballot and Stephen J. Grabill, trans. Nelson D. Kloosterman and Ed M. Van der Maas (Bellingham: Lexham, 2016): 543.

^[31] Kuyper, Common Grace, 543

^[32] Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:718.

^[33] Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:718.

^[34] C.f., Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., In The Fullness of Time: An Introduction to the Theology of Acts & Paul (Wheaton: Crossway, 2022), 321-335.

^[35] It is regrettably beyond the scope of this paper to consider the works of unbelievers in any detail. For a helpful framing and treatment of the question, see Dennis Greeson, “Beginning at the End of All Things: Abraham Kuyper’s and Klaas Schilder’s Eschatological Visions of Culture” Themelios 46.2 (2021): 366-74.

^[36] See in this regard the discussion of the judgment according to works in Herman Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 178-81.

^[37] Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:720.