and the life everlasting

The Text

The final clause of the creed, and the long arc-close to the first. I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth — the creed began with the God whose first act is to give being to a world that was not. It ends with the same God’s final act: giving life that does not end. The two clauses belong together. The creation in clause 3 is what it is because of the life everlasting in clause 22; the life everlasting is what it is because of the creation in clause 3. If God is not the creator, God cannot be the savior. The God whose voice in Genesis 1 said let there be light is the God whose Spirit at the resurrection says let there be life that has no end — to the same matter, to the same persons, to the same world. The creed’s last word before Amen is not heaven. It is life. The life of God, given without measure, possessed without termination, shared by the people God has made and remade and raised.

Translation Notes

Vita aeterna — eternal life. The English everlasting and eternal are both legitimate translations of the Latin aeterna (and the Greek aiōnios), but they pull in slightly different directions. Everlasting puts the accent on duration — life that goes on without end. Eternal in its older theological use puts the accent on quality — life of a different kind, the life that belongs to God, the life that is no longer subject to the wearing-out of time. The Latin aeterna and the Greek aiōnios hold both registers together: the life is unending in duration because its quality is no longer subject to the corrosions that end the present life. The English liturgical form everlasting is the older choice; eternal is the modern. Both are defensible. The pastoral teacher should hold the qualitative emphasis steady against the modern tendency to hear everlasting as nothing more than for a very long time.

Vita — life. The Latin vita and the Greek zōē both name life in its fullest sense — not the bare biological function (Greek bios, Latin vivere in its narrow physiological use), but life as the lived participation in being. The New Testament’s zōē aiōnios is therefore not the same as the philosopher’s athanasia (immortality) or the Platonist’s aphtharsia (incorruptibility), though it includes both. Eternal life is participation in the life of God, which is the life that has no end because it has no privation. The choice of zōē over bios in the New Testament is doctrinally pointed: this life is not the present biological run extended indefinitely; it is a different quality of life, given as gift in the Spirit, consummated at the resurrection.

The relation to the resurrection of the body (clause 21). Clause 21 confessed the resurrection of the body — the rising of the same flesh that died. Clause 22 names what the raised body is for: the life everlasting. The resurrection is not an end-state but a passage; the body is raised into the life everlasting. The two clauses are not redundant. Clause 21 answers the question what happens to this body?; clause 22 answers the question what is the body raised into? The early baptismal creeds always had both clauses, with the order resurrection-then-life preserved across the Eastern and Western traditions. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan formulation parallels the structure: and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come (καὶ προσδοκῶ ἀνάστασιν νεκρῶν, καὶ ζωὴν τοῦ μέλλοντος αἰῶνος).

The closing Amen. In the Greek and Latin baptismal traditions, the Amen (Hebrew אָמֵן, firm, sure, so be it) is not a punctuation mark but a doctrinal element: the believer’s yes to the entire confession just made. Justin Martyr (First Apology 65) describes the congregation’s Amen at the eucharistic prayer as the people’s consent to what has been prayed. The Amen at the end of the creed is the same act. The creed is not a description the believer overhears; it is a confession the believer makes. The Amen closes the act.

Historical Context

The eternal-life hope is, with the bodily resurrection, the oldest and most stable element of Christian eschatology. Zōē aiōnios — eternal life — appears more than thirty times in the Gospel and First Letter of John alone, and is the central category of Johannine theology. John 3:16 places it at the very center of the gospel: whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. John 17:3 gives its definition: this is eternal life, that they know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. Eternal life on the Johannine reading is not merely future; it has already begun in the believer’s union with Christ, and is consummated at the resurrection.

The Pauline literature gives the eschatological accent. Romans 6:23 puts eternal life as the alternative to the wages of sin (death): the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 2:7 names eternal life as what God will give to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and incorruption. Galatians 6:8 connects sowing in the Spirit to reaping eternal life. 1 Timothy 6:12, 6:19 names taking hold of eternal life as the believer’s vocation. The eschatological-Pauline and the inaugurated-Johannine registers belong together; the early baptismal creeds receive both.

The Old Testament substrate is the prophetic vision of the messianic age, in which the curse of death is undone. Isaiah 25:6–9 is the locus classicus: on the mountain of the Lord, a feast for all peoples, and he will swallow up death forever. Isaiah 65:17–25 names the new heavens and new earth in which the infant will not die at a few days old and the elder will fulfill his days. Ezekiel 37 — the valley of the dry bones — names the breath of God restoring life to the slain of Israel. Daniel 12:2 names the resurrection of the dead, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt. The intertestamental Jewish literature (2 Maccabees 7; Wisdom of Solomon 1–5; the apocalyptic literature) developed the hope further, and is the immediate background of the New Testament’s eternal-life confession.

The earliest Latin baptismal creeds — the Old Roman Symbol, c. 200 — ended at resurrection of the flesh, without an explicit life-everlasting clause; the vitam aeternam was added in the textual development of the creed in the 4th and 5th centuries, and is standard in the Textus Receptus form by c. 750. The addition was not innovation but specification: the resurrection-into-life that the earlier formula assumed is now named. The Nicene Creed’s life of the world to come gives the same theological move. The Athanasian Creed’s final sentences — they that have done good shall go into life everlasting; and they that have done evil into everlasting fire — name the eternal-life hope alongside its sober counterpart.

Through the medieval and Reformation periods, the eternal-life clause was largely uncontested; the doctrinal disputes attached to its neighbors (the resurrection of the body, the intermediate state, the nature of the beatific vision) rather than to the clause itself. The 20th-century theological recovery — Barth, Moltmann, Wright — has refocused attention on the eternal-life clause as the culmination of the creed’s narrative, the long arc-close to the creator of heaven and earth with which the creed began.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.20.7 (“the glory of God is the human being fully alive; the life of the human being is the vision of God”); Athanasius, On the Incarnation; Gregory of Nyssa, On Perfection and Life of Moses; Augustine, City of God XXII; Confessions I.1; John Chrysostom, homilies on John

The patristic settlement on vita aeterna holds three convictions together. First, eternal life is participation in the life of God, not the indefinite extension of the present biological life. Irenaeus’s famous formula — gloria Dei vivens homo, vita autem hominis visio Dei (the glory of God is the human being fully alive; the life of the human being is the vision of God) — fixes the patristic accent. The end of the human person is not survival but communion. Second, eternal life is already begun in the present — in baptism, in the eucharist, in the indwelling Spirit, in the love of God shed abroad in the heart. The Johannine register has dominated patristic discussion: eternal life is a gift the believer has now, consummated at the resurrection. Third, eternal life is the life of God shared — not a created substitute, but a real participation in the divine life by grace, what the Eastern tradition will call theosis.

Augustine’s City of God XXII closes with the longest patristic Latin meditation on the eternal-life vision. The final chapter (XXII.30) is among the most beautiful theological prose ever written: in the heavenly city, says Augustine, the saints vacabimus et videbimus, videbimus et amabimus, amabimus et laudabimus. Ecce quod erit in fine sine fine — we shall rest and we shall see, we shall see and we shall love, we shall love and we shall praise. Behold what shall be in the end without end. Augustine’s Confessions I.1 frames the entire human life by the same conviction: fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te — thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in thee. The eternal life is what the restless heart has been made for.

Strengths

• Holds participation-in-God and resurrection-of-the-body together as a single hope
• The vision of God (visio Dei) register names the qualitative depth of eternal life that duration alone misses
• Augustine’s City of God XXII.30 and Confessions I.1 are permanent pastoral resources

Weaknesses

• The strong contemplative-vision register sometimes left less room for the embodied-eschatological dimensions that the New Testament also names
• Some patristic appropriations of Greek philosophical immortality language imported framings (the soul’s natural immortality, in particular) that sit awkwardly with the New Testament’s resurrection-grounded hope

Scholastic

Tradition: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.12 (on the vision of God), I-II.1–5 (on beatitude), Supplement qq. 92–95 (on the beatific vision); Dante, Paradiso esp. cantos XXX–XXXIII

The medieval scholastic tradition gave eternal life its sustained doctrinal treatment under the heading of the beatific vision (visio beatifica) — the immediate, unmediated seeing of God face to face that is the consummation of the human being’s end. Aquinas’s treatment in Summa Theologiae I-II.1–5 is the major medieval treatise on beatitude (beatitudo). The argument is the classical one: every rational creature is ordered to its perfect good; the perfect good of the rational creature is the seeing of God as he is; therefore, the eternal life of the rational creature is the beatific vision of God. Aquinas’s careful argument that the beatific vision is not a natural endowment but a grace (it exceeds the natural capacity of the creature, and is given by God’s free gift) preserves the New Testament’s gospel grammar against any Platonic implication that the soul’s vision of God is something the soul accomplishes by its own ascent.

Dante’s Paradiso (1320) is the great poetic synthesis of the scholastic doctrine. Cantos XXX–XXXIII narrate the pilgrim Dante’s final ascent to the beatific vision. The poem’s last words name what the eternal life ultimately is: l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle — the love that moves the sun and the other stars. Eternal life is the soul’s participation in the love that is God, and that love is the same love that moves the entire cosmos. The vision and the love are one act; and the cosmic and the personal are one reality.

Strengths

• The beatific-vision framework names the qualitative depth that eternal life requires
• Aquinas’s distinction between natural capacity and gracious gift preserves the gospel grammar
• Dante’s poetic synthesis remains a great Christian articulation of the doctrine

Weaknesses

• The strong contemplative emphasis sometimes left the embodied dimension of the resurrection life less foregrounded
• The scholastic vocabulary requires translation for contemporary use

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, Lectures on Genesis (esp. on Gen. 1–3 and the protology of eternal life); Augsburg Confession Art. XVII; Luther’s Easter Sermons

The Lutheran tradition has held the eternal-life clause in straightforward Reformation form: the resurrection of the dead, the just to eternal life, the unjust to condemnation. The Augsburg Confession (Art. XVII) is brief and direct, in keeping with its overall conciseness on eschatology. Luther’s own treatment is concentrated in his Easter sermons and in Lectures on Genesis, where he reads the protology of Eden in relation to the eschatology of the new creation: the eternal life is the restoration and consummation of the life God originally intended for the human creature, freed from the curse of sin and death and brought to its proper end.

Luther’s vocabulary is distinctive: fröhlicher Wechsel und Streit (the joyful exchange and conflict) names the substitutionary heart of the gospel and the basis of the eternal-life hope. The Christ who took our sin and death has given us his righteousness and life; the eternal life of the believer is the life of Christ given to the believer. Justified by faith is therefore not only a present standing but a present possession of the eternal life still to be consummated.

Strengths

• Anchors eternal life firmly in the gospel of justification by faith
• The joyful exchange framing names the Christological basis of the believer’s hope
• Resists every form of works-righteousness in the doctrine of the last things

Weaknesses

• The conciseness of the Lutheran articulation has sometimes produced a popular piety more attentive to being saved (the verdict) than to the life everlasting (the substance)
• Some popular Lutheran appropriations have collapsed eternal life into the doctrine of justification, losing the eschatological-bodily fullness

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes III.25; Westminster Confession Ch. 32–33; Heidelberg Catechism QQ. 57–58, 86, 129; Jonathan Edwards, Heaven, A World of Love (sermon)

Calvin’s treatment of the eternal life is integrated into his treatment of the final resurrection in Institutes III.25. The Reformed tradition has tended to articulate the eternal-life clause in connection with the glory of God — the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever (Westminster Shorter Catechism Q. 1), and eternal life is the consummated form of that enjoyment. Edwards’s Heaven, A World of Love (preached 1738) is the great American Reformed sermon on the substance of eternal life: heaven is a world of love because God is love, and the eternal life of the redeemed is participation in the eternal communion of love that the Triune God is.

The Reformed tradition has been particularly careful with the question of the purpose of eternal life. The chief end is enjoyment of God — not merely the survival of the soul, not merely reunion with loved ones, not merely the cessation of suffering, but the actual delight of the redeemed creature in the Triune God. The accent on the glory of God keeps the eternal life from being decentered into anthropocentric piety.

Strengths

• The enjoyment of God register is among the strongest articulations of eternal life’s qualitative depth
• Edwards’s Heaven, A World of Love is among the great pastoral expositions of the doctrine
• Holds glory-of-God and joy-of-the-creature together as the same act

Weaknesses

• The strong theocentric register has sometimes been heard as cold, in tension with the warmer relational and embodied dimensions that the New Testament also names
• The high Reformed accent on God’s sovereign decrees has sometimes overshadowed the inaugurated dimension of eternal life that the Johannine literature emphasizes

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: Athanasius, On the Incarnation; Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua; Gregory Palamas, Triads; Byzantine liturgy of the Paschal season

The Eastern tradition has framed eternal life as theosis — the deification of the human creature, the creature’s participation in the divine life by grace. The defining patristic formula is Athanasius’s: God became man so that man might become God (γέγονεν γὰρ ἄνθρωπος, ἵνα ἡμᾶς ἐν ἑαυτῷ θεοποιήσῃ — On the Incarnation 54). The Eastern tradition reads 2 Peter 1:4 — that you may become partakers of the divine nature — as the New Testament charter of the doctrine. Gregory Palamas’s 14th-century articulation of the distinction between the divine essence (which remains incommunicable) and the divine energies (which are communicated to the creature) provided the doctrinal framework that has shaped the Orthodox account ever since.

The Byzantine Paschal liturgy is the living vehicle of the doctrine. The Easter homily of John Chrysostom — read every year in the Orthodox Paschal liturgy — names the substance of the eternal life: Death is swallowed up in victory. Christ is risen, and you, O death, are annihilated! Christ is risen, and the demons are cast down! Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice! Christ is risen, and life is liberated!

Strengths

• The theosis framework names the qualitative depth of participation-in-God more strongly than most Western articulations
• The Paschal liturgical embedding has preserved the doctrine as a living confession
• Maintains the essence/energies distinction that protects both divine transcendence and real communion

Weaknesses

• The theosis vocabulary can be misheard in the modern West as a kind of self-divinization rather than the grace it actually names
• The strong liturgical-mystical register can be harder to translate for cultures unfamiliar with the patristic-monastic tradition

Wesleyan

(See Wesleyan Voice below.)

Modern Ecumenical

Tradition: Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3 §73; Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God (1995); Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? (1986); N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (2008)

The 20th-century theological recovery has restored the eternal-life clause to its full eschatological and embodied register. Barth’s treatment in Church Dogmatics IV/3 §73 places eternal life within the doctrine of reconciliation: the life everlasting is the life of the human creature in the covenantal communion that the Triune God has freely established. Moltmann’s The Coming of God (1995) gives the most sustained constructive eschatology of the late 20th century, with the eternal life consistently held together with the renewal of the whole created order. Balthasar’s Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? (1986) reopens the patristic question of universal hope without retreating to dogmatic universalism — the question of whom eternal life is for, framed as Christian hope rather than as predictive knowledge. Wright’s Surprised by Hope (2008) recovers the embodied-eschatological accent against the popular going-to-heaven substitute.

Strengths

• Has decisively restored the eternal-life clause to its full New Testament register
• Wright’s popular work has reshaped English-speaking Protestant piety against the platonized substitute
• Moltmann’s integration of personal and cosmic eschatology is among the great achievements of late-modern theology

Weaknesses

• Some modern reconstructions blur the distinction between the eternal life of the creature and the renewal of the cosmos in ways the New Testament keeps clearer
• The popular reception of Wright has occasionally overcorrected, treating heaven language as if it were always Platonic rather than recognizing the proper New Testament use of the word

Wesleyan Voice

The eternal-life confession is at the center of Wesleyan theology and is the natural close of the Methodist ordo salutis. The Wesleyan order of salvation moves from prevenient grace (the grace that goes before, drawing the sinner toward God) through justifying grace (the pardon and acceptance given by faith in Christ) through sanctifying grace (the Spirit’s transforming work in the believer, toward Christian perfection in love) to glorifying grace — the consummation at the resurrection, in which the Spirit completes in the believer the work that has been begun. Glorifying grace is the Methodist name for the substance of the life everlasting. The eternal life is not a separate gift bolted on to justification; it is the consummation of the same grace that has been at work in the believer from the beginning.

Wesley’s most sustained pastoral treatment of eternal life is in Sermon 64, “The New Creation” — a meditation on Revelation 21:5 (Behold, I make all things new) — and Sermon 60, “The General Deliverance,” which extends the eternal-life hope to the renewal of the whole creation, including the animal creation. Wesley’s Notes upon the New Testament on 1 Corinthians 15, John 17, and Revelation 21–22 preserve a robust embodied-eschatological reading throughout. The Methodist Articles of Religion (1784) do not contain an article on the last things separable from the resurrection (Article III on Christ’s resurrection governs the structure), but the Confession of Faith of the United Methodist Church (Art. XII) names the resurrection of the dead, the judgment, and the everlasting blessedness of the righteous.

What is distinctively Wesleyan in the doctrine is the integration of present and future. The eternal life is not exclusively future; it has already begun in the believer’s union with Christ, and grows in the present through the means of grace (prayer, scripture, the eucharist, fasting, the works of mercy, the class meeting). The Methodist confession is therefore not merely I will have eternal life when I die but eternal life has already begun in me, and will be consummated at the resurrection. The present life of the sanctified believer is the firstfruits of the eternal life still to come. This is why Wesley could speak of Christian perfection — perfect love — as a real possibility in this life: it is the present growing-into of the love that will be consummated in the life everlasting.

The hymnody of Charles Wesley is, here as nowhere else, the great Methodist witness. Love divine, all loves excelling, / joy of heaven, to earth come down — the prayer ends with the line that is the Wesleyan articulation of the eternal-life hope: till we cast our crowns before thee, / lost in wonder, love, and praise. The eternal life is wonder, love, and praise — the threefold movement of the redeemed creature toward the God who gives. Finish then thy new creation; / pure and spotless let us be — the same hymn names the consummation of the sanctification that begins now and ends only in the life everlasting.

The Methodist pastoral posture: confess eternal life as gift, not achievement; receive its present substance now in the means of grace; live the present life as the firstfruits of the eternal; care for the world and for the bodies of others as participants in the new creation God is bringing.

Hymnody

The Methodist hymnody on eternal life is among the richest in the Christian tradition. The eternal-life hope is the closing register of the funeral service, the consummating note of the Easter season, and the underlying horizon of much of the everyday hymnody.

“Love divine, all loves excelling” (Charles, 1747) is the great Wesleyan hymn of eternal life. The hymn opens with the prayer for the indwelling Spirit and closes with the consummated vision: till we cast our crowns before thee, / lost in wonder, love, and praise. The arc of the hymn — from incarnation through sanctification to the life everlasting — is the Methodist ordo salutis in singable form.

“Come, let us join our friends above” (Charles, 1759) names the communion of saints across the resurrection: one family, we dwell in him, / one Church, above, beneath; / though now divided by the stream, / the narrow stream of death. The hymn’s eschatological horizon is the bodily reunion of the redeemed in the life of the world to come.

“O for a thousand tongues to sing” (Charles, 1739) closes its sixth stanza in the eternal-life register: my gracious Master and my God, / assist me to proclaim, / to spread through all the earth abroad / the honors of thy name. The proclamation is undertaken in the present because the consummation is the praise of God in the life everlasting.

“Soldiers of Christ, arise” (Charles, 1749) closes: that, having all things done, / and all your conflicts past, / ye may o’ercome through Christ alone, / and stand entire at last. The standing-entire is the eternal-life consummation.

“For all the saints” (William W. How, 1864) names the eternal-life consummation as the resolution of the saints’ present labor: and when the strife is fierce, the warfare long, / steals on the ear the distant triumph song, / and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong. Alleluia, alleluia!

“Jerusalem the golden” (Bernard of Cluny, c. 1145, trans. J. M. Neale 1858) is the great medieval eternal-life hymn that has remained in Methodist use: Jerusalem the golden, / with milk and honey blest, / beneath thy contemplation / sink heart and voice oppressed.

“Soon and very soon” (Andraé Crouch, 1976) names the eternal-life hope in the African-American gospel register: no more crying there, / no more dying there, / we are going to see the King. The hymn closes the Methodist funeral repertoire in a register that is at once joyful and embodied.

For Easter: the entire Easter repertoire — Christ the Lord is risen today, Thine be the glory, Hail thee, festival day — participates in this clause. Easter is not only the proclamation of Christ’s resurrection but the inauguration of the believer’s eternal life.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

The creed does not end with heaven. This is worth saying again, because the cultural pressure to substitute heaven for the life everlasting is constant and has been the inherited shape of much popular Christian piety for centuries. Heaven appears in the Apostles’ Creed twice — at the beginning (God is creator of heaven and earth) and in the middle (Christ ascended into heaven) — but it does not appear at the end. The same is true of the Nicene Creed (the life of the world to come) and the Athanasian (everlasting life). The early church’s hope at the close of the creed is not the soul’s eventual relocation to a non-material heaven; it is life everlasting — the consummation of the new creation that the resurrected body has been raised into. Heaven, in the strict creedal vocabulary, is the place from which Christ is coming back, not the place to which the believer eventually goes. The believer goes to the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, on the new earth that the new heaven joins.

The biblical image of the life everlasting is consistently embodied, consistently social, and consistently joyful. Isaiah 25 is the great vision. On this mountain — a real mountain in a real geography, the mountain of the Lord at the center of the new creation — the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of fat things, a feast of wine on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wine on the lees well refined. Choice wines. Rich foods. Eaten on a mountain, with all peoples gathered. He will swallow up on this mountain the veil that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces. The life everlasting is the feast at which death has been swallowed up and every tear wiped away.

The image to hold is this: the new creation is a party that doesn’t get old. The best party you have ever been to — and then it doesn’t end. The wine is choice and you don’t get bloated. The conversation is good and never boring. The music is fresh and never stale. The food is rich and you don’t get sick. The people are all there — the ones you loved and lost, and the ones you never met but were always made for, and the ones from every nation and tribe and tongue. And the host is God. Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation. A party without bodies is not a party. Group chats are not a party. FaceTime with your grandmother is not a hug. The life everlasting is the embodied, social, festive consummation of every good thing the present life pointed toward.

The qualitative dimension is also important. The life everlasting is not just the same kind of life, only longer. The present life — with all its goodness — is shot through with frustration, with fatigue, with the slow loss that ages every body, with the corrosions that ruin every friendship, with the boredom that empties every project, with the sin that wounds every will. The life everlasting is not the present life amplified to infinity (which, honestly, would be unbearable). It is a different quality of life — life freed from sin, from fatigue, from boredom, from the slow loss. The Greek aiōnios names life of the age to come, not life of the present age extended forever. This is what the doctrine is offering: not eternal boredom, but the consummation of the life this present life keeps trying to be and never quite manages.

The Johannine register is also pastorally crucial. Eternal life in John’s gospel is not exclusively future. It has already begun in the believer who knows the Father and the Son. This is eternal life, that they know thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent (John 17:3). The believer has eternal life now (John 5:24, 6:47), and the resurrection at the last day is the consummation of what has already begun. That future has already begun, and we can be a part of it. This is the church’s pastoral word in the present: the life that is being offered is not only future. It is already breaking in. The peace, the joy, the love, the freedom — the things the Spirit produces in the believer’s present life — are the firstfruits of the eternal life that is still to come. The future has come back to meet us, in baptism, in the eucharist, in the Spirit, in the church.

And the closing of the creed-arc. The creed began with I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. The God whose first act was the giving of life — let there be light, the breath of life into the earth-creature, the calling-into-being of a world that was not — is the same God whose final act, named at the close of this creed, is the giving of life everlasting. The arc is one act. If God is not the creator, God cannot be the savior; and if God is not the savior, the creator’s work was for nothing. But the creator is the savior. The God who gave being to the world is the God who, in Christ, gives life that has no end to the world he has made. The first clause and the last clause belong together. The creed is a single confession, and it is the confession of the God whose love is the beginning and the end and everything in between. Of him, and through him, and to him are all things; to whom be glory forever. Amen.

The Amen is the believer’s word. The creed is not a description of someone else’s belief that the believer overhears. The creed is the believer’s own confession of the faith into which baptism has incorporated her, and the Amen is her yes to the whole thing. Amen — so be it, this is what I believe, this is the God who has my life and my death, this is the future I am being made for. The whole life of the church, from baptism to funeral, is bracketed by this confession and this Amen. The eternal life is the substance, and the Amen is the seal.

The pastor’s task at this clause is not to consolation but to invitation. The life everlasting is being offered. The future has already begun. The party — the feast on the mountain, the wine on the lees, the death-swallowed-up, the tears-wiped-away — is being thrown for you and for your neighbor and for every body that has ever been made. Take a step onto the resurrection path Christ has blazed for you. Let go of the small consolations and the dim substitutes. The hope is not heaven as escape; the hope is life as gift, here and to come, embodied and social and festive and forever. And the life everlasting. Amen.

Further Reading

• Isaiah 25:6–9 (the feast on the mountain); Isaiah 65:17–25 (the new heavens and the new earth)
• Daniel 12:1–3; Ezekiel 37:1–14
• 2 Maccabees 7; Wisdom of Solomon 1–5
• Matthew 25:46; Mark 10:17, 30; Luke 18:18, 30 — eternal life on Jesus’ lips
• John 3:15–16, 36; 4:14, 36; 5:24, 39; 6:27, 40, 47, 54, 68; 10:28; 12:25, 50; 17:2–3 — Johannine eternal life (the locus classicus)
• Romans 2:7; 5:21; 6:22–23; Galatians 6:8; 1 Timothy 1:16; 6:12, 19; Titus 1:2; 3:7; 1 John 1:2; 2:25; 3:15; 5:11, 13, 20 — apostolic eternal life
• Revelation 7:9–17; 21:1–22:5 — the new creation, the new Jerusalem, the river of the water of life
• Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.20.7 (“the glory of God is the human being fully alive”)
• Athanasius, On the Incarnation §54 (“God became man that man might become God”)
• Gregory of Nyssa, On Perfection; Life of Moses
• Augustine, Confessions I.1 (“our heart is restless until it rests in thee”); City of God XXII.30 (“we shall rest and we shall see; we shall see and we shall love…”)
• John Chrysostom, Paschal Homily
• Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua
• John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith IV.27
• Gregory Palamas, Triads
• Anselm, Proslogion §§24–26
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.12 (the vision of God); I-II.1–5 (on beatitude); Supplement qq. 92–96
• Dante Alighieri, Paradiso (especially cantos XXX–XXXIII)
• Martin Luther, Easter Sermons; Lectures on Genesis
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.25
• Heidelberg Catechism QQ. 57–58
• Westminster Confession of Faith Ch. 32–33; Westminster Shorter Catechism Q. 1
• Jonathan Edwards, Heaven, A World of Love (sermon, 1738)
• John Wesley, Standard Sermons, Sermon 60 (“The General Deliverance”); Sermon 64 (“The New Creation”)
• John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament on John 17, 1 Corinthians 15, Revelation 21–22
• Charles Wesley, “Love divine, all loves excelling” (1747); “Come, let us join our friends above” (1759)
• Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church (1784), Article III; Confession of Faith of the United Methodist Church, Article XII
• Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3 §73; Credo
• Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology (Fortress, 1996)
• Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? (Ignatius, 1988)
• N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (HarperOne, 2008)
• C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle (1956); The Great Divorce (1945)
• John Updike, “Seven Stanzas at Easter” (1960)