and the life of the world to come. Amen.

The Text

The creed ends here — not with a doctrine to be defended but with a life to be awaited, and a single Hebrew word of assent. The final clause is grammatically the second object of we look for (clause 22): we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. The resurrection names the how — the bodily raising; this clause names the what — the mode and content of that raised existence: not endless duration of the present order, but the life of the coming age, the new creation, the kingdom of God in its consummation, the life that is God’s own shared without remainder with his people forever.

The creed’s last substantive word is life (ζωή, vita) — and it is the same word used of the Holy Spirit in clause 16, the giver of life (τὸ ζωοποιόν). This is not accidental. The creed’s third article is bracketed by life: it opens with the Spirit as the giver of life and closes with the life of the world to come. The whole arc of the Spirit’s work — life in creation, life in the new birth, life raised at the resurrection — terminates in the life of the age to come. The creed does not end with an idea about the future; it ends by naming the destination of everything the Spirit does.

And then: Amen. The creed’s only word of liturgical sealing. It is not a polite conclusion or a verbal full stop. It is the Hebrew word of firmness and certainty — it is sure; so be it; we stand on this — by which the worshipping assembly corporately ratifies the entire confession it has just made. The creed does not trail off into the future tense of speculation; it lands, with the whole gathered church’s voice, on a word of rock-solid affirmation. The last word of the catholic faith is not a question. It is Amen.

Translation Notes

Zōēn / vitam — life. The strong theological word for life — not mere existence or duration (βίος, the span of a lifetime) but ζωή, the divine, abundant, indestructible life that belongs to God and that Christ is and gives (John 1:4; 10:10; 14:6; 1 John 5:11–12). The creed’s closing life is the consummation of every prior use: the life the Father has in himself and gives to the Son to have in himself (John 5:26); the life through which all things were made (clause 9; John 1:4); the life the Spirit gives (clause 16); the life raised at the resurrection (clause 22). The “life of the world to come” is therefore not a new and separate thing but the bringing-to-fullness of the one divine life the whole creed has been confessing.

Tou mellontos aiōnos / venturi saeculi — of the world to come. The crucial translation point: this is not primarily a place (“the next world,” “heaven up there”) but an age — a temporal-qualitative epoch. The biblical schema is two ages: this age (ὁ αἰὼν οὗτος), the present order under sin and death, and the age to come (ὁ αἰὼν ὁ μέλλων), the new order God is bringing. The participles — μέλλων / venturi, “the coming age” — name an age already on its way, not a merely possible afterlife. The English “world to come” can mislead a modern ear toward spatial relocation (souls departing this world for another); the creed’s idiom is temporal and cosmic: the renewal of all things (Matt. 19:28, παλιγγενεσία), the new heavens and new earth (Isa. 65:17; 2 Pet. 3:13; Rev. 21:1), the kingdom come on earth as in heaven. The Christian hope is not evacuation to another place but the transfiguration of the whole creation in the age God brings.

The Apostles’ Creed closes with the parallel but distinct phrase vitam aeternam — life everlasting. The two are one substance with different accents: life everlasting presses the unending quality (the life that death cannot end); life of the world to come presses the new-creational content (the life proper to the new age). The catholic hope holds both: the coming age is unending (eternal life) and is qualitatively new (a new creation, not merely a prolongation of the old).

Amēn / Amen — Amen. Retained untranslated across the entire catholic tradition — Hebrew into Greek into Latin into every vernacular — because it is the church’s universal word of ratification. From the root meaning to be firm, sure, faithful (cognate with the words for faithfulness and truth), Amen is not “the end” but “it is sure / so be it / we affirm this.” Jesus’ characteristic Amen, amen, I say to you (the Johannine “Verily, verily”) uses it to mark certainty; Paul grounds it Christologically: in him every one of God’s promises is “Yes”; for this reason it is through him that we say the “Amen” (2 Cor. 1:20); Revelation names Christ himself the Amen, the faithful and true witness (Rev. 3:14). The creed’s closing Amen is therefore the assembly speaking its assent in Christ, the Amen of God — the corporate, ratifying seal on the whole confession.

Historical Context

The clause completes the 381 Constantinopolitan expansion of the third article. The Nicene Creed of 325 had ended abruptly after the Holy Spirit with anathemas against Arian propositions; the 381 revision removed the anathemas and added the ecclesiological-eschatological clauses (church, baptism, resurrection, the life of the world to come), giving the creed its full doxological-confessional shape and its forward-leaning close. The creed thus moves, by deliberate construction, from the eternal God before all ages (the Father, the Son begotten before all worlds) to the life of the age to come after this age — the whole sweep of the divine economy from eternity to eternity, sealed with Amen.

The clause confesses the biblical two-age eschatology against two perennial reductions. Against the Greek-philosophical and gnostic spiritualizing of the hope (the soul’s escape from time and matter into a timeless, bodiless eternity), the creed confesses a coming age — temporal, cosmic, new-creational, the redemption and not the abandonment of the material order (the same anti-gnostic instinct that gave clause 22 resurrection of the dead and clause 3 maker of heaven and earth). Against any merely this-worldly reduction (the kingdom as social progress within the present age, with no genuinely new act of God), the creed confesses an age that comes — God’s gift, breaking in, not the extrapolation of present trends.

The patristic and medieval tradition received the clause as the creed’s pointer to the doctrine of the last things (the eschata, the novissima): the consummated kingdom, the beatific vision (the West’s characteristic accent — the soul’s and the raised person’s seeing of God face to face, 1 Cor. 13:12; 1 John 3:2), the theōsis or deification of the redeemed (the East’s characteristic accent — participation in the divine life), the new heavens and new earth, and the everlasting Sabbath rest (Augustine’s great close to the City of God: there we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise — this shall be in the end without end). The clause does not adjudicate the disputed eschatological frameworks (the millennial readings of Rev. 20; see clause 15); it confesses the substance all the frameworks must serve: the life of the age to come is real, is God’s gift, is the destination of the whole economy.

The modern recovery — the same recovery that reclaimed clause 22 from soul-immortality reductionism — has reclaimed this clause from its sentimental reduction to “going to heaven.” The biblical-theology movement, Moltmann’s Theology of Hope, and the broad ecumenical recovery of new-creation eschatology (Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant converging) restored the clause’s proper content: not disembodied souls in a timeless heaven, but the renewed creation, the new Jerusalem coming down (Rev. 21:2), God dwelling with humanity, every tear wiped away, death itself destroyed, and the life of God filling all things. The creed’s last clause has, in the modern period, been the engine of a major correction of popular Christian hope.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Irenaeus, Against Heresies V (the recapitulation consummated; the renewed creation); Origen (the contested apokatastasis); Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, Life of Moses (the doctrine of epektasis); Augustine, City of God XXII (the eternal Sabbath, the beatific vision); Maximus the Confessor (the cosmic consummation)

The patristic settlement reads the clause as the consummation of the whole economy. Irenaeus’s Against Heresies V closes his great recapitulation theology with the renewed creation: the same flesh and the same world that God made, redeemed and glorified, the kingdom of the Son handed to the Father, God become all in all (1 Cor. 15:28) — the consummation is the fulfillment, not the abolition, of creation.

Gregory of Nyssa contributes the distinctive doctrine of epektasis (from Phil. 3:13, straining forward): the life of the age to come is not static repletion but eternal, ever-deepening progress into the inexhaustible God — the blessed forever advance from glory to glory into a God who can never be exhausted, so that the perfection of heaven is a perfection of unending growth, never boredom and never satiety. This is one of the most profound patristic answers to the perennial worry that eternal life would be monotonous: the infinite God guarantees that eternity is endless discovery.

Augustine’s City of God XXII gives the magisterial Western close: the life of the world to come is the eternal Sabbath, the seventh day that has no evening, in which the redeemed — body and soul, in the resurrection — rest and see, see and love, love and praise; its content is the beatific vision, the unmediated seeing of God, in which the will is at last perfectly free because perfectly fixed on the Good. The contested figure is Origen, whose apokatastasis (the final restoration of all rational creatures, possibly including the devil) was influential, partially shared by Gregory of Nyssa, and condemned in its Origenist form (553) — leaving the church with the affirmed possibility of eternal loss alongside the hope (held by some) of universal restoration, an unresolved tension the creed itself does not adjudicate.

Strengths

• Irenaeus’s renewed creation (not abolished) is the permanent anti-gnostic foundation
• Gregory of Nyssa’s epektasis is the profound patristic answer to the fear that eternity is static or dull
• Augustine’s rest and see, see and love, love and praise is the magisterial articulation of the consummation’s content
• The patristic tradition holds the cosmic and the personal, the rest and the dynamism, together

Weaknesses

• The Origenist apokatastasis dispute left an unresolved tension (universal restoration vs. the reality of eternal loss) the tradition has never dogmatically closed
• Some patristic speculation on the conditions of the blessed life outran the biblical reticence

Scholastic

Tradition: Peter Lombard, Sentences IV; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II.1–5 (beatitude), Supplement 92–96 (the beatific vision, the glorified life); Bonaventure; Dante, Paradiso; the doctrine of the visio Dei

The scholastic tradition gave the clause its most precise Western articulation under the doctrine of beatitude and the beatific vision. Aquinas’s treatment is the high point: the final end of the human person is beatitudo — perfect happiness — and this consists essentially in the visio Dei, the immediate intellectual vision of the divine essence (1 Cor. 13:12, then we shall see face to face; 1 John 3:2, we shall see him as he is), in which the created intellect, elevated by the lumen gloriae (the light of glory), sees God not through creatures or concepts but directly. This vision is the soul’s perfect rest because it is the attainment of the Infinite Good in which alone the restless heart (Augustine’s cor inquietum) finds its repose; and it overflows, after the resurrection, into the dotes of the glorified body (clause 22) and the consummate society of the blessed.

Aquinas carefully holds that this vision is supernatural — beyond the natural powers of any creature, a sheer gift of grace — and inexhaustible: the blessed comprehend God truly but not comprehensively (the finite cannot exhaust the Infinite), so the vision, while perfectly satisfying, remains the contemplation of an infinite object. Dante’s Paradiso is the supreme imaginative rendering of the scholastic vision: the ascent through the spheres to the visio of the Trinity, the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Strengths

• The visio Dei gives the clause’s life its deepest content: not merely endless existence but the seeing of God, the heart’s only rest
• Aquinas’s holding-together of true but not comprehensive vision preserves both real attainment and inexhaustible mystery (close to Gregory’s epektasis)
• The integration of vision (soul) and the dotes (resurrection body) holds clauses 22 and 23 together
• Dante gave the doctrine its supreme imaginative form

Weaknesses

• The strongly intellectualist accent (beatitude as vision, an act of the intellect) was contested already in the medieval period (the Franciscan accent on love and enjoyment) and can underplay the relational-communal and new-creational dimensions
• The scholastic apparatus requires translation; popular reception often reduced the visio to a static “seeing,” losing the epektasis dynamism the best scholastics retained

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, Sermons on John 14, the funeral sermons; the Augsburg Confession XVII; the Lutheran chorale tradition; the accent on the consummated justification and the eternal Sabbath of faith

The Lutheran tradition holds the clause in catholic substance, integrated characteristically with justification: the life of the world to come is the consummation of the gospel — the believer who is now justified by faith, and whose justification is now hidden under the cross and contradiction, will then live in the unhidden, unending enjoyment of the God whose favor was always theirs in Christ. The simul iustus et peccator of the present life is resolved: the peccator is gone, the iustus remains, and the believer at last is what the verdict of justification declared them to be.

Luther’s pastoral accent (his funeral sermons, his letters of consolation) is the resolution of the believer’s present struggle: the life to come is rest from the conflict of faith — no more accusing law, no more hidden God, no more wrestling Jacob, but the open face of the gracious Father. The Lutheran chorale tradition carries this in some of the church’s greatest funeral and hope hymns (Paul Gerhardt, Johann Franck — Jesu, meine Freude; the German Nunc dimittis tradition). The Lutheran emphasis on the Word extends here too: the life of the world to come is the final and unmediated hearing and seeing of the God who in this age comes only through the veil of word and sacrament.

Strengths

• The integration with justification gives the clause its evangelical force: the life to come is the gospel consummated, the verdict made manifest
• Luther’s pastoral accent (rest from the conflict of faith) is profound consolation for the struggling believer
• The chorale tradition carries the doctrine in the church’s sung hope

Weaknesses

• The strong justification accent, popularly received, can narrow the clause to individual salvation and underplay its cosmic, new-creational scope
• The Lutheran reticence about speculative eschatology, while healthy, has sometimes left the positive content of the hope underdeveloped in preaching

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes III.25 (the final resurrection and the blessed life); the Heidelberg Catechism QQ. 57–58; the Westminster Confession Ch. 32–33; the Westminster Shorter Catechism Q. 1 (the chief end of man); Jonathan Edwards, The End for Which God Created the World, Heaven Is a World of Love

The Reformed tradition gives the clause a rich treatment centered on the glory of God and the enjoyment of God as the final end. The Westminster Shorter Catechism Q. 1 — Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever — is, in effect, a one-sentence exposition of this clause: the life of the world to come is the forever in which the chief end is finally and fully realized. The Heidelberg Catechism Q. 58 gives the pastoral form: the believer feels in the heart the beginning of eternal joy now, and after this life will possess perfect blessedness, such as no eye has seen… in praising God therein forever.

Calvin’s Institutes III.25 holds the clause with characteristic discipline: he insists on the certainty and the surpassing greatness of the hope while sharply restraining speculation about its conditions (Calvin repeatedly checks curiosity — Scripture tells us enough for hope and comfort, not enough for a map). Jonathan Edwards gave the Reformed tradition its most profound positive articulation: Heaven Is a World of Love (the concluding sermon of Charity and Its Fruits) presents the life of the world to come as the perfected society of love — God the infinite fountain of love, Christ its mediator, the redeemed and the angels bound in a love that perfectly gives and perfectly receives, forever increasing. Edwards’s vision integrates the visio Dei (the seeing) with the communion of love (the relational-social consummation) and the eternal increase (the Reformed echo of epektasis).

Strengths

• The glorify and enjoy God forever (Shorter Catechism Q. 1) is the church’s most memorable one-line statement of the clause
• Calvin’s disciplined restraint against speculation is theologically healthy
• Edwards’s Heaven Is a World of Love is one of the great positive articulations, integrating vision, communion, and eternal increase
• The Reformed tradition holds the doxological end (God’s glory) and the human end (our joy) together rather than opposing them

Weaknesses

• The disciplined restraint, in lesser hands than Calvin’s, has sometimes produced a thin or merely formal treatment of the hope’s content
• The decretal frame presses the clause toward a fixed division of the blessed and the lost in ways the Wesleyan tradition does not follow

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: the patristic tradition (Gregory of Nyssa’s epektasis; Maximus the cosmic consummation); the Paschal and eschatological liturgy; the doctrine of theōsis consummated; the uncreated light (Palamas); modern: Lossky, Schmemann, Staniloae

The Eastern tradition reads the clause as the consummation of theōsis and the transfiguration of the cosmos. The life of the world to come is the bringing-to-fullness of the deification that baptism began (clause 21), the Spirit advances, and the resurrection completes: the redeemed, body and soul, in the renewed creation, participate without end in the divine life — not by becoming God in essence (the Creator/creature distinction is never erased) but by sharing fully in the uncreated energies of God, suffused with the divine light (the Taboric light of the Transfiguration as the very mode of the age to come). Gregory of Nyssa’s epektasis is the Eastern keynote: the life of the coming age is endless, ever-deepening ascent into the inexhaustible God — perfection as perpetual progress, never static, never sated.

The Eastern accent is strongly cosmic and liturgical: the age to come is not the rescue of souls out of a doomed world but the transfiguration of the whole creation (Rom. 8:19–23), and the Divine Liturgy is its anticipation — every eucharist is a real participation now in the marriage supper of the age to come, the church on earth joining the unending liturgy of heaven (the Sanctus: “with all the choirs of angels”). Schmemann’s For the Life of the World gave the modern classic statement: the church’s whole life is the bringing of the world into the life of the age to come, the eucharist as the journey of the world into the kingdom.

Strengths

• The theōsis-consummated frame gives the clause’s life its richest positive content (participation in the divine life, the uncreated light)
• Epektasis (the Eastern keynote) answers definitively the fear that eternity is static
• The cosmic and liturgical accent (the whole creation transfigured; the eucharist as anticipation) is biblically deep and ecumenically fertile
• The Creator/creature distinction is carefully preserved within the strongest possible doctrine of participation

Weaknesses

• The theōsis and uncreated energies idiom requires careful translation to avoid pantheist misreading
• The Palamite framework is not received by all Western traditions, complicating full ecumenical convergence on the mode of the consummation

Wesleyan

(See Wesleyan Voice below.)

Modern Ecumenical

Tradition: Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, The Coming of God; Karl Rahner; the post-Vatican II recovery; N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope; Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart, Hope Against Hope; the ecumenical recovery of new-creation eschatology

The modern period has produced both the sharpest reduction of this clause and its most substantial recovery. The reduction: the collapse of “the life of the world to come” into “going to heaven when you die” — a disembodied, individualist, otherworldly, escapist hope that concedes the body, the creation, and the future to death and offers only evacuation. The recovery, broadly ecumenical, has reclaimed the biblical content: not the soul’s flight to heaven but heaven’s coming down (Rev. 21:2), the new heavens and new earth, the renewal of all things, God dwelling with humanity, the redemption of creation, and life — God’s own ζωή — filling all.

Moltmann’s Theology of Hope (1964) reframed the entire theological enterprise around the future of God: Christian theology is eschatology, the doctrine of hope, and the life of the world to come is not a remote appendix but the horizon that determines the meaning of everything present. His The Coming of God (1995) gave the mature treatment: the coming (adventus) God, the new creation, the cosmic Sabbath, even a carefully argued universal-restoration hope. N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope (2008) carried the recovery into the broad church with its memorable correction: the Christian hope is not “life after death” (the intermediate state) as the final word, but “life after life after death” — resurrection and new creation; and the consequence is that what we do now in the body and for the creation is not burned-up scaffolding but is taken up, redeemed, into the age to come (1 Cor. 15:58 — your labor is not in vain). The ecumenical convergence — Catholic, Orthodox, mainline and evangelical Protestant — on the bodily, cosmic, new-creational, already-inaugurated character of the hope is one of the genuine theological achievements of the period.

Strengths

• The recovery of new-creation eschatology against the soul-to-heaven reduction is one of the great modern correctives, broadly received
• Moltmann’s reframing (theology as hope; the coming God) restored eschatology to the center
• Wright’s “life after life after death” and the labor not in vain corollary reconnect the hope to present discipleship and creation-care
• The convergence is genuinely ecumenical and pastorally fruitful

Weaknesses

• The recovery, popularly received, sometimes over-corrects into an immanent this-worldliness that loses the genuine transcendence and gift character of the coming age
• Moltmann’s argued universalism remains contested and is not the catholic consensus
• The proper relation of the intermediate state (“with Christ” at death) to the consummation still needs careful pastoral articulation (see clause 22)

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s confession of the life of the world to come is unambiguous, catholic, and — as everywhere in Wesley — bent toward the practical and the affective. The Methodist Articles of Religion (1784) imply it throughout the eschatological articles (the resurrection, the judgment, Christ reigning until he return); Wesley’s Explanatory Notes on Revelation 21–22, John 14, 1 Corinthians 13, and 1 John 3 expound the substance: the new heavens and new earth, the city of God, the wiped-away tears, the face-to-face vision, the being made like him for we shall see him as he is.

What is distinctively Wesleyan is the integration of the life of the world to come with Christian perfection and holy love. For Wesley the consummation is not a different thing from sanctification but its completion: the perfect love that the Spirit works in the believer now (the heart wholly given to God and neighbor — Sermon 40, Christian Perfection; Sermon 17, The Circumcision of the Heart) is the very life of the age to come, begun in this age and consummated in the next. Heaven is not a reward added on to a holy life; heaven is holy love brought to perfection and made unending. This is why Wesley insisted, against any merely forensic or merely future-oriented scheme, that the life of the world to come is begun now: the believer who loves God and neighbor with a perfected heart is already, in substance, living the life of the coming age; death does not introduce a new kind of life but removes every hindrance from the life already given. Charles Wesley’s Love divine, all loves excelling makes this the explicit hope: Changed from glory into glory, / till in heaven we take our place, / till we cast our crowns before thee, / lost in wonder, love, and praise — the “changed from glory into glory” is Gregory of Nyssa’s epektasis in Wesleyan hymnody, and the telos is not a place but the perfecting of love into endless praise.

The Wesleyan accent also holds, characteristically, the universal offer and the seriousness of the alternative. The life of the world to come is held out to all (Christ died for all; the gospel is preached to all; none is excluded who does not finally exclude themselves), and precisely because it is freely and universally offered, the refusal of it is the gravest possibility (Sermon 15, The Great Assize). The Wesleyan hope is therefore neither presumptuous nor anxious: it is assured (the Spirit’s witness now is the pledge of the life to come — see clause 22 and [[i-believe-in-the-holy-spirit]]) and urgent (the offer is real, the stakes are real, the age is coming).

Charles Wesley’s hymnody closes the creed better than any prose. Come, let us join our friends above sets the whole church, militant and triumphant, in one communion divided only by the narrow stream of death — soon to be crossed. Love divine ends in wonder, love, and praise. And the great hope-stanza of And can it be: No condemnation now I dread; / Jesus, and all in him, is mine! / Alive in him, my living Head, / and clothed in righteousness divine, / bold I approach th’eternal throne, / and claim the crown, through Christ my own. The eternal throne and the crown are the life of the world to come — and the posture is exactly the creed’s: not anxiety, not speculation, but Amen.

The pastoral Wesleyan posture: confess the life of the world to come as the consummation of holy love, begun now in sanctification and perfected then without end; refuse the reduction of the hope to “going to heaven” and teach the fuller new-creation content; hold the universal offer and the real seriousness of its refusal together; preach the hope as assured (the Spirit’s present witness is its pledge) and urgent (the age is coming); and let the parish’s last word, with the whole church’s, be the creed’s last word — Amen: it is sure.

Hymnody

The hymnody on this clause is the church’s richest — the repertoire of heaven, the new creation, and the consummation, sung at every funeral and every Easter and woven through the whole hymnal.

“Jerusalem the golden” (Bernard of Cluny, 12th c.; trans. J. M. Neale, 1851) is the great medieval hymn of the city of the age to come: Jerusalem the golden, / with milk and honey blest, / beneath thy contemplation / sink heart and voice oppressed.

“Love divine, all loves excelling” (Charles Wesley, 1747) is the Wesleyan hymn of the consummation as perfected love: Changed from glory into glory, / till in heaven we take our place, / till we cast our crowns before thee, / lost in wonder, love, and praise.

“Come, let us join our friends above” (Charles Wesley, 1759) confesses the one church divided only by the narrow stream of death, awaiting the consummation together.

“For all the saints” (W. W. How, 1864) moves through the communion of saints to the consummation: From earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s farthest coast, / through gates of pearl streams in the countless host, / singing to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. / Alleluia!

“Jerusalem, my happy home” (anon., 16th c.) and “O what their joy and their glory must be” (Peter Abelard, 12th c.; trans. Neale) are the classic hymns of the heavenly rest and the eternal Sabbath: O what their joy and their glory must be, / those endless Sabbaths the blessèd ones see!

“Lo! he comes with clouds descending” (Charles Wesley, 1758) ends in the consummated kingdom: Yea, amen! let all adore thee, / high on thine eternal throne; / Savior, take the power and glory; / claim the kingdom for thine own: / Alleluia! Alleluia! / Thou shalt reign, and thou alone.

“Guide me, O thou great Jehovah” (William Williams, 1745) ends at the Jordan crossing into the land of the age to come: When I tread the verge of Jordan, / bid my anxious fears subside; / death of death, and hell’s destruction, / land me safe on Canaan’s side.

“Ten thousand times ten thousand” (Henry Alford, 1867) confesses the consummation in the imagery of Revelation: Ten thousand times ten thousand / in sparkling raiment bright, / the armies of the ransomed saints / throng up the steeps of light.

“Sing with all the saints in glory” (W. J. Irons, 1873, paraphrasing 1 Cor. 15) moves from resurrection to the life of the age to come: Life eternal! heaven rejoices: / Jesus lives who once was dead.

“Soon and very soon” (Andraé Crouch, 1976) and “When we all get to heaven” (Eliza Hewitt, 1898) carry the clause in the American gospel and African-American traditions.

“Holy, holy, holy” and every hymn that ends in trinitarian doxology, the Gloria Patri (world without end. Amen. — in saecula saeculorum, “unto the ages of ages,” the very vocabulary of clause 23), and the eucharistic Sanctus (the church on earth joining the unending praise of the age to come) are all, in their close, performances of this clause and its Amen.

For the liturgical year: this clause is performed at every funeral and committal (its primary pastoral home, with clause 22), at Easter and the Easter Vigil, at All Saints, at Christ the King (the consummated kingdom), in Advent (the coming age), and in the Gloria Patri and Sanctus at every eucharist. The church confesses the life of the world to come every single time it sings “world without end. Amen.”

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

Three pastoral tasks attach to this final clause — and to the Amen that seals the whole creed.

The first is teaching the parish what they are actually hoping for. As with clause 22, the dominant folk-substitution is “going to heaven when you die” — and this clause is precisely where the larger, truer hope must be taught. The pastor’s task is to teach the two ages: this age, under sin and death; the age to come, God’s new creation, breaking in. The Christian does not finally hope to escape the world but to see it renewed; not for the soul’s flight to a timeless heaven but for heaven’s coming down, God dwelling with his people, the resurrection body in a redeemed creation, every tear wiped away, death itself destroyed. This is a larger hope than the one the culture sells, and it has immediate consequences the smaller hope lacks: if the present creation and the present body are destined for redemption and not the rubbish heap, then what we do now in the body and for the world matters eternally (1 Cor. 15:58). Recovering this clause re-dignifies the present life even as it relativizes it.

The second is teaching that the life of the world to come has already begun. The Wesleyan accent here is a gift to the whole church: the life of the age to come is not only future; it is inaugurated. The Spirit who is its pledge is given now; the love that is its substance is being perfected now; the eucharist is its anticipation now. The pastor’s task is to teach the parish that eternal life is not merely длительность — endless duration starting after death — but a quality of life, God’s own ζωή, that begins the moment one is joined to Christ and is consummated, not commenced, at the resurrection (John 17:3 — this is eternal life, that they know you; the present tense is deliberate). This protects the hope from being merely escapist and roots it in the present life of grace.

The third is teaching the Amen. The creed does not end with a clause; it ends with a word — Amen — and the parish should be taught what they are saying. Amen is not “the end” and not a wish (“may it be so” in the weak sense); it is the Hebrew word of certainty and firmness: “it is sure; we stand on this; so it is.” The whole creed has been a confession of things the parish cannot see — the eternal generation of the Son, the procession of the Spirit, the resurrection, the age to come — and it lands, with one voice, not on a question mark but on a word of rock. The pastoral task is to let the parish hear their own Amen: in saying it they are not concluding a recitation; they are ratifying it, staking their lives on it, joining the Amen of Christ himself (Rev. 3:14; 2 Cor. 1:20). Teach the parish to mean it.

For the preacher: this clause is the proper close of the eschatological preaching of Advent (the coming age), the Easter season (the resurrection life begun), All Saints and the funeral (the consummation), and Christ the King (the kingdom without end). It is also the natural occasion to preach the whole creed as a single arc — from the God before all ages to the life of the age to come, sealed with Amen — and to ask the congregation what it means that this is the faith into which they were baptized and on which they stake their dying and their rising. The homiletical tone the clause itself sets is neither speculative curiosity nor anxious uncertainty but assured hope: we do not know the furniture of the age to come, and Scripture is reticent by design; we know enough — God will be all in all, death will be no more, love will be perfected, and it is sure.

For the liturgist: the church confesses this clause far more often than at the recitation of the creed — every Gloria Patri (“world without end. Amen.” / “unto the ages of ages”), every Sanctus (joining the unending heavenly liturgy), every doxology, every blessing that ends “now and forever.” The liturgist’s task is to let these constant, almost invisible performances be heard for what they are: the church, in the middle of this age, repeatedly and corporately sealing its hope of the age to come with the firm word Amen. And at the funeral above all — the moment the culture most insistently offers its lesser consolations — the liturgy should let the creed’s true close be spoken plainly over the grave: we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

The Creed Complete

With this clause the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is finished, and the catholic confession is whole: from the one God, the Father almighty, before all ages; through the one Lord Jesus Christ, eternally begotten, incarnate, crucified, risen, ascended, and coming again; in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who spoke through the prophets; in the one holy catholic and apostolic Church, the one baptism, the resurrection of the dead — to the life of the world to come. The creed begins in the eternity before all things and ends in the eternity after this age, and the whole of the divine economy is held between them. Its last word is the church’s Amen.

Further Reading

• Genesis 1–2 — the creation the age to come will fulfill, not abolish
• Exodus 3:14 — the I AM who is the life of the age to come
• Psalm 16:11 — in your presence there is fullness of joy
• Psalm 17:15 — when I awake I shall be satisfied, beholding your likeness
• Psalm 73:23–26 — afterward you will receive me to glory
• Isaiah 25:6–9 — the feast on the mountain; death swallowed up
• Isaiah 35 — the redeemed creation
• Isaiah 60 — the city whose light is the Lord
• Isaiah 65:17–25; 66:22 — new heavens and a new earth
• Daniel 12:2–3 — those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky
• Matthew 5:8 — the pure in heart… shall see God
• Matthew 13:43 — the righteous will shine like the sun
• Matthew 19:28 — the palingenesia, the renewal of all things
• Matthew 22:1–14; 25:1–13 — the wedding feast
• Luke 20:34–38 — the children of the resurrection, the age to come
• John 14:1–3 — that where I am, there you may be also
• John 17:3, 24 — this is eternal life… that they may see my glory
• Romans 8:18–25 — the creation set free; the redemption of the body
• 1 Corinthians 2:9 — what no eye has seen, nor ear heard
• 1 Corinthians 13:12 — then we shall see face to face
• 1 Corinthians 15:20–28, 50–58 — God all in all; your labor not in vain
• 2 Corinthians 1:20 — in him every promise is “Yes” and “Amen”
• Ephesians 1:9–10, 21; 2:7 — the gathering up of all things; the ages to come
• Philippians 3:20–21 — our citizenship is in heaven
• Colossians 3:1–4 — when Christ who is your life appears
• Hebrews 4:9–11; 6:5; 11:10, 13–16; 12:22–28; 13:14 — the Sabbath rest; the city to come
• 1 John 3:2 — we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is
• 2 Peter 3:13 — new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness dwells
• Revelation 7:9–17; 21:1–22:5 — the new Jerusalem, the river and tree of life, the face of God
• Revelation 22:20 — Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
• Irenaeus, Against Heresies V.32–36
• Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection; Life of Moses (the doctrine of epektasis)
• Augustine, City of God XXII (esp. the final chapter); Confessions (the restless heart)
• Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua (the cosmic consummation)
• John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith IV
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II.1–5; Supplement 92–96; Summa Contra Gentiles III.48–63
• Dante Alighieri, Paradiso
• Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.25
• Heidelberg Catechism QQ. 57–58
• Westminster Shorter Catechism Q. 1; Westminster Confession Ch. 32–33
• Jonathan Edwards, Heaven Is a World of Love (Charity and Its Fruits, sermon 15)
• Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church (1784) (the eschatological articles)
• John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament on Revelation 21–22, 1 Corinthians 13, 1 John 3
• John Wesley, Standard Sermons, Sermon 15 (“The Great Assize”); Sermon 40 (“Christian Perfection”)
• Charles Wesley, “Love divine, all loves excelling”; “Come, let us join our friends above”
• Jonathan Edwards, The End for Which God Created the World
• Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (Harper & Row, 1967); The Coming of God (Fortress, 1996)
• Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? (Ignatius, 1988)
• N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (HarperOne, 2008)
• Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart, Hope Against Hope (Eerdmans, 1999)
• Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (St Vladimir’s, 1973)
• Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life (Catholic University of America, 1988)
• Anthony Thiselton, Life After Death (Eerdmans, 2012)