The Point of it All: New Jerusalem and Teleology
Stream of consciousness, un-proofread update. Here we go...
Ending versus Meaning
One of the main ideas I've been trying to develop circles around my attempt to make sense of a certain fact that is becoming more and more apparent to me as my research proceeds.
And that's this: The New Jerusalem, both in John's thinking when he writes Revelation, and in the late antique reception of it, is a condensed symbol that stands not principally for the end of everything but of the point of everything--a symbol that somehow makes sense of everything.
Yes, early Christian authors and intellectuals were concerned about what some modern Christians like to talk about as "the end times."
But, unlike many modern Christians, most early Christian authors didn't really get that distracted by it. They were far less interested in the ending of everything than they were in the meaning or even the purpose of everything.
In fact, their talk about the end of the world is almost always couched in a larger understanding of "the point of the world."
Early authors--from Irenaeus to Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus, Tertullian, Origen, Methodius, Augustine, the anonymous Syriac commentator on Revelation, Oecumenius, Andrew of Caesarea, etc.--sometimes do talk about eschatology in the sense of "the cool stuff that happens at the end of the world." But that's just a tiny aspect of their work.
A Single Golden Chain
What they're really, really interested in the big plot, or story arc, that stretches from creation, including the creation of humans in God's image and likeness (Gen. 1:26), to what Origen and others call "the consummation of all things" and humans' central place in it.
In fact, the basic Christian idea is that God created the universe and in Christ became a man so that humans, in Christ, could become God. I've done a lot of reading, and this is pretty much the "single golden chain of salvation" that links all Christian thinking in pre-modernity. (The idea of the single golden chain comes from Gregory Nazianzen's Oration 31, section 28 in the Popular Patristics translation). In fact, a few of my historian and theologian colleagues and I have been on the hunt for Christian thinkers in the first thousand years of Christian history who deny the idea of deification or theosis. And guess what, we haven't found anything yet.*
Teleology—A Quick and Painless Introduction
A central idea that's emerging is that instead of trying to understand the New Jerusalem and other so-called apocalyptic topics in terms of eschatology (the study of the "last things"), we should instead try to dial into the wavelength that early authors were on--namely, that of teleology.
Okay, stay with me now for 30 seconds...
Teleology is "the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve" or "the doctrine of design and purpose in the material world" (definitions from Oxford Languages). It comes from the Greek word telos, which means something like "end," "aim," or "goal." Aristotle in his Physics and Metaphysics speaks about telos as being an inherent property of everything. Just as everything is made out of something (it's material cause), is made by something (it's efficient cause), and has its own shape or form (its formal cause), everything has its own purpose, its own telos, its own final cause--"that for the sake of which a thing is made/done" (Physics II.3, 194b–195a). In other words, everything has a purpose which is as fundamental to itself as its material, shape, or source of being.
The Shape of Classic Christian Teaching
The idea that everything, including the universe, which is the biggest thing of all, has a final cause guided virtually all of the thought world of which early Christianity partook and was a part.** The great early Christian writers simply thought in terms of purpose, goal, and aim, and not just for practical reasons, but because they believed it was hard-wired into everything that God had created ex nihilo--out of nothing.
This is pretty apparent in the New Testament--the canonical collection of the founding texts of Christianity. Ephesians 1:5 and 1:11, for instance, speak of the purpose of God's will--the purpose according to which he made all things and all things happen.
Revelation 4:11 speaks of God's will as the cause of all things.
Romans 8:28 relates how every single little thing in the universe operates toward a singular end.
The end, stated simply (again in the language of Rom. 8:28), is the full conformity of humans to the image of God and their glorification with God's own glory.
As I argue in one of my papers (the one I delivered at the North American Patristics Society [NAPS] 2025 annual meeting in Chicago a couple months ago), this precise idea of purpose or direction suffuses virtually all early Christian writing, from the beginning for hundreds of years. All things exist because of God's will, and the purpose of God's will is that humans, who bear his image and likeness, would be fully conformed to him in every way possible.
New Jerusalem and Telos
What's fascinating is this: John conceives of the New Jerusalem in the exact same terms. Having in a sense begun with the idea that all things were created because of God's will (4:11), he concludes with human beings becoming God's sons, bearing God's name, and, in the end, seeing the God in whom they have so deeply participated (Rev. 21:7; 22:3-5). This is precisely the line of thought that I trace through the first 200 or so years of reception in my first book, City of Gods (Brill, 2025).
But while I'd noticed this in the early interpretations of Revelation's New Jerusalem, I'd never really stopped to consider in close detail why the early Christian writers on the topic were so unanimous on the topic. And so after a series of invitations to write on Revelation (as opposed to merely its reception), I had opportunity to look in detail into the roots of this thought in Revelation itself, esp. in its New Jerusalem vision in chs. 21-22.
I've been very cautious of anachronistically reading back into Revelation from later interpretations of it and finding things that aren't there. But after writing 3-4 papers in the last half year or so that dig into this in various ways, I'm convinced that a large part of this has to do with the fact that there is broad unanimity in early Christian thought about (1) the telos or purpose of all things (humans becoming divine for God's glory), and consequently (2) the way they use language, signs, and symbols to convey that underlying telos.
The New Jerusalem of Revelation, it's turning out, is one of those condensed symbols that conveys the entirety, and the end point, and the fulfillment over time, of that telos. The reason early Christian writers thought of the New Jerusalem in this way is because John, I'm now convinced, saw it that way, and made it quite clear that he did so.
Poetically Speaking
Of course, early Christians used many condensed symbols--safe harbor, divine filiation, the vision of God, blessedness, sanctity, heaven, nuptial union with Christ, paradise, etc.--to talk about this end. But John's New Jerusalem (and, e.g., the "Jerusalem above" and "heavenly Jerusalem" of Gal. 4:27 and Heb. 12:22 respectively) is one of the more vivid among them. And certainly it's been one that has had one of the more picturesque afterlives and purchase in post-late-antique culture, including within modernity.
Maybe that's why I'm so interested in teasing out the reception of this amazing biblical image. It just keeps coming back and keeps collapsing within itself the entirety of the Old Testament and New Testament economies. It's the perfect symbol and contains everything that went before.
Early Christians weren't for the most part eschatology-obsessed kooks. Rather, they were people who adhered to a very strong and clear vision of the nature and purpose of the universe, and of our place in it, and sought to employ every means at their call--especially literary--to give expression to it.
Such fascinating stuff I get to read and write. I'll continue to post about individual conferences and articles as time goes along, but this is one of the main orienting ideas that's emerging as I put pen to paper.
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* If you have evidence to the contrary, PLEASE send it to me.
** God is not a bigger thing, because God isn't a thing at all--in fact, to express this in Aristotelian terms, God is the final cause (Metaphysics V.2, 1013a33–1013b6; Metaphysics XII.7, 1072b).
Image: Cover art for Telos, Zedd's 2024 album.
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