The Home of God (Theology for the Life of the World): A Brief Story of Everything

By Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz

We live in the midst of a crisis of home. It is evident in the massive uprooting and migration of millions across the globe, in the anxious nationalism awaiting immigrants in their destinations, in the unhoused populations in wealthy cities, in the fractured households of families, and in the worldwide destruction of habitats and international struggles for dominance. It is evident, perhaps more quietly but just as truly, in the aching sense that there is nowhere we truly belong.

In this moment, the Christian faith has been disappointingly inept in its response. We need a better witness to the God who created, loves, and reconciles this world, who comes to dwell among us.

This book tells the "story of everything" in which God creates the world as the home for humans and for God in communion with God's creatures. The authors render the story of creation, redemption, and consummation through the lens of God's homemaking work and show the theological fruit of telling the story this way. The result is a vision that can inspire creative Christian living in our various homes today in faithfulness to God's ongoing work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781493437122

Miroslav Volf

Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and founder and director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He was educated in his native Croatia, in the United States, and in Germany, and received his Ph.D. and postdoctoral degrees (with highest honors) from the University of Tübingen (Germany). He has written or edited more than 20 books and more than 100 scholarly articles. Among his most significant books are the present Exclusion and Embrace, winner of the Grawemeyer Prize for Religion and one of the 100 most important religious books of the 20th century according to Christianity Today; Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World (2016), and (with Matthew Croasmun) For the Life of the World: Theology that Makes a Difference (2019).

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"The Home of God is a powerful intervention into the troubled ways we think about life in places and spaces—national, civic, and ecclesial. Like two highly skilled physicians, Volf and McAnnally-Linz diagnose our sickness and offer a compelling theological vision for how to think about and create home. At heart, this is a beautiful theological reflection on the significance of home that steers away from both the idolatry and the apathy that afflict so much thinking about home. I doubt this book will ever go out of print."

—Willie James Jennings, Yale University

Most modern Christians imagine that the gospel is about God rescuing ‘souls’ from this world to go and live with him somewhere else. The Bible, however, insists that God wants to come and make his home with us—and that he has launched this project through Jesus and the Spirit. The present book, a shining example of systematic theologians actually reading the Bible instead of plundering it for texts to redeploy within other narratives, argues its case through detailed, suggestive exegesis of three central biblical texts (Exodus, John, and Revelation). The result is a vision that is neither Augustine’s spiritualized focus on God alone nor Hegel’s dangerous elision of God and the world but a rich vision of rescued and restored human beings living with joyful purpose within a gloriously renewed creation. A remarkable book!

—N. T. Wright, former Bishop of Durham; University of St. Andrews; Wycliffe Hall, Oxford

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Jesus Christ is God come to dwell among humans, to be, to speak, and to act for the life of the world (John 6:51). Taking its mandate from the character and mission of God, Christian theology’s task is to discern, articulate, and commend visions of flourishing life in light of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The Theology for the Life of the World series features texts that do just that.

Human life is diverse and multifaceted, and so will be the books in this series. Some will focus on one specific aspect of life. Others will elaborate expansive visions of human persons, social life, or the world in relation to God. All will share the conviction that theology is vital to exploring the character of true life in diverse settings and orienting us toward it. No task is greater than for each of us and all of us together to discern and pursue the flourishing of all in God’s creation. These books are meant as a contribution to that task.

© 2022 by Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz

Published by Brazos Press

a division of Baker Publishing Group

PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

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Ebook edition created 2022

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ISBN 978-1-4934-3712-2

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016

Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations labeled NASB are from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org

Scripture quotations labeled NEB are from the New English Bible, copyright © Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press 1961, 1970. All rights reserved.

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To Phil and Patty Love,

faithful friends and consummate hosts

Contents

Cover

Endorsements    i

Half Title Page    iii

Series Page    iv

Title Page    v

Copyright Page    vi

Dedication    vii

Abbreviations     xi

Prelude: The Arrows of Our Longing    1

Overture: A Story of Home    4

Part 1:  Exodus    29

1. Out of the House of Bondage    31

2. Life in God’s Household    51

Part 2:  The Word of Life    71

3. God Coming Home    73

4. Life and Light    99

Part 3:  The Spirit of Life    125

5. Coming Home    127

6. Life in the Household    146

Part 4:  The Fullness of Life    169

7. The Transition    171

8. Babylon    194

9. The New Jerusalem     205

Postlude: The Choice    229

Acknowledgments    236

Bibliography     238

Index     254

Cover Flaps    258

Back Cover    259

Abbreviations

Prelude

The Arrows of Our Longing

No keen observation is required to see that something is amiss in the world. More than something—many things. That much is obvious. So obvious, in fact, that it’s all too easy to find oneself thinking that things are especially, uniquely awry. That they have never been worse. Narratives of crisis and decline do offer their own sickly sort of comfort, but pseudo-romantic nostalgia is a Siren’s song. Many things have always been amiss, and we gain nothing from a quantitative accounting of the degrees of amiss-ness at various times and places. In an important sense, everything is awry and has been awry, the primordial and indestructible goodness of the creation notwithstanding. There is an abiding out-of-jointness to things, witnessed (but not exhausted) by the abiding disquietude of human hearts. The pressing need isn’t that we accurately divine an overall trend line in the course of history but that we carefully discern how things are in fact awry—the texture of our dislocation—here and now.

Beneath or alongside or mingled with the disquietude, perhaps you have felt an amorphous but insistent longing—a yearning for truer modes of belonging, for fulsome forms of resonance that do not depend for their depth or intensity on the thrill of novelty, fascination with the forbidden, or the gravity of violence. In a word, a longing for home.

Much of the awryness of our sociocultural contexts thwarts this longing for home—or twists it toward exclusionary visions of home, most virulently exemplified in nationalist and identitarian cultural and political projects. Technological change outpaces our ability to observe, much less understand, its effects. The planet, the only home we earthlings have, convulses from the wounds of decades of unrestrained industrial production and often-avaricious economic growth. Everything from zoning regulations and highway maps to polarized political systems conspires to create alienation, distance where there should be none.1 Increasingly, it’s sinking in just how many of our homes were built—are still being built—on places and histories of violence and injustice.

The sense arises, quite naturally and probably quite rightly, that our current ways of life not only are inadequate to the challenges before us but also actively hinder us from addressing them—that they themselves tend to pull us yet further astray. When it doesn’t lead to despair, this realization might provoke the resigned, ironic smile of someone stuck in a pit and possessed of no tool but a shovel. How can we trust not only our institutions but our intuitions and our longings when they have brought us here and when they have been formed in the image of here?

When Friedrich Nietzsche’s prophet Zarathustra, the Godless, first preaches to a village of comfortable, self-satisfied stand-ins for Nietzsche’s modern bourgeois contemporaries, he cries out in warning, Beware! The time approaches when human beings will no longer launch the arrow of their longing beyond the human, and the string of their bow will have forgotten how to whir!2 Few of us today are as satisfied as Nietzsche’s last human beings, who imagine they invented happiness. And some of us do purport to aim for something beyond the human. Many, however, have lost touch with any desire that stretches beyond the present form of the world, to borrow a phrase from Paul (1 Cor. 7:31). The most striking feature even of transhumanist fantasies is just how unimaginative and pedestrian they are. The disquietude of our here and now—its political challenges and ecological crises, its peculiar sorrows and existential unease—asks something more of us: a broader and less restrained imagination. It calls us to string our bows and together cast the arrows of our longing beyond the present form of the world. But cast them where? Toward what?

From Marx and Nietzsche on, many critics have decried Christian faith for being a poisonous dream, misdirecting our longing from our home in this world to an eternal, ghostly one. The main thesis of this book is that Christian faith actually offers a vision of a form of the world toward which we can joyfully direct our hopes and strivings. We argue that creation comes fully to itself when, indwelled by God, it becomes God’s home and creatures’ home in one. This book’s cover art—Makoto Fujimura’s Water Flames—is a beautiful and apt image of just such a vision: God’s presence, far from diminishing creation, bathes all of it in the glow of transformative, glorifying love and makes it into the home of God. This, we hope to show, is where God invites us to aim the arrows of our longing.

Discerning how to honor that longing and live faithfully today with our disquietude, limits, and possibilities will require more than words on a page, more than an exercise in thought. Spiritual and affective ascesis will be needed, improvisational ventures of action, embodied practices that form our desires and ways of being with each other and in our world. It will require, in the final analysis, more than any of us have at our disposal, a more radical renewal than we can bring about. It will require prayer and, above all, grace. Even so, thinking theologically can make its own modest but indispensable contribution to the journey homeward.

The Home of God is an example of a systematically unsystematic3 theology that draws on the deep wells of the Scriptures and hews close to lived life by seeking to hold in a single vision, with the help of the metaphor of home, our most personal desires and concerns and our embeddedness in broader cultural, political, ecological, and ontological relations and structures. As you read this book, we invite you to join us in taking up in your own way the question that we believe is the greatest human concern: What kinds of lives and what kind of world are worthy of creatures made to image the God of love?

divider

In several ways, the project this book represents spills over beyond its covers. For one, The Home of God belongs to a set of books (some already published and some as-yet-unwritten) that together cover the traditional territory of systematic theology more fully than this volume alone. The first in this set is Miroslav Volf and Matthew Croasmun’s For the Life of the World. We intend to write two subsequent volumes on (1) God and creation and (2) ethics and Christian life. Second, this four-volume systematics belongs to a looser collection of works we are calling Contributions to a Theology of Life. Apart from For the Life of the World, the other currently existing volume in this collection is Croasmun and Volf’s The Hunger for Home. Third, there is the Theology for the Life of the World series described in the front matter of this book. Fourth, and finally, we have gathered resources related to the book, as well as various elaborations, clarifications, and addenda that belong to the project but found no home in this book at https://faith.yale.edu/home-of-God.

1. Jennings, After Whiteness, 132.

2. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, First Part, Zarathustra’s Prologue, §5, p. 9. Nietzsche calls Zarathustra the Godless in On the Genealogy of Morality, 2.25.

3. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 45.

Overture

A Story of Home

Behold, the home of God is among humans! So declares the loud voice from the throne to John of Patmos as his series of visions reaches its closing crescendo (Rev. 21:3).1 Here—at the final consummation of the world in the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, at the descent of the New Jerusalem, when all things are made new and death is brought to nothing and mourning and crying and pain pass away (21:1–4)—we find the image of home; of residence, habitation, dwelling; of living somewhere as one who belongs.

Perhaps at first glance home seems like an odd image to appear at the point when God’s purposes with creation are fully realized. For imaginations shaped by modern ideals of the home as a private space insulated from the public world outside, home might sound too insular, too bourgeois, and too small to gather up the hopes of humanity and the earth.2 For those who have suffocated from the constraints of an overbearing home or who bear the trauma of a violent one, home can be an image more akin to the lake of fire that burns with sulfur (Rev. 19:20) than to the glorious New Jerusalem, redolent of the fruit of the tree of life, free from tears, and radiant with God’s glory. Many have reasons, often good ones, to be startled or upset by the sudden appearance of home in John’s final vision, while for others, home shines from childhood as an image of wholeness, deep resonance, and belonging.3 We often reach for the image of home to express attachment to and concern for the fate of the planet we all inhabit. Both the beauty of home and its frequent horrors together make it an especially good metaphor for God’s purposes with creation. Being in many ways a microcosm of the world, home can be an image of what the world is and could become—after its radical refashioning.

The Story of God’s Home-Making

The voice’s declaration that the home of God is among humans does not come out of the blue. It picks up a thread of home imagery that stretches to the very beginning of the Bible. Surveying the Christian canon from the perspective of Revelation 21:3, we find that the hope of God’s final homecoming works as a lens that pulls the whole into a particular focus. From this vantage point, the story of everything is the story of God coming to dwell in and with human beings and the world. It is the story of God making God’s home on earth, such that it becomes at last our true home as well. In broad strokes, that story goes as follows.

Creation, Tabernacle, and Temple

The story begins with creation, which itself has a beginning in the life of God, a point to which we return in chapter 3. Right from this beginning, an arc is established for the story. Its historical realizations and eschatological conclusion are in view, even if only subtly.

A Historical Project. Many interpreters have noted literary correspondences between Genesis 1:1–2:4, which tells of God’s creation of the world, and the later chapters of Exodus, which tell of Moses receiving the plan for and then building the tabernacle (Exod. 25–40).4 Just as God creates in six days, for example, Moses must wait six days on the mountain before God delivers the plan for the tabernacle. The refrain God made punctuates the creation story, while the instructions for the tabernacle are peppered with make me . . . and you shall make . . . (e.g., 25:8), and the report of the building of the tabernacle is hardly more than a string of sentences beginning with he made (36:8–39:30). And so on. These literary correspondences suggest a substantive parallel. On the one hand, the tabernacle is a microcosm, a miniature world.5 Importantly, it does not mirror the world as it actually exists, ambiguous and riddled with evil, but portrays the ideal world as God has brought it into being. On the other hand, the created world itself is a macro-temple, the palace of God.6 To envision the world as a temple is to say that God intends it to be a dwelling place or home of God.7 As Genesis presents it, God completes the world-temple on the sixth day with the declaration that it is very good (1:31) and then rests from the work of creation.

God does not, however, actually come to dwell in the world at the end of the first account of creation. The world is to be the home of God, but in the canonical narrative of Genesis and Exodus, a series of ruptures—from the primal couple’s lips meeting the fruit of the tree of knowledge before the time of the evening breeze when God walked in the garden (Gen. 3:6–8) to the apostasy of the golden calf (Exod. 32:1–6)—forestalls the fulfillment of that intention. And a series of new beginnings rekindles hope and prepares for its future realization. This pattern of rupture and new beginning underscores that God’s work of making the world into God’s and humans’ home is not a primal event but a project that both takes place in history and ultimately points beyond it.8

God coming to dwell with Israel in the tabernacle during Israel’s desert journey is a pivotal moment in this project. It marks the point at which God begins to realize, among God’s covenant people and in a concrete place in the world, an intention to ultimately gather in the whole of creation. While the tabernacle evokes creation, it does not represent either (1) a return to a once-upon-a-time ideal world, (2) the long-delayed completion of the created world, or (3) the final fulfillment of God’s intention to make God’s home in the world.9 Rather, in the tabernacle, God dwells among the covenant people as God will eventually dwell in fullness in Israel and the whole world.10

An Eschatological Hope. The prophets underscore the exemplary character of the tabernacle and subsequent temple. Facing social injustice, the threat of imperial conquest, the fall of the Northern Kingdom, and the eventual destruction of the Jerusalem temple and exile of the Judean elites, the prophets emphasize that God’s home-making work goes beyond the temple and its rites. On the one hand, even if God does not properly dwell anywhere else on earth except in the temple, God’s presence is not limited to the temple. Jeremiah, for example, prophecies, Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the LORD (23:24). And Ezekiel sees the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD in Babylonia (1:28). Passages like these accentuate the special blessing it is for God, who is greater than the heaven and the earth, to dwell in the temple. God does not have to reside there; God has chosen to do so. On the other hand, there are no guarantees that God will dwell in the temple. Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD,’ Jeremiah warns (7:4). Indeed, Ezekiel receives a terrible vision of the departure of God’s glory from the temple before the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem (Ezek. 10). The unrighteousness and unholiness of God’s people can make even the sanctuary unfit to be an abode of God.

Something more than the sanctuary is needed. For some of the prophets, the project of making the world into God’s home is not simply historical but also eschatological. They envision a transformation that makes possible God’s everlasting dwelling in the world, specifically in a renewed Jerusalem. In Zechariah, YHWH says, I will return to Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem; Jerusalem shall be called the faithful city, and the mountain of the Lord of hosts shall be called the holy mountain (8:3).11 A key condition for God’s coming to transform the world into God’s home is the people’s righteousness and holiness. Ezekiel’s vision is typical: "I will save them from all the apostasies into which they have fallen, and will cleanse them. Then they shall be my people, and I will be their God. . . . I will bless them and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary among them forevermore. My dwelling place shall be with them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people" (37:23, 26–27). In Jeremiah, too, the new heart that God will give the people and the law that God will write on their hearts (24:7; 31:33; 32:39) are preconditions for God’s dwelling with them.

Incarnation

The crucial factor in Christianity’s divergence from the nascent rabbinic Judaism of the first and second centuries CE is the claim that God’s work of eschatological transformation is centered on Jesus of Nazareth. In John’s Gospel—the key New Testament text in our telling of the story of God’s home-making—three major shifts occur in the nature of God’s coming and God’s presence.

The first concerns the conditions of God’s coming. Sanctification does not precede God’s coming. Rather, God’s coming effects it. In Jesus Christ, God the Word came to his own, but the members of God’s own household did not receive him (John 1:11 ESV). God comes to the unsanctified world, dwelling among humans not in domestic tranquility, so to speak, but in the world’s un-homed state. Christ’s coming is the key step in God’s mission of transforming the world—in sanctifying it—so it can be a genuine home of God.

The second and the third shifts concern the location of God’s presence. Describing God’s coming, John writes, And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth (John 1:14 ESV). The Word, who was with God before all beginnings and who was God—the Word through whom all things came into being (1:3) and in whom is the life and light of all living things (1:4)—that Word has come to live among humans by dwelling not in a temple but as one particular human being. John’s language explicitly evokes the tabernacle. In Jesus Christ, the Word dwelt, or tabernacled (eskēnōsen, from skēnē, meaning a tent or tabernacle), among us. Correspondingly, later in John, Jesus depicts himself as the perfected temple (2:13–21). As the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle upon its completion (Exod. 40:34), so in John, divine glory is visible in Jesus, for those who have eyes to see. But unlike in Exodus or anywhere else in the Hebrew Scriptures, in John, God indwells human flesh, and divine glory shines forth from the God-indwelled person. In Jesus Christ, God becomes incarnate. Inhabitatio has become incarnatio.12

Finally, there is a return to inhabitatio but with a crucial difference. God’s coming to dwell in Christ—a unique occurrence—leads to a new form of God’s presence in the world: God dwells not only among the people (Exod. 29:45–46) but also in them.13 Christ’s whole mission aimed at just that kind of indwelling—so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them (John 17:26). With Christ, the whole Trinity comes to dwell in each individual and in the people as a whole (14:23; 17:22–23).

New Jerusalem

While the incarnation is the decisive turning point of God’s home-making, there still remains the worldwide realization of the incarnation’s aim. And so we return to where we began: John of Patmos’s vision of the New Jerusalem. The last chapters of the last book of the Christian Bible complete the vision of God’s coming to indwell the creation. In line with the Hebrew Scriptures, they place persons and communities indwelled by God into a material world likewise indwelled by God. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. . . . And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. . . . And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the home of God is among humans. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them’ (Rev. 21:1–3).14

Like all cities, the New Jerusalem is both a social and a material space, but it looks unlike any other city. It is an immense cube, and, surprisingly for an ancient city, it does not have a temple. Symbolized in this strange image is a profound idea. As a cube, the city is the holy of holies, the site of God’s palpable presence in the tabernacle/temple. The city does not have a temple because it is itself the sacred space the temple was built to contain. Is there then no temple in which the New Jerusalem, the holy of holies, is placed? There is. The temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb (Rev. 21:22). God dwells in the new world, and the new world dwells in God.

Such is the story of everything read through the central image of the home of God. It is the story of the God who comes into the world while remaining uncontainably outside of it. The coming of God into the transformed world fulfills God’s primordial intention: the world becomes at the same time a home of God and the home of all creatures.

Alternatives to Home-Making

As far as we know, we are the first to offer a reading of the whole Bible—and a corresponding systematic theology—organized around the home of God as the goal of creation. In our brief telling of the story of everything, we have made the choice seem obvious. It is not. Important alternatives are available. To suggest otherwise would be the height of hubris, as though a good nineteen hundred years after the last biblical writings were composed we had finally found the one hermeneutical key to the whole! We will briefly name three particularly compelling alternatives and give some reasons for preferring the metaphor of the home of God. The few pages here in which we describe the comparative advantages of our proposal do not amount to its justification, let alone a decisive argument against the competitors. Its main justification is this book as a whole and two more that will follow it.15 For only by actually telling the story guided by the metaphor of home can we hope to show the extent to which it can illuminate the canonical text of the Bible and speak to important contemporary challenges.

Home versus Temple

Given the centrality of the tabernacle and temple in our sketch of the story of everything, why not simply read the story through the lens of the temple, as Daniela Augustine has recently done? She, too, notes the mutual resonances between the creation narrative and the tabernacle and concludes that creation is a divinely built temple and the temple a sacral microcosm depicting the divine cathedral of the cosmos.16 The purpose of creation is its transfiguration into a temple of God.17 In the story that runs from protological to eschatological temple, the human appears as homo adorans (the worshiping human) and priest of the whole creation.

It is noteworthy, however, that in the garden of the original creation and in the New Jerusalem of the new creation there is no temple—no bounded sacral space for specifically liturgical activities. Garden and New Jerusalem are both forms of the world. Naming humans as priests in such a setting subsumes all other human activities—familial, political, economic, artistic—under worship. But in the description of the New Jerusalem, the site of God’s achieved purpose, the priestly role does not figure especially prominently. The citizens, it seems, no more fulfill a sacerdotal function through ruling than they fulfill their royal function through praising God. They are royals and priests, all of them (Rev. 5:10; 20:6).

More significantly, Revelation does not describe creation as the temple. The New Jerusalem is the holy of holies, and God is the temple in which it is located. Consequently, God is not mainly an external object of worship, whether that worship happens through specific liturgical acts or through ordinary activities. Instead, God is mainly the indwelling presence in all and each, the source of all liveliness, holiness, and agency. People live and act not so much toward God as with God (Rev. 21:3). Using home for God’s and people’s joint material and social space expresses God’s presence and agency in the full range of people’s lives better than temple does.

Home versus Kingdom

In the Hebrew Scriptures, running parallel with the priestly strand of the story (divine presence, temple, priests, worshipers) is a kingly strand (divine ruler, sphere of authority, terrestrial rulers, subjects). The New Testament writers picked up the kingly strand, centered it on Jesus Christ, and wove it through all the way to the end, just as they did with the priestly strand. With the rediscovery of the eschatological and political dimensions of the Christian faith at the beginning of the last century, the kingdom of God emerged as a prominent image around which to organize theological rearticulations of the Christian faith. Why not, then, a kingdom-focused story of everything?

Most of the significant aspects of the biblical use of kingdom are contained in the metaphor of home. Like kingdom, home is a social and material space marked by certain kinds of boundaries that provide both identity and security. Like kingdom, home requires a certain kind of order and mediates the assignment of responsibilities and the distribution of benefits. But kingdom is a political metaphor and is ill-suited to express a Christian vision of some important aspects of personal and social lives. That’s partly because not all of life is politics and partly because the politics evoked by the metaphor of kingdom runs counter to the politics of the New Jerusalem. God does not just rule over people but is present among them, indeed in each person. People therefore do not merely obey God; God lives in them, bringing them into their human fullness. In the New Jerusalem, they are all royalty who rule with God—over nobody. The life of the city is not regulated by mere rules—not even life-preserving and life-enhancing rules. All are members of a community governed by internalized love, each willing to attune their behavior to others’ needs, and all together inhabiting a space of common belonging (see chap. 9).

A clear biblical reminder that politics is not all of life is the joining of the priestly and kingly metaphors. God is the sacred presence dwelling in the temple, and the temple is at the same time a palace from which God rules. Analogously, God promises to make the house of Jacob into a priestly kingdom (Exod. 19:6). Revelation picks up this conjunction and promises that the eschatological community will be a kingdom and priests serving our God (Rev. 5:10; cf. 20:6). Home is capacious enough to contain priestly and royal ways of telling the biblical story18—and beyond that to place them in a larger unity of life that reaches from the stirrings of a person’s desire to world-encompassing patterns of relating.19

God as Home

The most significant and prevalent alternative to seeing creation as God’s home is seeing God as the home of human beings. The difference here is not about the appropriate metaphor for creatures in their state of ultimate fulfillment. Instead, it is about whether human beings find their ultimate end in enjoying each other (and the world) as creatures along with enjoying God or in enjoying God alone. Some of the most influential figures in Christian theology have said that God alone is humans’ ultimate goal.

The young Augustine is a good example. Only the highest good that suffers no lack could, he believed, satisfy human longing. This is nothing other than God.20 If God alone is the highest good, then God alone is humans’ true final end. He writes, God is for us the sum of all goods. God is for us the highest good. We must not remain with less than that nor seek anything beyond that. For the first is dangerous, and the second is non-existent.21 Even years later, after gaining increased appreciation for the bodily and social character of human beings, Augustine has a hard time giving up his God alone vision of human fulfillment. In The City of God, neighbors are enjoyed in God, which winds up amounting to enjoyment of God and God alone in and through creatures.22 He never quite gets to a God and creatures vision of human fulfillment.

The strength of the God alone view is its focus on the singular and supreme importance of God. Its weakness is that it has to disregard the overwhelmingly worldly character of biblical eschatological hopes.23 The home of God metaphor allows us to hold on to both the centrality of God and the worldly character of ultimate fulfillment. Every good comes from God, creatures’ ultimate fulfillment most of all. And for every good, humans owe God gratitude and praise. Since God is the ultimate Good, humans ought to love God above all things and for God’s own sake. But to love God is to love the world that God loves—and to love it, as we will argue (leaning on Augustine), with the love with which God loves it and which God is (see chap. 6). If this idea appears startlingly worldly, that’s because the holy and transcendent God is surprisingly worldly—desiring to make a home and be at home in the beloved creation.

Why Home?

We have sketched a Christian story of everything and explained why we think this story is best told with home as its guiding