Iain Atkinson

I’ve been seeing the world as the new Jerusalem. My boy plays with plastic pieces of a car’s track in the bath, it’s bliss. Austin Street is perfectly aligned under a blue sky, it’s amazing. I see it as the New Jerusalem, and my inner body delights.

I’ve been running Wittgenstein’s “duck-rabbit” thoughts against my seeing the world “as” the New Jerusalem. I’ve been asking on all our behalfs what it means to see the world thus, or what it could mean for the world to be thus. And thus have I answered myself:

The New Jerusalem is the newly existing objective condition that everyone is in a position to realize that everyone is everyone.

That historically definitive idea of a descending city is now the historically definitive downfall of the idea of the city. That idea of God being light for a new city is now God as light as this idea of a descending city destroying cities.

May I not sound unduly agrarian, for human disillusionment with cities will renew cities. Why, since Nimrod, have human being constructed cities? Places of such filth and congestion and noise and stress? Are they not anxious to earn a wage and depend on each other? Do they not idolize figures within the cities as their saviours and so submit themselves in exploitation to them? Christ’s accomplishment is great iconoclasm, the end of actual idolization of human beings by human beings. Christ’s accomplishment is equivalently deification, his revelation in each of us of himself, and the standing ability of all human beings to see God in every other human being. In this idea, this standing objective condition, God is a city.

God is that idea of the perfect interrelationship of human beings. Take nothing from the most theistic interpretations and dreams and understandings: God is a heaven in which the saints who have passed from earth now live. God is that specific city in which those who have died in Christ enjoy bliss with him. But that city is also an idea as vague as our idea of God, as open as that idea, as creative as that idea, and it is creating new cities on earth. Revelation 21 is certainly happening today.

May our cities be renewed. Let gardens grow, let noise be quietened, let buildings glisten and glow, let walls be as jasper and glass, and may You my Lord be a light in which all is seen, and a tree whose fruit is given in season, and whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.