Those Who Remain

Introducing "The New Jerusalem."

There’s a Christian vision of the apocalypse in which God sweeps the faithful up into heavenly rapture, while unbelievers remain forlorn and bereft on the earth below. It’s a powerful image, well known from popular stories like the Left Behind novels and modern hymns like “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” Even outside the Christian tradition, T.V. shows like The Leftovers and the madcap satire This is the End have worked out versions of the same idea: victory and salvation are up there, in airy realms beyond the mire of time and space.

But there’s another interpretation of scripture that portrays the end times differently. What if, when Judgement Day begins, it’s the ones who remain on earth who are blessed? In fact, this scenario may be written into the Greek of the Gospel. Where English translators print “left behind,” Matthew has written aphietai: it means “released,” or even “forgiven.” So maybe the man taken from the field is not a role model but a cautionary tale. Maybe the final drama of salvation will take place not up in the air, but down here on the ground.

“The book of Revelation ends, not with souls going up to heaven, but with the New Jerusalem coming down to earth, so that ‘the dwelling of God is with humans,’” writes theologian N.T. Wright. It may be appealing to imagine slipping free of our bodies and sailing away into a great beyond of pure spirit. But perhaps in the end it will be this world—this flesh, this human life we live—that is redeemed.

Earlier in the same gospel, Jesus insists that “no one knows the day or the hour” when these things will happen—“not the angels in heaven, nor even the son” (emphasis added). As a rule, we find it wise to take Jesus at his word. Nothing we have to say here should suggest that we’re in possession of privileged information about the apocalyptic schedule. All the same, we do sense that humanity is approaching a singular crossroads—a moment in the near future when we will all be forced to choose between two irreconcilable ways forward.

At the dawn of this era—the era of disenchantment and secularization—perceptive observers made certain prophecies. Two of them have already come to pass. One is Friedrich Nietzsche’s prediction that with the eclipse of transcendent faith, mankind would lose its commitment to God-given absolutes. Desperate to rebuild the framework of society, future generations would hope for exceptional men to become givers of a new law beyond good and evil. 

The other prophecy is spoken by Ivan, the tortured philosopher in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov: “for every individual…who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and…egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognized as the inevitable, the most rational, even honorable outcome of his position.” 

Ivan might have looked with jaundiced recognition on a society that holds civilization itself responsible for the crimes of murderers and rapists; that blesses as a human right the yearly execution of unborn babies in the tens of millions; and that carves the healthy bodies of children into sterile caricatures of the opposite sex in the name of so-called “liberation.”

Now, as humanity’s belief in God’s moral law reaches the vanishing point behind him, a third and final prophecy looms on the horizon ahead, waiting to be fulfilled. The French postmodernist Michel Foucault believed that all the “merely” human values—categories and morals that arise from the natural heart of man—would one day fade into irrelevancy. Man himself would then be erased “like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.” 

What then seemed extreme now seems plausible: we may be facing the end of man.

Many are already eager to reach this point of no return. Some hope to find salvation in the superior functioning of technology. Not long from now, they tell us, science will split open the prison walls of our brains and bodies; our outdated wetware will be perfected by machine enhancement. Powerful officials in the United States government have already broadcast their intention “to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers.” 

In this glittering chrome-plated future, it’s imagined, the elite will morph into a hybrid form of cyborg life. Those who opt out will remain unenhanced, lumbering behind like orphaned chimps. Or perhaps we will become obsolete altogether, as androids learn to do humanity better than humans ever could. “We’re loath to admit it,” writes Elise Bohan in Future Superhuman, “but the world is not set up for ape-brained meatsacks anymore.”

Others simply view our species as a stain upon the earth. They can’t imagine why humanity should survive in any form to pollute and plague the beauty of nature. Anti-natalists and environmental catastrophists have taken the logic of Nietzsche and Foucault to its natural conclusion: if man is an accident, belched out from the random churning of a heartless evolutionary mechanism, why is his existence special? Why shouldn’t he simply return to the void from which he came? 

Repellent as these attitudes are, they represent internally consistent and ruthlessly impassioned visions of humanity’s end. The people who want to see mankind transformed beyond recognition or erased altogether know exactly what they believe and how they want to achieve their goals. The logic of their premises has led them inexorably to seek the obliteration of the human race—to choose death over life. And for the first time in history, it looks as if the power and technology to make their vision possible is coming into existence. 

Why not use it? If every category of truth and beauty is merely human, and all things human are random accidents of nature, why is any of it worth saving? Everything the anti-humanists believe makes perfect sense, if there is no God.

We believe there is.

This changes everything. A created world is one imbued with the spirit of its creator. It speaks the language of his purposes. Its character and meaning are accessible to the moral heart. This is neither fantastic nor theoretical: this is the world we know; in fact, no other world makes sense or could make sense. And the world we live in does make sense. We are perfectly capable of perceiving and discerning the physical logic of material things. Why should we trust our scientific knowledge and yet doubt our insights into things of the spirit? Our moral sensibilities may sometimes be wrong. But the very fact they can be wrong means they can be right as well. If it were not so, argument and indeed even language would be pointless. Since we know they are not pointless, the mind of man cannot truly be an accident.

Everyone alive grasps this at his core. We know there’s such a thing as truth; we know there’s such a thing as goodness; we know there’s such a thing as beauty. The world we experience is shot through with these qualities; like light piercing a veil, they speak to us of a source beyond the world we see. We can think of no reason to allow mere theories to override the wisdom of our experience. We will not be talked out of what we know by the lovers of death.

We are not particularly concerned with theological disputes. We have no interest in undoing the advances of science or in rewinding the past 500 years of history. We indulge in no wishful thinking about resetting society to some imagined point before “things went wrong.” What we are looking for is a vision of a truly human future to match the rising visions of humanity’s end—a hope for our deliverance that surpasses the plans for our destruction in logic, clarity, and determination. Others may stretch out their hands to be lifted up into that darkness after man and so enter a rapture of nothingness. As for us, we want to see what the world might look like for those who remain. 

We are two men—a father and son, one a storyteller, the other a scholar. For as long as we’ve been able to speak together, we have been speaking about these things. In the time that’s left to us, we would like to share our remaining conversations. Informed by tradition, led by faith, inspired by beauty, we are seeking the trailhead of the road to the New Jerusalem. 

This is an invitation to all who believe, like us, that it can be found.

Every month, one or the other of us will post an essay about the ongoing assault on humanity. This first manifesto is a joint effort; from now on we will take turns laying out the case for human life against the corrosive forces of anti-humanism. But these essays will only be the beginning. For the rest of the month, Monday through Thursday, we will write daily letters back and forth to one another in which we wrestle with the problems we’ve raised, discussing works of art, news events, and modern cultural products that help inform the conversation. 

On Fridays, for those who would like to support the publication financially, we’ll highlight one work of literature, film, or visual art from the Western canon that we think speaks profoundly to the human condition. We’ll keep a list for those that might find it helpful as a resource. By the end of a year, we hope we’ll have made some headway toward charting out an alternative path toward life in the 21st century and beyond. 

It’s been our joy and blessing that the natural relationship between us has grown into an intellectual and spiritual collaboration as well. Since that kind of organic communion is one hallmark of humanity worth saving, we think it’s right to make it a core part of what we offer here. Over the years, we’ve grown to realize that our distinct perspectives and disciplines—artistic and philosophical, emotional and rational—complement one another best in dialogue. These conversations have shaped us both profoundly. We hope you’ll benefit from joining in.