The idea that “the end of the world” is the consummation of a divine plan for the earth is due to a bad translation in the King James Version of the Bible in Matthew 13:39,49 & 24:3,20. The text there speaks of the “completion of the age” (or eon). It is not about the end of the world but about the end of this age/eon/period/realm of evil and injustice, war and violence.

In Jewish and Christian theology the scholarly name for that faith is eschatology and it is based on these three beliefs:

First, our world was created by a God who is just and who stamped every part of it as “good” and the whole as “very good’ In Genesis 1. That creation was crowned with Sabbath-Justice which insists—from Sabbath Day through Sabbath Year to Sabbath Jubilee—that all get a fair and equitable share of a world not our own. (We humans, by the way, are not the crown of creation. We are the work of a late Friday afternoon and nobody’s best work gets done on a late Friday afternoon.)

Second, and on the other hand, our world is patently ridden with injustice and violence. In Genesis 1-11, that great parabolic overture to the Christian Bible, for example, our first accomplishment outside Eden in Genesis 4 is fratricidal murder and escalatory violence—from the individual murder of Abel to the tribal vengeance of Lamech.

Third, granted that dissonance between faith and experience, eschatological faith believes that God will not destroy but transfigure, not abolish but transform this world from unjust violence to just non-violence. It did not announce an evacuation from an abandoned earth to an inhabited heaven. It did not promise the end of the world but the end of evil. Here below. Upon this earth. And apocalyptic eschatology added: Soon, Any-Day-Now, In-Our-Own-Lifetime. Its mantra was: God will overcome, someday, and soon.

Jesus, Paul, and earliest Christianity specified that general faith with this astounding proclamation. The end of evil, they said, that is, the awaited eschatological or Messianic Age, is not something future but something already present. We are waiting for God to act, they said, but God is waiting for us to cooperate. The Kingdom of God, that is, the Great Divine Cleanup of the world, is a collaborative eschaton, an interactive process—not God without us and not us without God. Or, as it was said of old: God without us will not, we without God cannot. The program is already present, they said, let’s all get with it.

So, no, the biblical God will never annul creation by destroying the earth. The real danger is that we will destroy it all by ourselves. The sad and terrible truth is that, while we cannot transfigure the earth to justice and non-violence without divine empowerment, we can certainly destroy it without any such transcendental assistance.