There is a lot of dualistic thinking about which supposes that 'the world' -- the universe of space, time and matter -- will come to a shuddering end and leave us in 'heaven', always assuming that 'we' are the right people, by whatever standard. This is simply unbiblical.

The NT picture is for heaven and earth to be joined together in a great act of renewal (Revelation 21-22), or for the new world to be born from the womb of the old (Romans 8), or for everything that destroys and defaces the present world to be defeated and overthrown, including death itself, which means not that the world will be destroyed but precisely that the forces of such destruction won't have the last word (1 Corinthians 15.20-28).

The great irony here is that a lot of muddled Christians are relentlessly opposed to Darwinism on the grounds that they believe in Genesis 1. Often the same people have no concern at all for what Genesis 1 insists on, namely that the space/time/matter creation is the good creation of the one good God -- who will, according to both Old and New Testaments, set creation right at the last by bringing together its two dimensions (heaven and earth) into one. That, after all, is what Jesus taught us to pray.

The idea that to get salvation you need to go to heaven -- rather than that salvation is a gift which comes from heaven to embrace earth -- results in misreadings of key texts. When 1 Peter says that salvation is 'kept in heaven for you', that doesn't mean you have to go to heaven to get it. It's like the mother who assures the child that the birthday present has already been bought: 'it's waiting for you in the cupboard'. That doesn't mean the child has to get into the cupboard to enjoy the present.

The question then mutates into: when will this new creation happen, and what will it look like? The answer to both is that we don't know, but that there are enough signposts pointing into the fog of the future for us to be sure -- not that we have a photographic vision of what it will look like, but -- that this vision of the future is indeed true.

But Christians also believe that this new creation, this sense of the present world reaching its goal and transforming into the new one where heaven and earth come together, has already happened in Jesus, and specifically in his death (where the powers that would destroy the old creation did their worst) and resurrection (which is the launching-pad of God's entire new creation).

From that point of view, to imagine, as many do, that the present world will simply come to an end, leaving a non-spatio-temporal heaven as the only place to be, are merely colluding precisely with the forces of death and decay that Jesus met, and defeated, on the cross.

New creation is the name of the game!