Conclusion: The republic of grace; or, the public ramifications of heaven

Summary

There we shall be still and see, see and love, love and praise. Behold what will be, in the end to which there will be no end!

Augustine, de civitate Dei

What if heaven really were our destiny? What would that mean for how we should live now, during the world? This is the question that this book has tried to answer. It is an intelligible question to us – to all humans – in part because of our intuition that the world as we have it, the world in its simple immanence, is not a fully satisfactory reality, an adequate habitation for our hopes. This intuition begins as a vague discontent, an apprehension that our ordinary experience of the world today is wrong, incomplete. It gains determinate positive content in Christianity's claim that our destiny is gratuitous, that there is life beyond death for us – indeed, that all creation is similarly gratuitous. Heaven, it seems, is not only our destiny, but the world's as well.

How should that conviction shape life during the world? It may seem in tension with this book's argument that Christianity has as its fundamental dynamic a movement towards deeper engagement with the neighbor and creation, as well as with God. But the conflict is more apparent than real. For this dynamic gains its particular determination by Christianity's radically eschatological orientation.