Article: Living Between the Now and the Not Yet. August 1, 2008
Richard John Neuhaus says "The New Testament letter to the Hebrews dramatically portrays the continuing struggle of the saints who are far from home:
They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword; they were destitute, afflicted, ill-treated—of whom the world was not worthy—wandering over deserts and mountains and in dens and caves of the earth. And all these, though well attested by their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had foreseen something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect . . . But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven, and to a judge who is God of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel . . . For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come. (Heb. 11–13)
Note the tension. We might call it the dialectic. Some see it as a contradiction. On the one hand, we have come to Mount Zion, the New Jerusalem. On the other, we have here no lasting city but seek the city that is to come. This is frequently described as the “now” and “not yet” of Christian existence. Christians live “between the times”—meaning between the time of Christ’s resurrection victory and the time of its cosmic fulfillment in the coming of the promised Kingdom. All time is time toward home, time toward our true home in the New Jerusalem.
In this understanding, it is not a matter of “balancing” the other-worldly against the this-worldly, or the this-worldly against the other-worldly. Each world penetrates the other. The present is, so to speak, pregnant with the future to which the future gives birth. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” declares the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Charged as in electrically charged; the present is given new urgency, raised to a new level of intensity, because it is riddled through and through with a promised future."
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1132
