Thoughts from Vienna

I just arrived in Vienna and am sitting in the lobby of the hotel waiting for my grandparents. I am here from Thurs-Mon. with them, then I return to L’Abri and then they’ll come to Switzerland next Thursday. But we’ll spend a couple days here in Vienna and then we’ll go to Graz to meet up with a former Iranian exchange student of my grandmother’s sister (this is how my family works) who married another one of their exchange students who died tragically last year. But the woman, Vida, has a son who is performing this Sunday night in a choir in Graz. I don’t think it’s the Vienna Boys Choir, but I bet it will be good.

Before I left, a friend at L’Abri said that when she visited Vienna, she thought of it as a city that has forgotten how beautiful it is. I thought that an intriguing description, and in my few minutes here, I can see a bit of why. The buildings are old and magnificent and my taxi driver pointed out the Parliament, one of the big museums, a beautiful cathedral, Sigmund Freud’s house, the university, etc. But everything is covered with a thin layer of dirt, as if the whole city lived briefly under a grey cloud that has since passed but left behind its grey. I want to take a sponge to the buildings- it’s that type of dirt that could just be wiped off but covers everything, including the beautiful cathedral I saw that looks like it was transplanted from Gary, IN, for all the dirt on it. Perhaps the wet snow today doesn’t help the image. But nonetheless, it’s beautiful in a sad way, as if the prevalence of sex kink shops and the dirt reveal just how much the city has forgotten the glory that it once was.

At the Vienna train station, I was bending down once more to rummage through my bag for a lost paper and stood up to see a marble plaque. It described (this is my translation from my rough reading of the German, which by that I mean picking out the English looking words) how this train station bears the memory of the horrors of the Holocaust, as in April 1938, it was taken over by the Nazis and from then started shipping people to the Dachau concentration camp. As my train passed snowy field after field, it reminded me of images of the Holocaust, and you can almost feels its ghost here. It is so weird to be present in a place where once the evil of sin overwhelmed almost all men’s minds, as they forgot who they were as Children of God, and began playing God, determining who had the worth to live or not. When the enemy manages to get us to forget our true worth, who we really are, then destruction and genocide begins, destroying God’s good creation.

Passing silently past fields spotted with patches of trees and an occasional home, all covered in a thick blanket of snow, I can not imagine what it was like to live and die in the camps in this dank, grey, snowy cold. The plaque in the station furiously decries the horrors of the holocaust and calls for an end to war and genocide (I think in my translation) and calls for remembrance. How strange. A plaque so vehement and tragically beautiful, but only small on the walls. Perhaps there is a greater memorial in the station. But the makers of the plaque are determined to remind us of the horror, and as we walk gaily through the station, to remember those whose feet once stood where we walk, passing through on their way to die. The glory of Vienna was adulterated to be the way station to death. And then I remember all the genocide occurring right now, even as I write.

I’ve been studying how God as a Redeemer is going to redeem ALL things, not destroy them and start over. Just as He desires to redeem us, whom He declared good, so He desires to redeem all Creation (also declared “very good”) that suffered as a result of man’s sin and fall, including nature and cultures. We forget this in today’s Christianity because we’ve been so influenced by Gnostism (the spiritual is good and the physical is evil) which has no part in the Biblical description of God’s good creation. Before sin entered the world, He made us as physical beings. He intended for us to be that way. It is not the body that is sinful, but what sin is determined by what is in man’s heart, as Jesus continually pointed out to the Pharisees. How we dismiss nature and our physical world instead of seeing it as another realm through which God manifests His glory and which He entirely plans to redeem. I’ve gotten really passionate about correcting this misunderstanding in modern American Christianity at least, that has only been fed by things such as the Left Behind series. I believe the implications of a Biblical understanding of God as Redeemer renewing the heavens and earth to be as He intended it to be- to free it from the bonds of sin and suffering- are tremendous. The implications are not only for the way in which we live our lives and for the eternal destiny we hope for, but also for our understanding of the character of God. He does not cast off what is broken- He redeems it. He is not willing to give sin and evil the final victory. This gives me great hope when I see the brokenness of this world, knowing that this is not how it is meant to be, nor is God going to leave it this way. I am so grateful for His loving, gracious, redeeming heart. He will redeem all things that have lost their true glory, perhaps Vienna among them.

Wim Riekerk, the international director of L’Abri wrote a great book called The Future Great Planet Earth that discussed the Biblical concept of a Renewed Earth as our final destiny. To quote from his book:

“Therefore we could call Jesus Christ the ‘recreator’. The savior will not create a brand new world out of a vacuum. This is not a biblical picture. The biblical picture is: ‘We believe in a God (Psalm 121, 138) who is faithful to that which his hand began; who is faithful to the earth and his creation. The whole of the Old Testament emphasizes that God’s work, his redeeming power, is meant to renew this world, to cleanse it from sin, to take away all brokenness, to remove death, and to glorify it into a renewed world. This world will not just perish; it will be transformed. Let us not speak of the destruction of this world, but of its transformation as a result of God’s judgment, (cf. 1 Cor. 15).” Pp. 22-23

“We have narrowed the messaged of the Gospel. In the first place it is good news for man, because he has received a message of life in the midst of death: ‘My son here was dead, but now he is alive.’ But the power of the work of Christ is much wider than only the redemption of man. The whole creation will receive life out of death (Romans 8.22) and all the nations will be revived (Romans 11.25). This is what Paul had in mind when he said consciously, “in Christ we are a new creation.” Man redeemed through Christ draws a completely renewed world behind him… In the same way that the Fall of man led to the fall of creation, so the redemption of man will lead to the redemption of nature.” Pp. 27-28

I will be writing more about this hopefully in the coming weeks, including how recognizing the Biblical idea of continuity between this earth and the New Earth as our eternal destiny gives greater meaning to what we do here and now. Additionally, I hope to write on how incredible it is that God is going to dwell among His children- make His home among us- in this renewed Earth. I find that incredible! How gracious He is to His children that He will live among them and wipe every tear from their eyes, making all things new and beautiful!

On another note, I am planning on meeting up with Sarah Plyler tomorrow for lunch, for all of you Georgetown people. Since I’d graduated and she was abroad, who knows how long it would’ve been before I saw her again, but alas, we meet in Europe.

Only six weeks left here.