A World Transformed, Not Abolished

Chapter TWO LIKE BIRDS HOVERING OVERHEAD: THE FAITHFULNESS OF THE GOD OF ISRAEL
(iv) A World Transformed, Not Abolished

What then was the hope of a first-century Pharisee? One obvious answer might be, ‘salvation’. But what might ‘salvation’ actually mean?
A good deal of the secondary literature on the hope of second-Temple Jews has assumed that ultimate salvation is emphatically otherworldly. Often this is simply taken for granted. You don’t look at your spectacles until looking through them becomes difficult. This assumed otherworldly salvation, ‘going to heaven when you die’, has then contextualized and conditioned the ways in which scholars and preachers alike have handled the questions which swirl around ‘salvation’: questions, not least, of justification, the law, ‘works’, ‘grace’, and so on. But the second-Temple texts themselves tell strongly against an ‘otherworldly’ salvation; against (that is) the notion that the ultimate aim of humans in general and Jews in particular was the escape of saved souls from their present embodiment and indeed from space, time and matter altogether. In the texts we have studied, and in particular in the continuous story we have been examining, the aim and goal does not have to do with the abolition of the universe of space, time and matter, or the escape of humans from such a wreckage, but with its consummation.349...