Love is a corpse . . .

From Larry Norman's 1973 So Long Ago The Garden, his prescient "Nightmare Number 71" (1971 was the last year the total fertility rate in the US exceeded the replacement rate, except for 2006 and 2007):

Last night i had that same old dream it rocked me in my sleep

And left me the impression that the sandman plays for keeps


I dreamed i was in concert in the middle of the clouds


John wayne and billy graham were giving breath mints to the crowds

I fell through a hole in heaven i left the stage for good


And when i landed on the earth i was back in hollywood



The california earthquake it tore the land in half

While san andreas cleared her throat i heard tsunami laugh

The ground began to tremble the land began to sway

And people in the other states they were glad they'd moved away


But suddenly california just floated in the breeze

While every state that wasn't sank down into the seas

And soon i saw atlantis rumble and rise high

And the great egg of euphrates came down out of the sky


And out stepped shirley temple with guy kippee who was dead


And that communist bill robinson whom shirley called black red


They have a marionette of harpo marx they said it was an inside joke

But when i honked his horn he came alive and these were the words he spoke



With the continents adrift and the sun about to shift

Will the ice caps drown us all or will we burn


We've polluted what we own will we reap what we have sown?


Are we headed for the end or can we turn?

We've paved the forests killed the streams

Burned the bridges to our dreams

The earth is bursting at the seams


And in pain of childbirth screams


As it gives life to what seems

To either be an age that gleams


Or simply lays there dying


If this goes on will life survive how can it


Out of the grave oh who will save our planet?

I said i'm pleased to meet you i always thought you were a scream

He said have you ever thought of having helen keller in your dreams

I said errol flynn dropped by but he tried to steal my girl


Then she ran off with ronald colman said something about a new world

Now i'm stuck with my own cooking hey i'm lonely can't you see


Well he grabbed my leg and said exactly eighty nine words to me

Count them

: let the proud but dying nation kiss the last generation


It's the year of the pill, age of the gland

We have landed on the moon but we'll clutter that up soon


Our sense of freedom's gotten out of hand


We kill our children swap our wives


We've learned to greet a man with knives


We swallow pills in fours and fives

Our cities look like crumbling hives

Man does not live he just survives

We sleep till he arrives


Love is a corpse we sit and watch it harden


We left it oh so long ago the garden

The strings snapped briskly then went slack the marionette lay dead

While hoover played with the motorcade the body slumped and bled

The man who held the camera disappeared into the crowd


I said the hope of youth, fictitious truth, lays covered in a shroud


Then up walked elmo lincoln and he said i beg your pardon


But we left it oh so long ago, the garden

Jesus predicted an imminently coming kingdom which brings catastrophic death, not N. T. Wright's Christendom

gathering tares to be burned

N. T. Wright, here:

Here is the central element: the point about God’s authority is that the whole Bible is about God establishing his kingdom on earth as in heaven, completing (in other words) the project begun but aborted in Genesis 1–3. This is the big story that we must learn how to tell. It isn’t just about how to get saved, with some cosmology bolted onto the side. This is an organic story about God and the world.  God’s authority is exercised not to give his people lots of true information, not even true information about how they get saved (though that comes en route). God’s authority, vested in Jesus the Messiah, is about God reclaiming his proper lordship over all creation. And the way God planned to rule over his creation from the start was through obedient humanity. The Bible’s witness to Jesus declares that he, the obedient Man, has done this. But the Bible is then the God-given equipment through which the followers of Jesus are themselves equipped to be obedient stewards, the royal priesthood, bringing that saving rule of God in Christ to the world.

Jesus in Luke 13.1ff.:

There were some present at that very time who told him of the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, "Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus? I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen upon whom the tower in Silo'am fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish."

The hyperbolists, of course, must insist that "perish" means something more and something less than "die violent death", and that "you" must refer to more than those then "present", and that "likewise" doesn't really mean "in the same way", and that "repent" doesn't really mean "turn your back on your former life". Jesus couldn't have possibly meant what he said literally, because then he would have been mistaken, and a mistaken Jesus is unthinkable because then he is unworshipable.

And that would be crazy!

NT Wright's Kingdom of God is still basically a kingdom designed for and of this world, and that's the problem with it

It is not the apocalyptic kingdom of the gospel documents which he otherwise claims to be rescuing.

Here:

[A]t a particular time God called a particular pair for a particular task: to look after his creation and make it flourish in a whole new way. ...

The point is that if you start, not with Adam and a “moral test,” but with Adam and Eve and a vocation (see Psalm 8), then a lot of things in Paul look significantly different. There is more to Paul—and to Genesis—than you might have thought. It all works, it’s all good, it’s all about God’s grace—and it’s about a justification through which humans are “put right” in order to get the original project back on track, so that we might be “putting-right” people for the world.

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"For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven."

-- Matthew 22:30

"[T]he harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels."

-- Matthew 13:39