Jamin Bradley

The great melting pot is not America, but the coming New Creation where Heaven and Earth merge with one another. America may celebrate its cultural diversity, but it does so with the unspoken expectation that if you’re going to live here, you must blend in. Don’t do anything unfamiliar to the white majority or we will recognize you as different and ostracize you while we create rumors about you. Americans have a history of xenophobia and it plays itself out the same way in every generation, regardless of who we’re newly xenophobic toward.

The New Creation, on the other hand, is a diverse utopia that shares one belief: Jesus is King. But this belief does not make them culturally homogenous. They still have their own languages. They still have their own nations. They still have their own cultures, customs, culinary tastes, and ways of life. As people of all cultures subject their ways to King Jesus, there are some things they’ll strip away, but they do not need to leave their culture. They simply let God redeem their culture.

I can’t wait to travel in the New Heavens and New Earth. I don’t get a lot of vacations this side of the resurrection, but when eternity comes, I think there will be some space to finally check out some other countries and try some new culinary dishes. Maybe I won’t even need a vacation to do that. Since Jesus’ resurrected body could warp around, perhaps our resurrected bodies will also be able to. Maybe I can pop into Tokyo to grab some ramen and then eat it in the Shire in New Zealand before returning to my office in Michigan to start work on a new book. If C.S. Lewis has time in the evening, maybe I’ll ask if I can read it to him while he smokes his pipe.

God loves diversity. That’s why he made life diverse. Sure, all cultures within Christianity have some things to change to follow Jesus rightly (which is why I’m always calling people to change within my own white American Christian culture)—but change doesn’t make us uncultured or void of culture. Heavenly citizenship is unified around Jesus, but Heavenly citizens celebrate Jesus with cultural diversity.