All Things New

 The Renovation of the Whole World

"To the Lord and his kingdom belongs the whole world, with all that lives and moves in it.  All is yours, says the apostle (I Corinthians 3:22).  Religion is not a single, separate sphere of human life, but the divine principle by which the entire man is to be pervaded, refined, and made complete.  It takes hold of him in his undivided totality, in the center of his personal being; to carry light into his understanding, holiness into his will, and heaven into his heart; and to shed thus the sacred consecration of the new birth, and the glorious liberty of the children of God, over his whole inward and outward life.

"No form of existence can withstand the renovating power of God's Spirit.
There is no rational element that may not be sanctified; no sphere of natural life that my not be glorified.  The creature, in the widest extent of the world, is earnestly waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God, and sighing after the same glorious deliverance.  The whole creation aims toward redemption; and Christ is the second Adam, the new universal man, not simply in a religious but also in an absolute sense.

"The view entertained by Romish monasticism and Protestant pietism, by which Christianity is made to consist in an abstract opposition to the natural life, or in flight from the world, is quite contrary to the spirit and power of the Gospel, as well as false to its design.  Christianity is the redemption and renovation of the world. It must make all things new."

Philip Schaff, The Principle of Protestantism, trans. John Nevin (Philadelphia: United Church Press, [1845] 1964), p. 173.