Man’s Desire to Unite Heaven and Earth: From Babel to Pentecost and Beyond
The proper Latin name for human beings is homo sapiens; thinking man. Man the thinker. This captures an important part of what it means to be human and what separates man from beast. But many theologians have gone further; not just referring to humankind as homo sapiens, but as James K. A. Smith puts it, homo liturgicus;[i] or in Alexander Schmemann’s idiom, homo adorans.[ii] Man, the worshipper. Man, the liturgist. Man, the adorer. We human beings are desiring creatures that long to worship and adore something, someone, even ourselves. Even before the Fall into sin, man was a worshipper, praising God and in communion with him. And since the Fall into sin, we have been trying to get back to Eden. We have been searching for a way to reconnect heaven with earth, to reunite God and man and find the communion, worship, and rest that was experienced in the bliss of Paradise. St. Augustine put it this way: “our heart is restless until it rests in Thee, oh Lord.”[iii] In modern terms, some have said we all have a God-shaped hole inside of us.
Even today in the West, where Christianity seems to be on the decline, man the worshipper is still on full display. Into the God-shaped hole left by Christianity’s decline has come all sorts of things to worship: political messiahs, celebrities, careers, utopian dreams, sexual identity, ethnic heritage, and that most tempting god all, the self. We are also seeing the return of the strong gods of paganism, witchcraft, spiritualism, and psychedelics. It turns out, modern man isn’t all that different than ancient man. We may have shinier toys and may like to think we are more civilized and enlightened, but the desire to worship, the longing to unite heaven and earth, is the same. At Babel we see the paradigm of man’s disordered attempts to bring heaven down to earth. At Pentecost we see God’s great reversal where heaven meets earth on his own terms.
Babel: Man’s Disordered Attempts to Unite Heaven and Earth
The account of Babel is recorded in Genesis 11, which is the last chapter of what we might call the primordial history of humanity. Echoes and remnants of this universal history are found in the myths, legends, and origin stories of countless cultures across the globe who have similar creation, flood, and tower of Babel stories. This actually is further evidence that these things really happened.
In Genesis 11 we read that the whole earth had one language, and that the sons of man wanted to build a city and a tower with its head in the heavens. In the ancient near eastern world of the Israelites and surrounding nations, at the center of a city was always a temple, a tower. These were called ziggurats. They looked like a pyramid staircase reaching toward heaven. They were a simulated mountain, for it was upon mountain peaks that many ancient cultures believed the gods dwelled. They imagined the gods could come down to earth via the temple at the top of the mountain or tower.[iv] Archaeological discoveries all over the world reveal similar temples and ziggurats, these attempts to connect heaven and earth. From Mayan and Incan temples of South America, to the Pyramids of Egypt and the Ziggurat towers of Babylon, we can see that man is a worshipper, desiring to reunite heaven and earth, even in such sinful and distorted—even demonic—ways.
And the Babel account is the archetype of such human sinfulness, pride, and presumption. Here we see the sons of man wanting to make a name for themselves, to manipulate the gods, to bring them down by means of their tower to do their bidding, and thus achieve power and fame, renown and glory, and rule the world as they wished.
This is the sin of Eden all over again: “you shall be like god.” They have rejected their status as creatures and taken things into their own hands—to call the gods down as if it were some technique or magic incantation through which they could achieve power and greatness. “At Babel,” Graeme Goldsworthy notes, “we see a collective expression of the original attempt of Adam and Eve to displace God from his rightful place as Lord of the universe.”[v] And much like the original Fall, God comes down in judgment again at Babel. He comes down and exiles them, sends them out across the globe, confusing their languages, dividing them in judgment for their pride, presumption, and disordered worship of false gods. In Hebrew, there is a word play here, as if we were to say God babbled their languages at Babel. And, the Hebrew tradition as recorded in the Jewish book of Jubilees is that God even destroys the tower by wind, much like the divine wind of God that came in judgment in the garden in Genesis 3 and that accompanied God’s presence throughout the Old Testament.
God’s Uniting of Heaven and Earth: From Promise to Pentecost
God’s judgment at Babel sent shockwaves across the globe, dividing people into nations, bringing about wars and rivalries, ethnic strife, and brutal competition for resources. In their rejection of the worship of YHWH, the sons of man were further alienated from God as the exile from the garden intensified. But just like in the garden, even with this curse and judgment, came a promise that God would reunite heaven and earth. The very next chapter of Genesis zooms in on the promise to Abraham. Through Abraham’s family God would bless all nations, reuniting them around Abraham’s seed, the seed of the woman promised in the Garden, who is Christ. If the tower of Babel was fallen man’s attempt to return to paradise and reconnect heaven and earth, God’s answer is in the promise of Christ.
The rest of the Old Testament is the unfolding of this promise of a renewed Eden and the proper marriage of heaven and earth on God’s terms. The one true God descends to man on the Mountain—Mt. Moriah, Mt. Sinai, Mt. Carmel. He descends the staircase (the ziggurat tower) in Jacob’s dream (Gen 28). He comes down to deliver his people from Egyptian slavery and is among them in cloud, wind, and fire. He reconnects heaven and earth in the Tabernacle and in the Temple where he dwells, where he comes down, where the people don’t make a name for themselves like at Babel, but where he makes his name great (2 Chron. 6:20, 7:16, 1 Kings 8:43). And all this seems to culminate in the holy city of Jerusalem, the holy hill, the holy mount of the Lord, Mt. Zion.
But man still kept falling, kept building new Babels, worshipping foreign gods, constructing new idols, following after other nations and other gods, rejecting the word of the Lord for the word of men. So, the Israelites too were exiled, scattered, and dispersed from the Promised Land as their Temple was destroyed, awaiting restoration and reunion—awaiting a Messiah to deliver them.
And so he came: Emmanuel, God with us. Heaven comes to Earth in the person of God himself, Spirit unites with Matter, Word with Flesh, God with Man. God tabernacled with men and dwelt among us (Jn. 1:14). He is where God’s presence is found.
Christ connects heaven with earth not by ascending a glorious throne in a temple but by descending from heaven to ascend the mountain of death and climb the tower of the cross, suspended halfway between heaven and earth. His death on the mountaintop reconciles God and Man, as proved by his rising from the dead.
Then comes Christ’s ascension to the right hand of power, which brings about a further marriage of heaven and earth, enabling Christ in his glorified and resurrected body to be truly present with us. And the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost makes this so by reversing and undoing the curse of Babel and bringing us into the reality of what the ancient temples and towers of men were distortedly reaching towards, and the Babels that we still sinfully build are grasping for.
At Pentecost, people “from every nation under heaven” are in one place—all those who had been scattered since Babel; all the Jews who had been scattered since their exile. And then comes the sound of a mighty rushing wind, a cloud and fire—all signs of God’s presence. At Babel man tried to build up to God through his own works; now at Pentecost God descends in grace. Here, the wind of God’s Spirit is not a wind of judgment, but a blessing upon all flesh. The Holy Spirit brings order out of chaos, just like he did when he hovered over the waters at creation. The Spirit rushes into the disciples and they speak with other tongues, undoing the curse of Babel, and uniting God’s people around the new temple, Christ’s own body, the church. From God’s dividing of the languages to divide the world, now we have the great reversal as divided tongues of fire now unite all nations into the cosmic temple of Christ’s flesh.
The Disciples, the ones who scattered at the cross and cowered in the upper room, are now pillars of fire, living candles, mouthpieces of Jesus, the Light of the World, stewards of the divine mysteries of God’s presence given to us in Word and Sacrament, whose flames will burn bright until their martyrdoms, and continually burn bright as the Apostolic Word is proclaimed as torches to light our way still today.
In his Pentecost sermon Peter, now aflame with the Spirit, boldly proclaims that a new age has dawned, the Spirit is now being poured out on all flesh, Jew and Gentile, young and old, male and female. The apocalyptic and cosmic signs testify to a regime change, a changing of the guard; Christ’s kingdom has begun. Pentecost is the great reversal of Babel, the great release of the Spirit that ushers us into the new age of the kingdom, where heaven and earth, God and man are being reunited.
Conclusion
And so, we’ve seen that man the worshipper has a restless, transcendent longing to connect heaven and earth that he tries to fulfill by building all sorts of Babels. But it can only be fulfilled in Christ, who perfectly unites all things: the earthly with the heavenly, the material with the spiritual, the mundane with the miraculous, the ideal and the real. Christ is the one in whom all things hold together and find their fulfilment, the one who unites all things—things in heaven and things on earth (Col. 1, Eph. 1).
And this Christ makes himself present in the church, the very life-giving center of the universe, beating with the very heart of Jesus, made alive by his very body and blood given into ours. As our lives are transformed by the Spirit and ordered around Christ’s presence in the church, God’s kingdom comes on earth, his will is done on earth as it is in heaven. Of course, this only is in bits and pieces now, as we still await “a better heavenly city” (Heb. 11:16). But even though we await the ultimate fulfillment, the foretaste we receive now is the guarantee of what will be achieved on the last day when the full union of heaven and earth will occur as the New Jerusalem will descend to earth and “behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.” (Rev. 21:3).
[i] James K. A. Smith argues that human beings are “‘liturgical animals,’ creatures who can’t not worship and who are fundamentally formed by worship practices. The reason such liturgies are so formative is precisely because it is these liturgies, whether Christian or ‘secular,’ that shape what we love.” James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Baker Academic, 2013) 4.
[ii] “All rational, spiritual, and other qualities of man, distinguishing him from other creatures, have their focus and ultimate fulfillment in this capacity to bless God, to know, so to speak, the meaning of the thirst and hunger that constitutes his life. ‘Homo sapiens,’ ‘homo faber’…yes, but, first of all, ‘homo adorans.’ The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God—and by filling the world with this eucharist, he transforms his life, the one that he received from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him.” And later he notes that man is “the one for who whom worship is the essential act which both ‘posits’ his humanity and fulfills it.” Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy ( St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2018) 22, 140.
[iii] St. Augustine, Confessions (Penguin Books, 1961) 21.
[iv] John Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament (Baker Academic, 2018) 81.
[v] Graeme Goldsworthy, According to Plan: The Unfolding Revelation of God in the Bible; An Introductory Biblical Theology (IVP, 1991) 116.
Joshua Pauling is a classical educator, furnituremaker, and contributing writer at Salvo Magazine and Modern Reformation. He has written for FORMA, Classical Lutheran Education Journal, Front Porch Republic, LOGIA: A Journal of Lutheran Theology, Mere Orthodoxy, Merion West, Public Discourse, Quillette, The Lutheran Witness, Touchstone, among others. He studied at Messiah University, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Winthrop University. He is currently vicar at All Saints Lutheran Church (LCMS) in Charlotte, NC and is completing additional studies through Concordia Theological Seminary towards ordination. He and his wife Kristi have two children.