Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > The Economy of the Covenants Between God and Man: Comprehending a Complete Body of Divinity > Status Update

"It still remains doubtful, whether the life promised to Adam upon his perseverance was to be enjoyed in paradise, or in heaven. The latter appears more probable.

1st. Because paradise is in scrıpture represented as a type of heaven; and heaven itself is called paradise (Luke 22:43), by that exchange of names which is very common between a sacrament, or sign, and the thing signified thereby. But is it in the least probable, that paradise should be made a sacrament after man's ejectment?

2dly. It is fit that man when raised to consummate happiness should reside there, where God does most brightly display the rays of his glorious majesty; which doubtless he does in heaven, where he has fixed his throne (Isa. 66:1).

3dly. As the earthly paradise was furnished with all the delights and pleasures appertaining to this animal life, of which there is no necessity in that most perfect and immediate fruition of God, all that external entertainment being in the highest degree excluded thence; heaven ought to be deemed a much more suitable habitation for glorified man than the earthly paradise."

Here I must continue my series of disagreements with Witsius, for I absolutely hold that the life promised to Adam if he were to have overcome the probationary test (ultimately accomplished by Jesus, the second Adam) will be enjoyed in consummated earthly paradise. Otherwise stated, one day the veil (the Firmament/the Second Heaven), like that of a bride on her wedding day, shall be removed and heaven and earth shall be one forever more.

Notice how Witsius's sacramentology leads to a kind of latent gnosticism in his reasoning. Despite how close he wants to associate the sign and the thing signified, there is still a clear distinction. In the end, this inevitably leads to a denigration of the sign itself as being a kind of material crutch that will someday be bypassed altogether once we obtain the necessary spiritually maturity to do so.

Since ultimately all of life is sacramental, this understanding then leads to a mechanistic view of material creation and subsequently our ("animal") bodies. They exist as subordinate, lower, and ultimately dispensible props to help us attain the higher, spiritual, heavenly life, and the material may even be a hindrance to us if we focus on it too much.

To state this differently, this view represents the "Grace Above Nature" paradigm where the Cultural Mandate and the Great Commission are two distinct but somewhat parallel trajectories for humanity: the former an earthly/natural/bodily telos and the latter a heavenly/supernatural/spiritual telos. The natural here properly exists to serve the obviously superior supernatural until it is no longer necessary and can be transcended to a more spiritual, pure communion.

To state my own view, summarized as "Grace Restores Nature," humanity as God's image/idol was created to follow the pattern set out by Yahweh and lead creation as it's organic head into it's consummate, glorified Sabbath rest (the Cultural Mandate). The Fall of Genesis 3 neither destroyed nor altered our telos, though it did render us incapable of fulfilling it. The Great Commission restores us back to our initial trajectory, so that we may accomplish what we were created to. In Christ and as Christ's Body, the Church will spread the Kingdom of Heaven to every inch of the globe until the earth is filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

5 star comment there.
Also can you describe in a couple sentences what you mean by “all of life is sacramental”?

I'm not sure if it even remotely qualifies as "a couple of sentences," but here are some quotes from Alexander Schmemann's "For the Life of the World":

"Nowhere in the Bible do we find the dichotomies which for us are the self-evident framework of all approaches to religion. In the Bible, the food that man eats, the world of which he must partake in order to live, is given to him by God, and it is given as communion with God. The world as man's food is not something "material" and limited to material functions, thus different from, and opposed to, the specifically "spiritual" functions by which man is related to God. All that exists is God's gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man's life communion with God. It is divine love made food, made life for man. God blesses everything He creates, and, in biblical language, this means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation: "Oh taste and see that the Lord is good.""

"The term "sacramental" means that for the world to be means of worship and means of grace is not accidental, but the revelation of its meaning, the restoration of its essence, the fulfillment of its destiny. It is the "natural sacramentality" of the world that finds its expression in worship and makes the latter the essential work of man, the foundation, and the spring of his life and activities as man. Being the epiphany of God, worship is thus the epiphany of the world; being communion with God, it is the only true communion with the world; being knowledge of God, it is the ultimate fulfillment of all human knowledge."

How you understand the sacraments will thus concurrently inform and be informed by how you understand all of creation itself because all of life is sacramental.