This World Farther On

Yoder again: “What we are now doing is what leads to where we are going. Since the ‘this-worldly’ and the ‘otherworldly’ [are] not perceived in radical dichotomy, to be ‘marching through Emmanuel’s ground’ today is to be on the way to Zion. Terms like ‘hereafter’ are in that kind of context affirmations, not negations. They do not say that that to which we look forward is a radically different kind of world from the world in which we now live, but rather that it lies farther in the same direction in which we are being led. The unforseeable future is farther along in the same direction as the foreseeable future for which we are responsible.”