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Before they call I will answer,

while they are yet speaking I will hear.

The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,

the lion shall eat straw like the ox,

but the serpent—its food shall be dust!

They shall not hurt or destroy

on all my holy mountain,” says the LORD. (Isa. 65:17–25)

Many nations shall come and say:

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,

to the house of the God of Jacob.

that he may teach us his ways

and that we may walk in his paths.”

For out of Zion will go forth instruction,

and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

He shall judge between many peoples

and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;

they shall beat their swords into plowshares,

and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

neither shall they learn war any more;

but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,

and no one shall make them afraid;

for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken. (Mic. 4:2–4)

You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel,

and that I, the LORD, am your God and there is no other.

And my people shall never again be put to shame.

Then afterward

I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;

your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

your old men shall dream dreams,

and your young men shall see visions.

Even on the male and female slaves,

in those days, I will pour out my Spirit. (Joel 2:27–29)

I will make for you a covenant on that day

with the wild animals, the birds of the air,

and the creeping things of the ground;

and I will abolish the bow, the sword,

and war from the land;

and I will make you lie down in safety.

And I will take you for my wife forever;

I will take you for my wife in righteousness and in justice,

in steadfast love, and in mercy. (Hos. 2:18–19)

Many of us modern Christians, having been trained to read the Bible within the six-line Greco-Roman narrative, “know” what to do with these passages. We push them into the distant future, beyond history as we know it, applying them either to heaven, a literalist “millennial” period, or a little bit of both. But what if we were to receive these images in a different way?

If we are people who live in the Genesis narrative of creation and reconciliation and the Exodus narrative of liberation and formation, what if we were to receive these images as a vision of the kind of future toward which God is inviting us in history? What if we saw them less as an eternal destination beyond history and more as a guiding star within it, less as a literal description and prediction and more as a poetic promise and hope, less as a doctrine to be debated and more as an unquenchable dream that inspires us to unceasing constructive action? What if we saw them as a good future unfolding in time, not a perfect state beyond time?

If we take this third narrative in this way, we are immediately freed from arguments about a deterministic future (a subject to which we will return in our eighth question), because the future in this approach is waiting to be created; it is not fatalistically predetermined. God hasn’t already prerecorded history so that it waits like digital information on a disk, already “made” but only being “played” in real time. No, by taking this new approach, the narrative of the peaceable kingdom becomes the desired future toward which the people of God orient themselves, the constellation they set course and sail by, the dream or goal or vision or imagination they pursue. In this view, history and life are not prerecorded: life is “live.” History isn’t a “show”—not even a “reality show.” History is unscripted, unrehearsed reality, happening now—really happening. (You might want to pinch yourself before reading on, and ask yourself if you really believe the previous sentence.)

As this approach relieves us of literalistic interpretations, it frees us to let the poetry work as poetry is supposed to. Swords into plowshares. Today that would mean dreaming about tanks being melted down into playground jungle gyms and machine guns being recast