6.4 — A New Heaven and a New Earth (2 of 2)

That reading is available, and a number of partial preterists hold it. But it requires real interpretive work to get there, and it does not sit as naturally on the surface of the English text as the dispensationalist reading does. Here, more honestly than anywhere else among these five doctrines, that should be said directly: Isaiah 65:20 is a verse where progressive dispensationalism and historic premillennialism may simply have the smoother fit. Both expect a bounded, intermediate earthly age — not yet the eternal state, genuinely transformed from the present age, but not yet free of death either. Isaiah 65:20's own words describe exactly that kind of age without requiring any idiom-based reinterpretation to make sense. A reader who finds the covenant-idiom reading above less persuasive than the plain sense of the text has not misunderstood anything. They have located the one place among these five doctrines where the partial preterist case is carried more by consistency with its reading elsewhere than by the free-standing weight of the verse in question — worth knowing plainly before you weigh it.

The full preterist case, at its strongest. A serious full preterist notes, correctly, that "heavens and earth" collapsing is well-established covenant-collapse idiom in the Old Testament, consistently describing the fall of specific nations rather than the literal end of the physical cosmos. Isaiah uses this exact vocabulary for Babylon's fall: "the stars in the sky and their constellations no longer give out their light... So I will shake the heavens, and the earth will shake loose from its foundation" (Isaiah 13:10, 13, NET) — no reader imagines Babylon's literal sky actually went dark. Isaiah uses the identical language for Edom's judgment. Partial preterists grant exactly this reading wherever it suits their own argument, including, as this book has already argued, for the cosmic language surrounding Jerusalem's fall in the Olivet Discourse.

The argument, at its core, is one of consistency. If "heavens and earth" is covenant idiom for a collapsing order everywhere else it appears, then treating 2 Peter's "new heavens and new earth" as a sudden exception — literal re-creation rather than covenantal renewal in the same recycled imagery — requires switching genres without the text ever signaling a switch. On this reading, the new heavens and new earth describe precisely the same event full preterism locates everywhere else in AD 70: the old covenant order dissolved, the new covenant community established, with nothing left, in any literal sense, still ahead.

Weighing the two cases directly. Both readings agree that "heavens and earth" is genuine covenant-collapse idiom in Isaiah, and that the same idiom governs the Olivet Discourse's cosmic language about Jerusalem's fall. The disagreement is over whether that idiom's reach extends to 2 Peter 3 as well. Isaiah's cosmic-collapse language is always explicitly attached to a named nation and a specific historical judgment — Babylon by name in chapter thirteen, Edom by name in chapter thirty-four. The partial preterist case argues Second Peter supplies a different referent, framing the coming fire by direct comparison with Noah's flood — "by the word of God heavens existed long ago and an earth was formed out of water and by means of water. Through these things the world existing at that time was destroyed when it was deluged with water. But by the same word the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire, by being kept for the day of judgment" (2 Peter 3:5–7, NET) — a real, physical, worldwide event rather than a nation's political collapse, and treats that comparison as evidence of a wider scope than AD 70. A full preterist reader may treat the flood analogy as incidental rather than load-bearing, and Paul's grammatical distinction between creation and "the children of God" in Romans 8 as compatible with a covenantal reading after all. Which way those two pieces of evidence tip is, again, a judgment this book leaves with you rather than settles in advance.

What follows if each is right. If dispensationalism is right here, the physical world you are stewarding today is headed for a still-future, literal remaking — the garden you tend and the work you do with your hands are building toward a renewal that has not yet arrived. If partial preterism is right, the old covenant order has already, decisively passed away, and the new creation is genuinely underway in Christ, though its final, cosmic completion remains ahead of you still. If full preterism is right, the new heavens and new earth are already fully here, in the same sense Christ's kingdom is already fully here — meaning nothing about the physical world around you right now is, on that reading, still waiting to be made new.