“Since participation in the Christ-reality fully affirms the world, the Christian therefore no longer needs to feel torn between different allegiances to heaven and earth. Indeed, Bonhoeffer introduces the divine mandates of church, marriage, government, work, and culture as the God-given means to live one’s life holistically, without constant ethical conflicts, freely and confidently before God. Nevertheless, Bonhoeffer also insists that the same Christ-reality places both self and world within an eschatological framework determined by the “ultimate” promise of creation’s renewal in Christ. In Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, creation was affirmed, judged, and renewed. As a result, the fallen creation, or the penultimate, is preserved and “held over” in its relative autonomy until its transformation into a new world already inaugurated in Christ’s own resurrection but fully to come with Christ’s return. The Christian life is basically the hermeneutical task of participating in this eschatological framework. God’s affirmation of creation allows one fully to live within the penultimate, that is, to pursue work, enjoy life, one’s spousal or social relations, and cultivate the earth. Yet the cross and resurrection also give this pursuit the urgency to recognize that all these things exist in light of God’s humanity as revealed in Christ. Bonhoeffer explains that “the Christian life is the dawn of the ultimate in me, of the life of Christ in me; however, it is also always life in the penultimate in anticipation of the ultimate” (DBW 6:151). Participating in the “polemical” relation of the ultimate to the penultimate, “the Christian life entails neither the destruction nor the sanctioning of the penultimate, so that in Christ the reality of God encounters the reality of the world and allows us to participate in this encounter. It is an encounter beyond any radicalism or compromise. The Christian life is participation in Christ’s encounter with the world” (DBW 6:151).”