Fundamentals Of The Faith by Kreeft Peter

Author:Kreeft, Peter [Kreeft, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898702026
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2009-10-29T04:00:00+00:00

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The Four Last Things: Judgment

Sign on campus: “Prepare for your finals. Read your Bible.” As with death, judgment requires that we face facts. Nothing can be done without light.

The fact here is justice—God’s justice. Yes, God is merciful. But he is also just. “Justice and peace shall meet together, righteousness and truth shall kiss each other.” He reconciles both justice and mercy at Calvary. That’s why Christ had to die. If God were only merciful and not just, he could have breezily said “forget it” instead of “forgive it”. Forgiveness is costly. If you owe me $1,000 and I forgive your debt, I have to pay my creditors $1,000 out of my own pocket. The debt must be paid. Justice is.

Judgment, therefore, is an eternal necessity, not an arbitrary whim. Judgment must fall—somewhere, sometime, on someone, somehow. Instead of here, at my death, on me, and as reason expects, it falls on Calvary, two thousand year ago, on Christ, in God’s great mystery. But it falls. The “wages of sin is death,” and Christ shoulders it all. The death here includes spiritual death, alienation from God, and hell itself. No soul in hell suffers more than the one who cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Modernity cannot understand why Christ had to die because it does not believe injustice and judgment. The typically modern mind sympathizes with the clergyman in hell in C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. Granted a day’s vacation in heaven, he chooses to return to hell because “we have a little theological society down there” and the paper he is to present that night deals with the question of what Jesus’ mature views would have been if it hadn’t been for that tragic accident of the Crucifixion!

Our only escape from judgment is in the one who did not escape it. We are saved in Christ. Not by imitating Christ, or by being externally “clothed” with Christ, so that God blinds his own eyes by looking at us but seeing Christ instead (Luther’s notion), but rather by being incorporated into Christ.

Life is full of warnings to prepare for the Last Judgment. Psychoanalysis furnishes a fine example: push a problem down into the unconscious and you don’t bury it dead, you bury it alive, and it rises from the dead and haunts you. There is justice in every act in our lives: the same stroke of the axe that weakens the tree strengthens the lumberjack. And the same blow of the club that softens the victim’s body hardens the mugger’s soul. For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction—in the spiritual world as well as the physical. There’s no free lunch.

We hear little about this today—about justice and judgment in this life, much less in the next. One reason is our loss of metaphysics; our disbelief that the human mind can know objective reality. Justice is reduced to vengeance, a subjective motive. Religion itself is reduced from objective truths to subjective comfort.

Another reason is the prevalence of some very odd theologians among writers and opinion makers.

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