Rethinking Judgment

I’d love to have a nickel for everyone who sees the headline of this blog and thinks no way am I going to read that kind of drivel. Had a snootful of that in the conservative church of my youth. Not going there ever again!

If there’s any less popular theological idea in 21st century culture than judgment, I’d love to know what it is.

The Middle Ages got a lot of things right, in my opinion. But one thing they didn’t get right, although medieval men and women are owed some slack for not exactly having cooked up the idea of The Last Judgment, was the notion of judgment as wrath and doom. By inviting you to reflect on judgment, I aim to make a clear distinction between judgment and condemnation. Most English speakers react negatively to “judgment” because they figure it means condemnation. Although it might, that’s not necessarily the case.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure why our culture is so down on judgment, since we seem to be one of the most judgmental crowds ever. We are constantly reminded by the political diagnosticians that we are polarized, divided, and so forth. Maybe. The more we accept those diagnoses, the more we tend to live into them. One of the ways we do so is by living with constant judgments of all those “other people,” judgments uttered or unexpressed. MAGA is always going after the liberals tarring them as communists as if that were the single worst thing to be. And MAGA itself has become shorthand for all the abhorrent things that non-MAGA people blame them for.

I’m not excluding myself from this melee of judgmentalism.

I do, however, want to take a closer look at something that our disdain for “judgment” has caused to be omitted from constructive discourse.

Here it is, the lynchpin of the matter: judgment, at least in the biblical sense, is inseparable from justice.

The entire Hebrew Bible hinges on the Exodus event. The Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings are all replete with memos of that signal event, “when our fathers and mothers were slaves in Egypt” and Adonai delivered us in a most miraculous way by liberating us from our oppressors. Over and over, especially in the Books of the Law, passages recall what Yahweh Adonai did. Israel is enjoined to show mercy to strangers, to take up the cause of the poor and dispossessed, to treat with mercy those who are at the margins. Why? Because that’s exactly what Yahweh did for Israel. It’s the direct and simple notion that “freely you have received, freely give.” Out of the Exodus event grows the idea that Yahweh intervenes in human affairs righting wrongs, redressing imbalances, and adjusting to correct injustices.

Discussing the Hebrew idea of justice requires paying careful attention to the dynamic of righteousness. Most of the time, if modern people think about righteousness, they imagine it to mean super-religious or morally upright, perhaps especially sexual purity. There are reasons for that, but I’m not going to delve into them. What’s germane here is to come to terms with the meaning of righteousness as right relationships and Yahweh Adonai’s interest in bringing about justice to those who have been deprived of it.

The New Testament doesn’t sideline that idea but takes it to a new level. Not only is God on the side of the helpless, the outcast, the peripheral, but Jesus’ own ministry is largely about preaching Good News to the poor. By the time St. Paul is writing his Epistle to the Romans, “the poor” has been extended to encompass everyone. For if they are not poor in the sense of living in poverty, they (we) are poor—without assets or resources to justify ourselves in the moral universe.

Indeed, the theme of Romans and much else that we can say is authentically Pauline is ‘o dikaioς ‘εκ πιστεως ζησεται : the one who is righteous will live by faith (Romans 1:17). That word “dikaios” is the same word for just. And the relatives of “dikaios” like δικαιοςυνη, (dikaiosyne), mean both justice and righteousness.

I remember when this clicked for me. I was leading a Bible study on Romans, re-reading the first several chapters, when the thought struck me that one meaning of “justify” (I learned it from high school journalism in the days long before computers) was the lining up of print along the margins of a column. To be justified meant to be in line, and theologically that means in line with God. Call it God’s will if you like, but how we spin it is less important than the fundamental idea. And Paul’s point is that we can’t do it (i.e., be “justified” or “righteous”) by ourselves. It is God who justifies (Romans 8:33). And faith is, in that context, the simple acceptance of our justification as a fact not to be disputed nor argued with. Nor, I might add, can justification be improved upon. The truth is that we don’t have to wring our hands and tie our intestines in knots worrying about our salvation. It is πιστις, faith, that seals the deal. One might write a footnote there to the effect that it is as much God’s having faith in humanity as it is humanity’s having faith in God. The point is that this whole Covenant is sufficient. Faith is what activates the covenant relationship: faith coming from both directions, divine and human, meeting in the middle.

It's tempting to stop there, but that is only the beginning of the matter. Since we are beneficiaries of such grand and generous Grace, in Paul’s metaphorical language in Romans 1-3, we have been spared our “just desserts,” which would be the awful outcome (wrath!) were we left to justify ourselves. This might sound a bit abstruse, but it all boils down to the way we live. We have been shown mercy by being taken off the hook; we’ve been released from the dock. The obvious response is to be merciful to all and sundry.

And to be merciful is pretty much the obverse of being judgmental, isn’t it? What might happen if the churches were to reclaim that idea?

I think we have some clues. It makes us frighteningly nervous. What? If we just go around showing mercy, won’t society fall apart? What will become of our standards? What will happen to all these absolutes that the Bible seems to be packed with? This is not an inconsequential pooh-pooh-worthy problem. While I don’t want people obsessing over gender roles and pronouns and who uses what restrooms, I’m quite much in favor of the rich paying their fair share to finance a government that works for everyone, including those whom the rich depend upon for much of their success and no little of their comfort and convenience. That’s my admission that I have a stake in exacting a bit of skin, or maybe even a pound of flesh, from those who seem intent on dancing through life with little sense of social justice.

It seems to me that we can come to the point quickly. A balance must be struck between freedom and responsibility, between grace and obligation, between human autonomy and divine justice. Exactly how that’s done is not something that I or any other theologian can definitively spell out. Would that it were otherwise.

If we go back and look at the Latin poem “Dies Irae, Dies Illa,” we can scarcely avoid being struck by what a dark and dreadful vision it conveys:

The day of wrath, that day,
will dissolve the world in ashes:
(this is) the testimony of David along with the Sibyl.

How great will be the quaking,
when the Judge is about to come,
strictly investigating all things!

Read the whole thing here[1].

Little wonder that this was axed by Vatican II for use at funerals, replaced by the directive to use texts that concentrate on Christian hope. That hope, however, is not antithetical to judgment but integral to it.

Christian Hope is cosmic, global, communal, and personal. Cosmic, because Christ is inseparable from the entire creation. It is he “through whom all things were made (John1:1-4).” What can that possibly mean but that the Word incarnate in Jesus is the Word we might as well call the Big Bang, because it was the Word that set the cosmos in motion? (That is, of course, not a scientific statement but a theological one.) Christian hope is global because it has to do with the entire earth, not just with homo sapiens. The inanimate world, the plant world, the animal world (including humans) are all included in the hope that New Life will pervade the entire planet, restoring balance and harmony and repairing the deep damage that has been done to the planet itself. Christian hope is communal because it is what propels the beloved community into the future, widening that community in the process to include all nations and races. Christian hope is personal because it is the compass by which each individual can chart a life increasingly centered on the transforming Spirit of the Risen Christ.[2]

When we frame judgment as hope, that hope comes down to justice: the redressing of imbalances, the righting of wrongs, welcoming the estranged, healing the faults and fractures in communal relationships. But what of that conglomeration of things we generally find hard to stomach? The “wrath” of God (Romans 1: 17), the indignation of the righteous Judge, and all the cataclysmic things traditionally associated with the end times including the end of the world as we know it?

While we let that question dangle for a minute, let me throw in another idea. J. B. Phillips, theologian and translator of The New Testament, included a metaphor in his book Your God Is Too Small. A man wanders into a room where he has some project to work on. The room is completely dark except for one light illuminating a blank canvas. The man picks up a brush and dips it into some paint and begins to dab some colors onto the canvas. Suddenly the lights come on. The man sees that he has marred a beautiful masterpiece. While Phillips suggests this as a way of understanding how our quite inadequate ideas of God contrast with God’s immensity and greatness, the metaphor seems to me to be an apt way of conceptualizing judgment. Judgment is when the lights come on, when the truth is revealed, when the real nature of things and actions is exposed. Judgment is happening as I write. Our Republic is fraying, to put it mildly. The lights have come on. Some of our most cherished myths about America have now had the light of truth shone on them. Only the willfully blind ignore the mixed-up mess of anger, hate, rage, that has festered for generations. And it isn’t only the present moment. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, it was a turning on of the light. The depth of the fracture of the nation might have been ignored or denied, but that ended when South Carolina troops fired on Fort Sumter.

Not all moments of judgment are so dramatic. Lights are always coming on, exposing the true nature of things and events. That is judgment. That is when the injustices of societies and of the world are exposed. That’s what apocalypse means: it is the revealing of the Truth. Sometimes the Truth is exceedingly painful. Always it is the displaying of the chasm between the way things are and the way things are meant to be. The latter—the way things are meant to be—is just, in line with the purposes of the Creator of the universe, which in a word is Love.

Don’t we need judgment? We wander in a wasteland quite literally becoming less recognizable by being bombed, polluted, debased. We are living the Dies Irae now. Still, it’s true that judgment often reveals the Truth that many good things are happening. Justice does arise and the just sometimes win. The poor sometimes hear good news, prisoners are sometimes freed, diabolical strongmen are sometimes overthrown. Those things, too, are exposed in the Light.

But it’s never quite enough, is it? One war ends and soon another begins. On goes the story. That’s even more reason for hope. Not the hope that sees personal pie in the sky by and by, but hope that dares to believe that there’s a

Day to whose clear, shining light

All wrong shall stand revealed,

And justice shall be throned in might

And every hurt be healed.[3]

[1] https://jesuitjoe.blogspot.com/2015/11/dies-irae-dies-illa.html

[2] In my view, Christian hope is trivialized and truncated when it becomes all about “going to heaven when we die.” There is little doubt that for the most of its history, Christianity has devolved into a scheme of personal salvation. This is particularly true of Western Christianity which at least since the third century has been preoccupied with the state of the Christian soul. The Eastern Church, in contrast, has invested most of its energy historically in focusing on the nature of God. I’m not suggesting that my generalization covers every aspect of Christianity, but in the main I think it holds.

[3] Frederick William Hosmer (1840-1929), “Thy Kingdom Come on Bended Knee,” in The Hymnal 1982 (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1985), 615.

Dan Pure responds

Excellent and thought-provoking, my dear friend. Judgment happens every day from the infinitesimal to the judgments rendered out daily in courts. Justice, on the other hand, is a calling like Jesus returning. To borrow Derrida's term, justice is a haunting. Justice leaves us haunted and restless, like waiting for the Day of Redemption that is always just out of reach.