Judgement- who gets f'd and who doesn't?

One of the chapters in the book is called ‘Jesus, the Coming Judge’. This chapter too was helpful to me. The idea of judgment is one I’ve struggled with greatly- especially when it’s used in a vindictive subtle F you to those who the teacher/preacher looks down upon…or to scare us into a guilt laden ‘Oh my God is going to smite me’ lifestyle. I’ve also had difficulty with statements such as ‘God MUST be _________’. Surely God is bigger than the words we choose to define him?! (I hope my masters will center around that idea):

‘We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned for. It causes people to shout for joy and the trees of the field to clap their hands. In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world of rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment. ’

‘The main point to notice, once more, is that all the future judgment is highlighted basically as good news, not bad. Why so? It is good news, first, because the one through whom God’s justice will finally sweep the world is not a hard-hearted, arrogant, or vengeful tyrant but rather the Man of Sorrows, who was acquainted with grief; the Jesus who loved sinners and died for them…’

‘In particular, the present rule of the ascended Jesus Christ and the assurance of his final appearing in judgment should give us- which goodness knows we need today- some clarity and realism in our political discourse. Far too often Christians slide into a vaguely spiritualised version of one or other major political system or party. What would happen if we were to take seriously our stated belief that Jesus Christ is already the Lord of the world and that at his name, one day, every knee would bow?
You might suppose that this would merely inject a note of pietism and make us then avoid the real issues- or indeed, to attempt a theocratic takeover. But to think in either of those ways would show how deeply we have been conditioned by the Enlightenment split between religion and politics. What happens if we reintegrate them? As with specifically Christian work, so with political work done in Jesus’s name: confessing Jesus as the ascended and coming Lord frees us from needing to pretend that this or that program or leader has the key to utopia (if only we would elect him or her). Equally, it frees up our corporate life from the despair that comes when we realize that once again our political systems let us down. The ascension and appearing of Jesus constitutes a radical challenge to the entire structure of the Enlightenment (and of course several other movements). And since our present Western politics is very much the creation of the Enlightenment, we should think seriously about the ways in which, as thinking Christians, we can and should bring that challenge to bear.

I know this is giving a huge hostage to fortune, raising questions to which I certainly don’t know the answers, but I do know that unless I point all this out one might easily get the impression that these ancient doctrines are of theoretical or abstract interest only.

They aren’t.

People who believe that Jesus is already Lord and that he will appear again as judge of the world are called and equipped (to put it mildly) to think and act quite differently in the world from those who don’t’.

‘I believe we can today restate the doctrine of final judgment I find it quite impossible, reading the NT on the one hand and the newspaper on the other, to suppose that there will be no ultimate condemnation, no final loss, no human beings to whom, as C.S Lewis put it, God will eventually say “Thy will be done”.

I wish it were otherwise,

but one cannot forever whistle “There’s a kindeness in God’s mercy” in the darkness of Hiroshima, of Auschwitz, of the murder of children and the careless greed that enslaves millions with debts not their own. Humankind cannot, alas, bear very much reality, and the massive denial of reality by the cheap and cheerful universalism of Western liberalism has a lot to answer for’.

While I think I agree with what he’s saying above, I am aware that it’s not helpful to stop with the quote here (as many justice/hell/fire and brimstone/let them burn they deserve it frameworks would cry out for [Wright refers to them, perhaps more lovingly, as overenthusiastic preachers and teachers]) but to continue…

‘But if there is indeed final condemnation for those who, by their idolatry, dehumanize themselves and drag others down with them, the account I have suggested of how this works in practice provides a somewhat different picture from those normally imagined.


The traditional view is that those who spurn God’s salvation, who refuse to turn from idolatry and wickedness, are held forever in conscious torment. Sometimes this is
sharpened up by overenthusiastic preachers and teachers who claim to know precisely which sorts of behavior are bound to lead to hell and which, thought reprehensible, are still forgivable.' (Ricky Gervais deals with this humorously in his latest audio books- all of which everyone should buy)


‘The description of the New Jerusalem in chapters 21 and 22 (of Rev) is quite clear that some categories of people are ‘outside’: the dogs the fornicators, those who speak and make lies.

But then,

just when we have in out minds a picture of two nice, tidy categories,

the insiders and the outsiders,

we find that the river of the water of life flows out of the city; that growing on either bank is the tree of life, not a single tree but a great many ; and that ‘the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations’.

There is a great mystery here, and all our speaking about God’s eventual future must make room for it. This is not at all to cast doubt on the reality of final judgment for those who resolutely worshiped and served the idols that dehumanize us and deface God’s world. It is to say that God is always the God of surprises.’


He also talks of different problems which can arise when we’re childish with our understanding of hell and judgment:


‘Just as many who were brought up to think of God as a bearded old gentleman sitting on a cloud decided that when they stopped believing in such a thing they had therefore stopped believing in God, so many who were taught to think of hell as a literal underground location full of worms and fire, or for that matter as a kind of torture chamber at the center of God’s castle of heavenly delights, decided that when they stopped believing in that, so they stopped beleving in hell.

The first group decided that because they couldn't believe in childish image of God, they must be atheists. The second decided that because they couldn’t believe in childish images of hell, they must be universalists.


There are of course better reasons for becoming an atheist and better reasons for becoming a universailst…but , at least at a popular level, it is not the serious early Christian doctrine of final judgment that has been rejected but rather one or other gross caricature’