Judgment: a setting for learning and practicing hope 

“He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”

From the earliest times, the prospect of the Judgment has influenced Christians in their daily living as a criterion by which to order their present life, as a summons to their conscience and, at the same time, as hope in God’s justice. Faith in Christ has never looked merely backward or merely upward, but always also forward to the hour of justice that the Lord repeatedly proclaimed.

In the arrangement of Christian sacred buildings, it became customary to depict the Lord returning as a King—the symbol of hope—at the east end; while the west wall normally portrayed the Last Judgment as a symbol of our responsibility for our lives—a scene which followed and accompanied the faithful as they went out to resume their daily routine. As the iconography of the Last Judgment developed, more and more prominence was given to its ominous and frightening aspects, which obviously held more fascination for artists than the splendor of hope.

In the modern era, the idea of the Last Judgment has faded into the background: Christian faith has been individualized and primarily oriented toward the salvation of the believer’s own soul, while reflection on world history is largely dominated by the idea of progress. The fundamental content of awaiting a final Judgment, however, has not disappeared, it has simply taken on a totally different form. The atheism of the 19th and 20th centuries is a type of moralism, a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested. Since there is no God to create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish justice.

In the face of this world’s suffering, protest against God is understandable. But the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. This idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope. No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and nothing can guarantee that the cynicism of power—whatever beguiling ideological mask it adopts—will cease to dominate the world.

The great thinkers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno were equally critical of atheism and theism. Horkheimer excluded the possibility of ever finding a this-worldly substitute for God while, at the same time, he rejected the image of a good and just God. Adorno also firmly upheld this total rejection of images, which naturally meant the exclusion of any “image” of a loving God. On the other hand, he also constantly emphasized this “negative” dialectic and asserted that justice —true justice—would require a world “where not only present suffering would be wiped out, but also that which is irrevocably past would be undone.” This would mean, however—to express it with positive and hence, for him, inadequate, symbols—that there can be no justice without a resurrection of the dead. Yet, this would have to involve “the resurrection of the flesh, something that is totally foreign to idealism and is in the realm of absolute spirit.”

Christians, likewise, must constantly learn from the strict rejection of images that is contained in God’s first commandment (cf. Exodus 20:4). The truth of negative theology was highlighted by the Fourth Lateran Council, which explicitly stated that “however great the similarity that may be established between Creator and creature, the dissimilarity between them is always greater.” In any case, for the believer the rejection of images cannot be carried so far that one ends up, as Horkheimer and Adorno would like, by saying “no” to both theses—theism and atheism. God has given himself an “image”: in Christ who was made man.

In Him who was crucified, the denial of false images of God is taken to an extreme.

God now reveals His true face in the figure of the sufferer who shares man’s God-forsaken condition by taking it upon himself. This innocent sufferer has attained the certitude of hope: There is a God, and God can create justice in a way that we cannot conceive, yet we can begin to grasp it through faith. Yes, there is a resurrection of the flesh. There is justice. There is an “undoing” of past suffering, a reparation that sets things aright. For this reason, faith in the Last Judgment is first and foremost hope—the need for which was made abundantly clear in the upheavals of recent centuries.

The purely individual need for a fulfillment that is denied to us in this life, for an everlasting love that we await, is certainly an important motive for believing that man was made for eternity. 

To be continued next week...

Spe Salvi Encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI to all “On Christian Hope” 

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Judgment: a setting for learning and practicing hope

“He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”

From the earliest times, the prospect of the Judgment has influenced Christians in their daily living as a criterion by which to order their present life, as a summons to their conscience and, at the same time, as hope in God’s justice. Faith in Christ has never looked merely backward or merely upward, but always also forward to the hour of justice that the Lord repeatedly proclaimed.