Final Judgment, Elert

p. 47-49  (Italics and bolding are mine.)

The question of how a person's judgment "according to works" is to be reconciled with the evangelical doctrine of justifiacation by faith can be discussed only from this point of view.  This question has occupied many simple and also many learned Christians.  Justification is acquittal by God, and this fact is accepted by faith.  This acquittal remits all sin.  It sanctifies;  it removes the conflict between God and us.  If we are justified, we are justified completely and not merely in one segment of our life.  And how could it be different in the last Judgment, since also this judgment is executed by "God in Christ"?  However, numerous statements in the New Testament seem to contradict that.  Jesus Himself stated that the final Judgment will be decreed in accord with one's words and works, that He Himself will separate mankind on the basis of the performance or nonperformance of good works.  In line with that, also the First Letter of John assigns eternal significance to doing the will of God and to the committing of sin.  Indeed, also St. Paul, the great teacherof the doctrine of justification, speaks of a judgment that depends on works, both in a good and in a bad sense...  Does all of this have merely a dialectical--in this instance, rhetorical--meaning, as Albrecht Ritschl opined?  Are these "Jewish remnants" which cannot be reconciled with the "Christian concept of God"?  Or conversely, does not the evangelical doctrine of justification founder on this fact, as the Romanists maintain?

This seeming contradiction stems from an incorrect conception of justification.  It fails to realize that justification, understood forensically in the sense of the New Testament, is a real judgment of God.  By it justice is meted out to each individual.  It really treats every personas a sinner.  It compels him to stand mutely before the Judge.  His sin is unsparingly uncovered.  His sin is not ignored, but it is remitted.  It is not the sin that is justified but the sinner, that is, when he is ready to submit completely to the judgment of God.  The sinner is declared righteous;  but sin is never declared to be righteousness.  For that very reason we must formulate differently the question of how judment "according to works" relates to justification by faith.  It must read:  Why should justification be different in the last Judgment?  For here "the secrets of men," "the things now hidden in darkness," "the purposes of the heart" are disclosed (Rom. 2:16; 1 Cor. 4:5).  The difference between this and the judicial act of justification, which is passed on us during our earthly life, consists only in the fact that now there is absolutely no longer any  escape from the final disclosure of all secrets, and that we can no longer decide whether or not we want to declare ourselves guilty.

This final and complete disclosure of sin is punishment.  It brings home to man his lifelong opposition to God and thus also his remoteness from God and from the life of God.  What other punishment could we imagine to equal this?  The seriousness of this judment inheres in the fact that it is God's judgment, that it reveals the true relationship of man to his Judge, and that it at the same time executes this judgment.  Just as sin is not an objective defect but personal opposition to God, thus the penalty too is not an objective misfortune but the painful experience of personal remoteness from Him.  Together with the discolsure of all sin, this remoteness too becomes an element in the judgment.  It is in keeping with these terms that every person receives his measure of punishment.

Self-evidently something corresponding to this applies also to the works which "are done in God."  These are the works which Christ's disciples perform, works which also Christ perfoms as He fulfills the will of the Father, indeed works which the Father dwelling in Christ Himself performs (John 14:10).  The disciples deal with each other as Chrsit deals with them (John 13:15).  These are the works of love.  By these works, by this proof of love, Christ's disciples shall be known to all men (John 13:35).  This thought, which finds a number of parallels also in Paul's writings, in reality expresses nothing other than Christ's announcement in the Gospel of Matthew, namely, that He will separate mankind at the end of time on the basis of the performance or the non-performance of works of love (25:31 ff.).  This pericope in Matthew can be isolated just as little as can the corresponding passages in the Fourth Gospel that we have considererd.  Further, the Gospel of Matthew is aware that the personal decision of man for or against Christ constitutes the criterion for the final separation (10:32).  The judgment pericope warns against an eudaemonic, happiness-producing morality whose purpose is to bring pleasure to the doer.  Works of genuine love are performed exclusively for the sake of others.  Paul declares that love does not seek its own.  It would destroy itself if it were to perform good works for the purpose of its own bliss.  Genuine love can thrive only when man breaks out of his self-centered position in life.  Love is the criterion of the transformed life, and thus it is the proof that God abides in us and we in Him (1. John 4:13).  It bears its own reward because it springs from the fact that "He first loved us."  Also in the last Judgment it can find no greater reward than is there revealed and put on record forever.

But neither the preserved records of sins and of good works nor the corresponding punishment or reward executed on them can form the basis for the final separation of all men.  This results, as already stated, from a judicial sentence which is a divine act of absolute freedom, as all acts of God are.  It is inconceivable that God might act under the constraint of deeds performed by man  in one way or another during his earthly life.  On the other hand, God's freedom is never tyrannical arbitrariness either.  In the side of His personality, (or being), turned toward us, His free act manifests iself by the fact that He can pardon us despite His wrath over sin.  He gives expression to this freedom inasmuch as the judgment takes place "before the judgment seat of Christ."

We can conceive of that only as we conceive of justification.  Man is summoned before God's judment;  there he stands mute.  All he can do is to listen.  The decisive question during his earthly life is whether he listens or whether he closes his ears.  Readiness to listen is readiness to die--readiness to hear the condemning sentence.  We cannot face the last Judgment with a different attitude.

However, this attitude alone does not yet constitute our justification.  If we are justified "by faith," we are not justified because of the subjective attitude of faith but because of the objective content of faith, that is, because this faith is faith in Christ.  The fact that we must appear before the judgment seat of Christ in the last Judgment tells us that the final decision rests with Him who is the content of our faith--with the Christ in whom we believe--because He is our righteousness.  But it also tells us that the final decision rests with Him who cannot pardon him who refuses to lend an ear to His Word.  But in the last Judgment even the most obstinate ear will be opened, not to give man a chance to reconsider his decision but to shut the door to that possibility forever.

While I was gone...

While I was gone a 19 year old male from the sister congregation died in a car accident.

This leads me back to the Elert on "Last Things" of recent reading.

To be sure, there is a death which we regard as premature.  The literatures of all nations are replete with lamentations over death in life's springtime.  Indeed, death often enough plays the role of the despoiler.  It shatters what was still incomplete.  It thwarts life's last great undertaking.  Like a mischievous young lad it wantonly decapitates the sunflower and keeps its seed from ripening.  However, we must ask whether this universal lament really understands--or purports to understand--death's meaning for the dead person himself.  Death which prematurely creates a gap in the family circle entails pain for the survivors.  A child's death is most painful for its mother, not for the child itself.  To speak plainly on the physical side, the stench of decomposition is nauseous not for the dead but for the living.  Particularly the Christian, who seeks to view death from the perspective of God, will hesitate to cite God's judgment in support of man's opinion about death's untimeliness.

For the Christian, physical death relates only partly to the question of God's providence, which is posed to him by his entire life.  But this question also places us inescapably into the antithesis of law and gospel.  the Law attests the judgment of god.  It reveals that our entire life is "judged" in a twofold sense:  It is subject to the erdict of God's judgment, and it pursues an irreversible course toward death.  Under the Law, death has teleological significance for all of our earthly life.  The earthly way is a way to death.  whatever it may be that constitutes life itself, it cannot prevent death, and it is simultaneously a disintegration of life because it consumes the time of life which is delimited in advance by death.  Under the Law the earthly way is the way of death and nothing else.  The apostle's statement that the law of God is inscribed also into the hearts of the heathen is confirmed by nothing so much as by the wisdom of the Greeks, which declares that the happiest man is he who was never born.  Since he does not live, he also need not die.  To live means to have to die.

But all of this is not the evangelical faith.  Faith derived from the Gospel is faith against the Law, against appearances, against the God of wrath and of judgment, because it is faith in God's freedom in the God of life, in the God who keeps His promises.  This faith breaks every earthly hold and casts itself unreservedly into the arms of God.  Faith can exempt nothing from this surrender to God, neither the biological nor the ethical content of its earthly existence.  Nor can it differentiate here between temporal and eternal life.  Nor can it exempt from it the necessity to die a physical death.  If I believe that God has created me, that He preserves my earthly life "out of fatherly, divine goodness and mercy, " as the catechism states, how could I then believe that this fatherly, divine goodness and mercy suddenly ceases to operate when He lets me die?  If physical death signified God's judgment to faith, it would also be His judgment on faith.  If the apostle had conceived of it thus, how then could he have a veritable desire "to depart" (analysai, Phil. 1:23)?  No, physical death has lost its terrors for faith.  Faith receives death from the hands of a merciful God exacly as it receives life.  As has been said, "Death has become my sleep." pp. 14,15.

I have not written here about the pain, and I don't think I ever will.   The gap is not just in the family circle either.  This pain and this helplessness over and against such death calls forth a huge response, either deep anger or faith. 

The pain continues, even if it may abate.  Again and again, faith is needed, faith to the very end.

I sometimes "cite God's judgment in support of man's opinion about death's untimeliness."  But this is completely beyond our knowing.  I will worry about myself, and today, and my own repentance and faith.





"Yet, in my flesh, I will see God."
Job.

P.S.  In looking at the Google images on burial of a child, one finds that most of them are of non-caucasians.  This denies the reality of death of children in the developed world, even at peace.   We lose multitudes to accidents, drug overdoses, suicide and abortion.  There are many, many mothers out there.  There is death and there is pain--even in suburbia.  Life is never so neat, that it is not lived at the edge of death.  We just often think that it is not.

"the line of battle passes directly through the hearts of the believers"

From Werner Elert "Last Things", which I discovered among our books. (CPH 1974).  It must have belonged to my father-in-law.

I've been pondering this section, see below,  from p. 44 and 45, chapter 7 "The Last Judgment".

But the parousia of Jesus has a deeper and more decisive meaning for the last Judgment.  "We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ"  (2 Cor. 5:10).  Why before the judgment seat of Christ?  Why not before the judgment seat of God?  First of all, we are here expressly reminded of the fact that the expectation of the last Judgment is an expectation of faith.  As all else that we preceive in faith finds its basis in "God in Christ,"  so does also the expectation of the last Judgment.  God without Christ is only the God of wrath whose judgment would be nothing but death and final destruction for us.  On the other hand, "God in Christ" confronts us with the call of the Gospel, with the Spirit's exhortation (paraclesis):  "Be ye reconciled to God."  It is this "God in Christ"  whose final judgment we are expecting, the God who established the Word of reconciliation in our midst, the God who offers us reconciliation through the Paraclete.  The expectation of our appearance before the judgment seat of Christ is but the eschatological conclusion of the judgmental mission which Christ fulfills for the entire cosmos since His incarnation.  The Gospel of John speaks of this Christ-effected judgment as both present and as in the future (12:31; 5:21ff).  Wherever we encounter the judgment of God in the sense of this Christ-induced crisis, it is preceded by the coming of Christ.  It was so during His earthly mission;  and it is so also during the entire course of history after Christ.  And so is also His last coming the presupposition of the last Judgment.

It is its finality which distinguishes the last Judgment from the permanent, ongoing judgment of post-Christian history.  After the final Judgment there is no more chance.  That is why unbelief is pursued by the Gospel invitation (paraclesis) to the very last moment in the hope that unbelief might recognize that the twelfth hour is approaching.  And on the other hand, faith is threatened by apostasy to the very last moment.  The last Judgment marks the end of every possibility to make pro and con decisions.  Judgment Day takes for granted that there is a Last Day, a day which terminates history as the conflict between belief and unbelief.  But since it is also preceded by Christ's parousia, it not only ends the possibility of decisions but it is also a separation of believers from unbelievers, and that separation is final.  The final appearance of the Son of Man silences the last doubt as to His person and His mission.  Now the Judge over all reveals Himself.  Up to that time mankind is urged to make a decision.  In the last Judgment He commands silence.  How it is He who now makes His decision.

The decision of the last Judgment involves, first of all, a final separation .  The historical struggle between belief and unbelief is not a conflict between clearly defined groups of men, or even between two tangible worldly societies.  Most generally, he line of battle passes directly through the hearts of the believers.  Therefore a well-known theologian is correct when he states that "the christian faith never leaves the fear of judgment totally behind it, but it can certainly rise above it."  That is not only a psychological fact;  that is something inherent in the essence of faith and hope.  Appearances run counter to both;  and death is the most obvious factor to oppose them.  This very faith, which learn to understand death from God's perspective, therefore always faces the haunting question of whether physical death (since it is also a condemnation) is not after all only the beginning of the final condemnation.  That is, of course, a temptation which faith fends off.  But it can fend it off only as it adheres to the promise which is contradicted by appearances.  Viewed in that light, the last Judgment is the fulfillment of God's promise, because it removes the contradiciton between faith and appearances.  In that way the final Judgment becomes a separation also for a Christian.  Now faith and temptation (Anfechtung), doubt and hope no longer exist side by side in the same person.  Only faith and hope--not their opposites--remain.

What is more, while the historical conflict between belief and unbelief is waged within an individual person, the final Judgment is a separation of persons.  In this respect it is an actual judgment and an actual last judgment.  It cannot be anticipated or analyzed in any way.  We do not know which predominates in us, the hours of faith or the years of doubt, for both often dwell side by side in the same heart.  We know that still less with regard to our future life here on earth, and least of all do we know if of others, no matter whether these are--as judged by appearances--fellow believers or advocates of unbelief.  To achieve final clarity in this matter requires a judicial verdict pronounced by Him to whom not only the totality of our earthly life is known but who also alone can judge what has become of everyone of us with regard to belief and unbelief. 

So much for today.  It strikes me the most that "the line of battle passes directly through the hearts of the believers".  I pause at the "decision" statements, but I read them as whatever the response is to that call of "be reconciled to God" (who offers you his pardon).

As someone has as her tagline:  "Lord I believe; help my unbelief!"