The Final Triumph of Grace

What does it mean to confess the Final Judgment in our creeds and catechisms? The most common approach to final judgment is about “Will I get to heaven?” That is, eternal life beyond the judgment is about personal salvation, and for the same common approach that decision is now so that any actual awe about that final judgment, an awe and fear that surely is present in European art, has evaporated. Its song is “When the Roll is Called Upon Yonder.”

Question 52 of the Heidelberg Catechism asks, “What comfort does the return of Christ ‘to judge the living and the dead’ give you?” and answers: “That in all affliction and persecution I may await with head held high the Judge from heaven who has already submitted himself to the judgment of God for me and has removed all the curse from me; that he will cast all his enemies and mine into everlasting condemnation, but he shall take me, together with all his elect, to himself into heavenly joy and glory.”

Ziegler develops a few themes from this catechism that shift the substance from me and my salvation forever and ever to God’s liberating work for the cosmos. We are looking at Philip Ziegler, Militant Grace: The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology.

Ziegler begins with Kant’s approach to morality, immortality and the existence of God before turning to Jüngel and Moltmann. So here’s what he says about Kant, beginning with some classical summarizing of abstractions:

In short, a happy conspiracy of the supreme power of moral order and the infinite extension of the time of our autonomous moral agency renders intelligible the moral world and our lives within it.

Immortality is needed for the good life to be good and for that we need God.

The solution to the problem of perfecting the autonomous moral will in the rational world that the divine Legislator oversees is simply that, as a matter of practical necessity, we believe there will always be more time.

Ziegler contends this is inadequate:

Adjudged theologically, Kant’s moral religious vision is soteriologically anemic: the self-saving subject is afforded neither aid nor grace but only authorized to “believe in” there being space to continue to struggle on ad infinitum. Here we are not so much saved by the bell as saved by the fact that the bell never rings to call time on our moral endeavors to realize the highest good and marry justice with happiness.

For Kant, the fragile finitude of the moral will is the problem to which immortality (as indefinite extension) provides a rational solution. Theology acknowledges that both the problem and its solution are far more radical.

It’s bigger and better and broader and deeper than Kant’s postulates:

Approached evangelically, eternal life stands as the crowning gift of the unimaginably gracious advent and realization of ultimate divine justice upon and for us, rather than being merely structurally instrumental to its human pursuit. Pace Kant, the determinative movement really is and can only be “from grace to virtue.” If this is so, then the primary theological task is to understand the nature and role of saving divine judgment as the necessary and creative ground and source of eternal life.

By thinking through the links between cross, resurrection, justification, and final judgment, these writers [Jüngel, Moltmann] try to attain to an understanding of eternal life adequate to the gospel.

The last judgment is a judgment unto life—eternal life—not least because it is the terminal defeat of death’s annihilating enmity.

It is also too common to see the last judgment so much about personal salvation that the great themes of the Bible — or Lord of the Rings or Star Wars — are sublimated or erased. What about new creation? These theologians let the last judgment serve themes of new creation. When it does, judgment becomes the act whereby God eliminates evil and establishes goodness, and when it does it is fundamentally revealed in the cross and resurrection. They anticipate the final judgment in the here and now.

Positively, Moltmann suggests that a properly Christian account of the last judgment must begin by recollecting both the concrete identity of the Judge and the scriptural concept of creative divine righteousness. It is Christ, who bears the sins of the world so that “grace also might reign through righteousness to eternal life” (Rom. 5:21 RSV), to whom humanity goes for final judgment; it is his “judgment seat” and his “day” (2 Cor. 5:10, Phil. 1:6). And he will be manifest then as the One he is: not a “divine avenger” or “final retaliator” but rather the “crucified and risen victor over sin, death and hell. As such, Christ will render the selfsame divine righteousness that has already erupted proleptically in his death and resurrection: a righteousness that creates justice, reconciles all things to God, and rectifies the distorted field of sinful relations.19 This is a creative, salutary, and healing righteousness—the work of the cross—that brings about liberation on all sides: justice and restoration for victims, transformation and rectification for perpetrators, genuine creaturely freedom for all.20 It is an act of love that “burns away everything which is contrary to God so that the person whom God has created will be saved.” This is judgment that one might actually implore and await with “head held high.”

Jüngel’s theories overlap with Moltmann’s and need not be detailed so I will move to the second major theme: not only is the final judgment a liberation for but it is a liberation from as well. From death and the enemies and evil and sin/Sin.

Salvation is an apocalyptic act of God, an incursion into our world to liberate it.

The theme is even more sharply present in Jüngel’s theology. Evangelical faith obediently trusts that “the God who in participating in man’s death gains victory over death” has done so for me.54 As Jüngel sees it, the antithesis between God and death structures the gospel itself. “God and death are opponents,” he writes, “they are enemies. The style in which God deals with death, and in which death also has to deal with God, is the history which faith tells about Jesus Christ.” As the annihilating power and consequence of sin, death is aggressively active, “repudiat[ing] life by hopelessly alienating men and God from one another.” Salvation is the business of dealing with death, as it were. For Jüngel, the death of Christ accomplishes the death of death: in the identity of the living God with the dead man Jesus, God meets death, taking its enmity and contradiction into himself in virtue of his own divine life. Death is thus overcome in and by the outworking of the eternal vitality of God’s love. When this victory is consummated, “even then” in the final judgment, human beings will be given to know that it is by grace that they are “undying, or better . . . plucked from out of death.”