Who’s the Judge?

Rob Bell stirred up a quite the controversy with his book Love Wins. I haven’t read it, though I feel like I have read it through osmosis. The basic premise of the book is a questioning of our preconceived notions about judgement. Questioning is always a good thing. It is like iron, sharpening our heads and hearts and souls. Through questioning comes learning and knowledge. If we don’t have disequilibrium we will never have knowledge.

Let me repeat, I haven’t read the book. Taking a step back from the book, the response to the book has brought to the front a full spectrum of theological questions concerning judgment:

Who is saved? How they are saved? How do they exist in the afterlife?

and the converse:

Who is damned? How they are damned? How do they exist (if at all) in the afterlife?

I think that the questions of judgment stirred up in response to the Love Wins debate on both sides are adventures in missing the point.

Why? Because these questions are stated from our human perspective.  This is because our theology of judgement is from an Enlightenment perspective. In Western theology and philosophy there is an error that we fall into, as Descartes did, of proving God’s existence through our own. Descartes was a thinking person, therefore he was a being, and therefore there was a Being. This frames the basis for God’s existence in theology and philosophy on our terms.

We have done the same with the judgement debate. We say God is the judge, but then tell God what his judgement should be, as if any person actually knows what happens to a 13 year old girl who dies in the jungles of South America or Compton or Beverly Hills. We try to extrapolate and surmise we know what happens to babies or people who haven’t heard the gospel or who have backslid and any other vague salvific hypothetical we can think of.

These are good intentions, to try to assure ourselves of matters that are left to the will of God. But there is the rub: it is God’s will not ours.

It is not our role to be judge.

More importantly: it is not our role to announce the verdict over anyone. To do so smacks of hubris and idolatry, because it puts our morality and equity above God’s. In our own court of law only a judge may hand down a sentence and judgement. The defendant or prosecutor has his own opinion as to what the sentence and judgement may be, but it is only for the judge to decide. How more so should it be for God’s judgement!

It is not our role to be judge or to pronounce judgement. We have been given a great role of our own: to worship. You may ask, how does worship relate to judgement? We worship because we believe that God is the King. As Lord of Heaven and Earth we bow to his will. So, let us put away our limbos and ages of accountability. Let us put away our hypotheticals and our convoluted theological puzzles. Let us go forward and proclaim God as the one who is coming, as the Psalmist writes:

Say among the nations, “The LORD is king!
The world is firmly established; it shall never be moved.
He will judge the peoples with equity.”
Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
let the field exult, and everything in it.
Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy
before the LORD; for he is coming,
for he is coming to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness,
and the peoples with his truth. (Psalm 96)