Gracious Judge, Holy Saviour

In recent years we have had conversations with numerous EMC ministers grappling with the morality of the church’s teaching on salvation through Christ alone, heaven, hell and judgment. We wish to offer our perspective on the glorious gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. We see in these questions a quest to gain a deeper, more transforming vision of the mighty acts of God on our behalf. We affirm the quest.

We are not intending to end conversation on these matters or to suggest some new creed or statement of faith for our conference. Think of this as a commentary on our statement of faith, intended to provide teaching and elicit response.

These themes have become controversial in our lifetimes. Several cultural shifts affect how we think: travel and immigration have introduced us to people of other religions who are not the evil people some of our forebears may have imagined; we have shifted in how we think about restorative justice, punishment and torture, making us uneasy about God’s punitive justice; because of a steady diet of novels and movies we have a much greater ability than pre-moderns to enter others’ thoughts; psychology has deepened our appreciation for the complexity of human choices; and we have more awareness of how our theology is affected by our culture, language and upbringing.

But perhaps most importantly, at some level we are all secular people now. We find it difficult to imagine that the “good life” we seek awaits the final triumph of the Lord of Hosts now in a pitched battle against the powers of darkness. The good life for secular people comes not by God’s mighty acts, but from capitalism (to give us wealth), a centralized state (to give us safety), modern science (to solve our problems) and a host of regulations, bureaucrats, and technologies to move it all invincibly onwards. In this secular climate, the scriptural picture of salvation by divine judgment can seem like an embarrassing left-over of medieval barbarity.

Perhaps in this secular climate we evangelical Christians have been tempted to oversimplify what conversion and salvation mean, reducing it to a simple change of status before God. “All you need to do is pray this sinner’s prayer” or “all you need to do is accept Jesus as your personal Saviour” and your eternal status before God switches from damnation to salvation. In this oversimplifying there is little awareness that one is being conscripted in the Lamb’s war to establish the new creation. There is little awareness that to be saved is to take one’s stand inside the crushing pressure that exists between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of a world that revolts against the Lamb’s suffering, loving, non-resistant reign.

But the more conversion gets oversimplified to fit a secular age, the more damnation seems immoral. To face damnation for becoming a minion of Satan and hurling oneself against the Lamb of God has a certain logic to it. To face damnation for having the incorrect “forensic” status before God, not so much.¹

These questions become intensely personal. What difference will the thousands of choices I make in this life have in the afterlife? What will happen to my friends who see nothing compelling in Jesus? What will happen to those who have never heard of Jesus at all?

Can God be trusted with these questions?

Sculpture “Font” by David Robinson

Salvation through Christ alone

Christ as universal and particular
universalparticular²particularone³

His ascension does not erase his particularity. When we finally meet Jesus in heaven we will meet that one Jewish carpenter with nail marks in his hands. The church’s bifocal vision of the universal and particular Christ is a fathomless mystery.
Can this one Jewish man be the Saviour?
But this then raises the troubling issues we may have about proclaiming salvation through Christ alone. How can someone so local and limited in the scope of his life, whose message the church will only ever preach to a small portion of the human race, say “I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture”? ⁴ Why did God choose so small a gate that apparently so few will find?

And yet this is the scandal that we are called to proclaim as good news of great joy. This is a tremendous mystery that can never be reduced to a formula. The universal Christ is the particular Christ and the particular Christ is the universal Christ. They are one and the same.

The more we exalt Christ as universally Lord of all, the more faith we have that he can draw near to each person within his dominion. As cosmic Lord, the Crucified can knock on every door, asking to enter every home, claim lordship over every nation, and demand each person’s allegiance and faith. He has access to his own dominion in ways we cannot fathom. Every creature is asked, in some way or another, to bend the knee before this particular man.

This exaltation of Christ means “there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” ⁵ Each person, institution and power stands or falls by its worship of this singular Lord. This is a stumbling block we nevertheless proclaim with joy, knowing all the while that we ourselves cannot fully grasp it. Christ is the hope, the only hope, but the real hope of the nations.

Scripture also teaches that it is only by faith that we personally respond to this reconciliation with the Creator Christ. In response to the announcement of the good news we surrender with both inner assent and the outward obedience of kingdom living. We enlist in the army of the Lamb to forgive our enemies, love our neighbours and surrender ourselves to God.

But can we know what constitutes saving faith? How much, or what kind of faith is “enough”? Here we must maintain two paradoxical postures. First, the Bible teaches us how to respond to Christ. In the gospels Jesus variously tells people to leave their nets and follow him, give their possessions to the poor, love as the good Samaritan, ask for healing, or simply do the will of the Father. ⁶ The problem was in the will to respond, not in understanding what was being asked.

But secondly, though we are told how to respond, it is only God who can finally judge whether a response is real saving faith. We do not see into the heart as God does. It is our task to proclaim the good news, seeking a faithful response. It is God’s task to judge whether anyone’s response to him is genuine faith. God may see faith in people in whom we detect no faith. There may also be people we think are faithful in appearance that God nevertheless finds lacking.

Heaven

Jesus taught his disciples that their lives would now resemble a woman in labour: “You will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy.” ⁷ This is a stunning reversal!

Christ’s words of comfort on the eve of his death have rung like bells in the hearts of despairing warriors down through the centuries: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” ⁸ The Christian life as taught by Jesus makes no sense without heaven. It is only through vibrant hope in the promise of life with Jesus in heaven that we can live the life of suffering, sacrifice, costly love of enemies, and voluntary poverty through radical generosity that Jesus models. Without the new heaven and new earth as our destiny, earthly suffering becomes a misery with no hope.

But heaven in the New Testament is more than just reward. It is a vision for how to live today. Christ begged his Father, “Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” ⁹ He asks that the lives of his disciples in church community might even now be an experimental outpost of heaven, a foreign colony of the future realm, lived out within enemy territory.

The biblical vision of the kingdom of heaven is lived by the church with weakness and only partial fulfillment. We see now only in a mirror dimly. But this is essentially why Mennonite churches have refused to kill their enemies, even when this goes against the grain of a worldly logic. The church of Christ must attempt to be an example to the world of what life will be like when Christ’s reign is fully present.

We do not believe that the whole debate about whether finally we go up to heaven or heaven comes down to us is very important. Scripture uses evocative, poetic language to portray the afterlife and anyone who tries to create a clear geography of heaven is misusing the Bible. This is language designed to stoke our longing and guide our living more than to give precise details. The New Testament speaks of both a radical continuity and a radical discontinuity between our lives now and our life in the new kingdom. ¹⁰

Hell

¹¹¹²¹³A biblical theology of divine wrath

Divine wrath culminates in the cross of Christ. As the Old Testament draws to a close, the reader comes to the sickening realization that even the people God chose as his holy ones, his beloved Israel, have now become the enemy of the new creation. There is none righteous. The only path forward is for God to now become an Israelite, becoming both the giver and the receiver of wrath. ¹⁴ God in Christ took up and lived both sides of the covenant, the faithful Lord and the faithless human. On the cross all the imprecatory psalms against the enemy and the furious rants of the prophets against Israel (and Babylon), God now turns upon himself. God defeats the reign of sin in an act of infinite self-sacrificial love.

The cross is thus at once the clearest, most consuming event of the wrath of God against the reign of sin and the most potent revelation of God’s love. We cannot understand hell unless we understand what Christ experienced as the judged one on Good Friday. It is on the cross that the judgment of hell is united with the love of God. It is united when Christ descends to the dead on our behalf and in our place.

But if the cross is the culmination of God’s wrath, turned in love upon himself in the Son of God, does there still remain a hell to be feared in the afterlife? Will not the paradoxical power of the Lamb who was slain finally win over all oppressors and evildoers to bow in humble gratitude? Obviously in the Old Testament God fought against the wicked to destroy them, but does the cross now make this divine destruction obsolete?

When we look at the New Testament, we see the opposite is true. As God draws near to the world in more open, tender and vulnerable revelation in Christ, and especially as he appears in infinite self-giving love on the cross, people and powers are goaded into two opposing responses: worship or revolt.

This is why it is only really in the New Testament that hell appears openly for the first time. As God moves into the world in greater openness, the powers of darkness respond with ever-greater ferocity, a spasm of rage that is utterly self-destructive. The book of Revelation depicts this clash; as the crucified Lamb is revealed to be the true ruler of history, the seven seals are opened and worldly powers ride forth to destroy the saints. ¹⁵ An “upside down trinity” of dragon, sea-beast and earth-beast goad the revolt of the people of the earth. ¹⁶ What these mythical depictions show is the gathering rage the loving, nonresistant slain Lamb provokes from the world. As these powers wage war against the Lamb, their evil collapses down upon them. ¹⁷ This is why those who most believe in the cross most need to preach the reality of hell. The Bible gives us no reason to believe that those who revolt against the Lamb will all finally be convinced to repent. Evil will entrench and even grow until the end of the age, and were it not for God’s promise to put an end to it finally, the “poor in spirit,” the little ones of earth would despair and need to resort to violence. The words of theologian (and pacifist) Miroslav Volf state vividly how the wrath of God is the basis for preaching love in the face of evil:

To the person who is inclined to dismiss it [divine vengeance], I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone…. Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. ¹⁸ Hell is good news for those who have no alternative in life but to wait for God’s judgment and vindication. Rather than sitting in “the quiet of a suburban home,” the church must take its stand with the downtrodden, poor and oppressed of the earth. As we live in solidarity with the oppressed, hell becomes not only logical, but the very basis for our refusal to use violence now.

Hell as eternal torment or annihilation
One current debate in the EMC centres around the question of whether hell is the “eternal conscious torment” of sinners or is rather the total destruction and annihilation of sinners. We have those in our conference who make biblical arguments for either position. There are passages that seem to suggest an ongoing conscious torment. ¹⁹ Other passages seem to suggest utter destruction and the end of existence. ²⁰

This is an unresolved exegetical disagreement between scholars. We would here simply point out that biblical teaching may not allow us to determine exactly what the nature of hell will be. The message of warning we are tasked to preach does not hinge on us knowing exactly what the final defeat of evil will look like. Like the images of heaven stoking longing and creating a vision of how we are to live in the present, biblical images of fire, worms or maggots, sulphur or brimstone, and fire from heaven are meant to impress us with the eventual outcome of an evil life and are warnings for how not to live in the present.

Nor should we deploy this language to frighten people, or to manipulate them into repentance. Hell is real, and the possibility of total loss is something we need to preach, but this does not mean it is meant to frighten children. It is meant to assure those powers, both human and angelic, who wage war against the kingdom of God that a justice will be wrought on behalf of those they have slaughtered and oppressed.

God will not be mocked, and he vows that the martyrs under the altar crying “Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?” will not be deferred forever; their vindication will come after they have waited only “a little longer.” ²¹

Judgment²²

A gracious and holy judge
Many people have little difficulty accepting the good news that God will destroy evil finally. However, we wonder whether God can be trusted to apply this justly in individual cases. Yet, the reader of Scripture is overwhelmed by the incessant refrain that the judgment of God brings joy, relief, rest, shalom and vindication for those God loves: his holy little ones.²³
The central theological reality of judgment is God’s ultimate enactment of justice and righteousness. A central teaching of the Christian tradition is that there is coming a day when God will untangle the frustrating mix of truth and error, ugliness and beauty, goodness and evil that this earthly life presents. The Apostles’ Creed states that Christ “will come again to judge the living and the dead.” Indeed the whole gospel can be summed up in the good news that it is Jesus, the man who died on the cross for our sins; Jesus, who gave himself utterly for our salvation, draining all our condemnation, this is the man before whom we will finally stand at judgment. Paul declares to the Athenians that God “has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”²⁴

Who would we rather have as our judge? This is the biblical source of hope, to finally have righteousness established by someone who with infinite wisdom sees into our deepest soul (“his eyes were like a flame of fire”)²⁵ and who loves us more than we could ever love ourselves. A judge of infinite love, wisdom and righteousness meets us at the end of our journey and he will establish true justice with absolute freedom. This is a great source of boldness for the believer.²⁶

We have many questions about how exactly Christ’s judgment will fall on this or that person. Can Jesus truly make things right? We have no answer but to trust the character of the One who is to be our judge. Many of the vexing dilemmas we have about the “morality” of judgment, hell, and heaven are addressed by plunging deeper into a living awareness of who it is that is our judge. What has this judge proven about his care and love for his creatures? Where do our fallible but nevertheless real notions of fairness, justice and equity come from if not directly from this Saviour and Lord? Who could better serve as the world’s judge than the Son of Man who in one brief visit to the temple sent money tables flying, drew to himself the blind and lame and healed them, and sparked a children’s choir to erupt in song?²⁷

A troubling question
A recent Chinese convert to Christ in one of our EMC churches asked a troubling question: “I can see that Jesus is the truth that I believe in for my salvation, but what am I to think about my grandmother in China who died before ever hearing this message?” This probing question could also be asked of those who lived in the Old Testament, of those who have intellectual disabilities, or even of children too young to know.

It’s a hard question in part because the Bible does not seem to address it specifically. We have much in the New Testament about how saints in the Old Testament will be saved in spite of not knowing Jesus.²⁸ But there is little that can be found about people who seem to have received no revelation from God.

Rather than speculating on the eternal state of this grandmother it seems wise rather to simply offer a portrait of Christ who will be her judge. We know from abundant biblical testimony that God is just, fair, impartial and loving toward all he has made. His Word is “piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”²⁹ Out of the vast oceans of his wisdom it is a small matter for God to discern this grandmother’s situation and render a righteous judgment, even though he has not revealed to us exactly how he will respond.

The apostle Paul, after weaving through three dense chapters on the salvation of Jews and Gentiles in Romans 9–11 gasps finally, “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!”³⁰ We must maintain a keen sense that God’s judgments are unsearchable and inscrutable.

Repentance beyond the grave? This confidence in the righteous, unsearchable judgments of God may speak to a recent discussion in the EMC over whether God might offer a chance to repent in the afterlife.³¹ For some, envisioning such an opportunity alleviates the injustice felt about God condemning to hell those who had no chance to repent in this life. Advocates of this possibility point to passages such as 1 Peter 3:19 and 4:6 that can be interpreted as giving space for this kind of expectation. Also, Revelation 21:25 says that the gates of the city of heaven will never be shut.

On the other hand the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:26 seems to indicate that there is no possibility for crossing the fixed chasm after we die. Hebrews 9:27–28 states that after death there is only the possibility of judgment, and that when Christ “will appear a second time” it will not be “to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.”

We do not want to claim that God could not offer people such an opportunity in the afterlife, but is this where biblical hope lies? We suggest that rather than expecting a chance for repentance in the age to come it is better to simply trust that the God revealed in Scripture is able to come to a loving, righteous and fair judgment based on the life we have lived. The God who created us and is present to our deepest thoughts, who came to live among us and be our neighbour, who gave himself utterly on the cross for an opportunity to live with us forever, who has set himself against all wickedness on behalf of his little people, this God can be trusted to judge in ways that are both utterly just and infinitely loving. This God can be trusted to probe through the tangle of ignorance, blindness, hidden faith, deception, rebellion and genuine goodness that human life presents, and pronounce a just and fair judgment.³² In judgment we will meet one whose wisdom exceeds our own like the sun exceeds a candle.

For us now the task is to proclaim this Jesus as judge of the earth. We praise this man in our witness as the one before whom everyone will give an account for what they have done, whether good or evil. We proclaim this not with hand-wringing fear but with joy, knowing that there could not be better news for the world than the announcement that Jesus of Nazareth has been appointed their judge. But this news will be received with both worship and revolt. Each person needs to bow in obedience and worship.

Conclusion

“Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”³³

This letter deals with what the New Testament calls the “mystery” revealed in Christ.³⁴ A mystery is not a problem hard to figure out. A mystery is a reality that once “figured out,” only opens up to new depths of mystery. We never reach the bottom because revealing, learning and understanding a mystery only reveals more mystery. Such is the glorious reality of salvation.

As the EMC we are caught up in the grip of this mystery. Our first response must be wonder, awe and reverence before matters too deep for us. Then we must speak of what we have seen and heard. Our speech will not exhaust the mystery; thus it can be vigorous. We can be like excited children dashing about a newly discovered castle. It can also be contentious. Because we are wrestling with realities far beyond our grasp, we can debate, struggle and come together to a clearer wisdom. Let’s keep talking about these mysteries, admitting our doubts and fears, and giving one another courage (en-couragement).

Salvation is an objective fact we did not invent or contrive. We can believe it, ignore it or deny it, but that does not change its marvellous reality. We will sometimes disagree on aspects, but this too can lead to incredible learning. May God be praised for his gracious judgments!

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This letter was written by Layton Friesen and approved by the Board of Leadership and Outreach.
¹ This is not to say that salvation does not involved a change of status before God, only that if it is reduced to that in a simplified way, it is no longer apparent why it obviously should lead to eternal defeat and punishment.
² Col. 1:19–20. All Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
³ Mark 6:3.
⁴ John 10:9.
⁵ Acts 4:12.
⁶ Mark 1:16-20; Luke 19:1-10; 10:25-37; 5:17-20; Matt. 12:46-50.
⁷ John 16:16–21.
⁸ John 14:1–3.
⁹ Matt. 6:10.
¹⁰ 1 Cor. 15:35–50; Isa. 60; John 16:28.
¹¹ Luke 2:10.
¹² Rom. 12:19.
¹³ See, for example, Rev. 12:10–12; 14:8–11; 16:5–7; 19:17–21.
¹⁴ Malachi 3–4, literally the end of the Old Testament, can be read as a description of a desperate impasse that has come about between God and his people. Israel says, “it is vain to serve God” (3:14). But to the despair of the people of Israel before the wrath of God, the Lord promises a “sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings” (4:2). The Lord will send “the prophet Elijah…. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse” (4:5). In canonical perspective there could not be a more fitting ending to the Old Testament.
¹⁵ Rev. 6.
¹⁶ Rev. 13:3–4, 11–12.
¹⁷ Rev. 17:15–18. Some commentators have noted also how the war of the White Rider in Rev. 19:11–21 seems over before it begins. No sooner has the Rider gone forth than Satan’s armies are defeated by a mere sword from his mouth.
¹⁸ Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 304.
¹⁹ Matt. 13:49–50; Matt. 25:46; Luke 16:23.
²⁰ John 3:16; 2 Peter 3:5–10; Isa. 66:24.
²¹ Rev. 6:10–11.
²² The Bible’s discussion of judgment is vast; see Ex. 6:5–7; 2 Chron. 19:4–7; Ps. 4; 146:5–10; Isa. 9:6–7; Mal. 3:1–5; Matt. 25:31–46; Luke 1:46–55; John 3:16–21; 5:19–30; Rom. 2:1–16; 14:1–13; Heb. 9:23–28; James 2:12–13.
²³ One example can stand in for all the rest. In Isaiah 35 we are told, “Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you” (v. 4). Therefore “the wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom” (v. 1) and “the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped” (v. 5).
²⁴ Acts 17:31.
²⁵ Rev. 1:14.
²⁶ 1 John 4:16–18.
²⁷ Matt. 21:12–15.
²⁸ John 8:48–59; Rom. 4; Heb. 11.
²⁹ Heb. 4:12.
³⁰ Rom. 11:33. Note also in the judgment of sheep and goats in Matthew 25, both the sheep and the goats are surprised by the judgment handed down to them.
³¹ A recent book by retired EMC minister Arden Thiessen, Welcome to Hope! (self-published, 2019) devotes a chapter in favour of this possibility.
³² Rom. 2:4–11.
³³ Phil. 3:12.
³⁴ Col. 1:24-29.