The final judgment: sunrise of Christ's liberating justice

Our lives are shaped in part by our expectations for the future-our hope and our anxieties. In the current US context, the pursuit of happiness, the prevalence of anxiety, and the will to power together stimulate apocalyptic fantasies and an accompanying friend-foe mentality in politics and religion. Many believe that judgment rests either with a wrathful God or with each human being. But final judgment rests in the hands of Christ, the crucified and risen conqueror and victor over sin, death, and hell. The justice Christ will wield at the end is the same as the justice he proclaimed in his preaching: God's creative justice which brings the victims justice and puts the perpetrators right. This justice does not consign some to heaven and others to hell. Rather, it opens into the of the world to come in which all is reconciled with God. Christians may anticipate this new creation even while living in an unjust, hostile, and divided world, by taking sides with the poor, the weak, and the victims of violence. Future Expectations and Present World Views Our life is not only shaped by memory and tradition but by future expectations in anxiety and hope as well. There is always a correlation between personal life expectations and our way of life, and between public future perspectives and our present worldviews. Let us review some of the spirits of our times. The American way of life was and still is shaped by trust in an irresistible and incessant progress into a glorious future of unlimited possibilities and inexhaustible resources. The future is always better than the past, and the past is at best a prologue to the future. Because a happy life is destined for us, the pursuit of happiness is a fundamental human right in the US Constitution. Belief in progress was not different in Germany at the beginning of modern times. I shall lead you into glorious times, promised Kaiser Wilhelm II to his subjects in the German Reich. Two years later he sent them into World War I, where the most advanced nations of humankind destroyed each other with the most advanced weapons of mass annihilation: poison gas. Belief in unending progress in science, technology, economy, and last but not least in morality is nothing but secularized millennialism. The religious expectation of the millennium of Christ was translated into the future golden age of humankind. Because in the Christian expectation Satan was bound for a thousand years (Rev. 20:2), a secular moral optimism shaped the modern culture of the nineteenth century. The founding fathers of the United States had a strong messianic faith: the New World Order of peace and democratic self-government of the people were their global vision. On the one-dollar note we still read novus ordo seclorum, the new world order. Europeans today no longer share this dream of perfection. The fear of catastrophes is much more deeply rooted in our souls. The twentieth century was for us an age of anxiety, with innumerable crimes against humanity, mass murder, and displaced persons in prison camps, refugee camps, concentration camps and the Gulag Archipelago. Our existential question is no longer: How can we complete God's unfinished future by progress in science, economy, and education? But much more: Is there a justice higher than inhuman brutality and crimes? With wounded memories of human catastrophes in mind many are saying, No, there was and there is no higher justice. The law of the jungle is that the stronger win, the weaker are lost. The reckless and cynical will to power justifies all means, and success sanctifies every brutality. There is no God; therefore everything is allowed. In the times of Darwinism this was a justification for the supremacy of the white race, white racism, and colonialism. In our time of global turbo-capitalism, the survival of the fittest is the only law respected by all global players. There is no higher justice; the godless are victorious, the violent win. …