From Robert Lawrence Kuhn, host and creator of Closer To Truth:

“God’s judgment” strikes fear and dread. Every religion thunders its day of reckoning, few of them nice. We’ve all behaved in ways untoward, and settling ultimate accounts, should such be the case, forebodes no joy. But to me, because “God’s judgment” is supposed to be the core of “God’s plan,” to examine God’s judgment is to assess God’s existence.
Should it turn out that “the God of mercy” contradicts “the God of judgment,” then perhaps the whole God project is incoherent. If God does not exist, then the inconsistency of God’s judgment may be evidence to expose it.
If God does exist, and assuming God is merciful as well as just, maybe we’ve missed the meaning of God’s judgment.
So what is it, really?
Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne unabashedly asserts that “after our death, God judges us. We have to answer to our creator for the life that we have been given. And our creator will judge us on the basis of what we have made of that life.”
I go to the heart of what to me would seem almost like a logical contraction in the traditional concept of hell: infinite, everlasting punishment for finite, temporary sin. Torment forever as fair-and-just punishment for a few decades of bad behavior? For me, that would be hard to accept, no matter how bad. I ask Swinburne if such foreboding finality is the act of an all-good God?
“It’s best not regarded as a punishment,” he begins. “In our lives, all the time, we have to choose between doing good and doing evil. And it’s a characteristic of human beings that each time we do a good act, it’s easier to do a good act of that type the next time. And each time we do a bad act, it’s easier to do a bad act of that kind next time. Gradually, people form their character over their lives. People’s characters get more and more solidified. Clearly, what God hopes is that we will become better people. But it’s possible that most of the time, somebody chooses the bad, and the more one yields to the bad, the more insensitive one becomes to the good.”
Swinburne continues: “So what would a good God do with somebody who had totally annihilated his sensitivity to the good? Well, he could impose good character on that person. But that would mean that he was not being allowed a choice of forming his own character. Furthermore, then God would be saying to all of us: ‘Whatever you choose, in the end it’s not going to make any difference because I’m going to make you a certain sort of person.’ And that is not giving us ultimate freedom of what we are to be. What is central to Christianity and to some other religions is that in our lives we often have ultimate choices to make, which affects our eternal destiny.”
I ask Swinburne whether that eternal destiny, based on human choices in this brief life, fleetingly evanescent when compared with eternity, is permanent and irrevocable.
“It will be so if [a person] has annihilated his sensitivity for good,” Swinburne responds. “If he hasn’t all together done that then, of course, I don’t want to say that he is permanently barred from God.”
I persist. I note that, in addition to those who deliberately choose good or evil, there are other categories: babies who die in their first hours or years of life, untold multitudes who never heard of anything like the God of Western religions, the mentally deficient.
Swinburne agrees: “That is true,” he says. “It is not a doctrine of the church that anybody is in hell. All the doctrine states is that there is this possibility of hell. And maybe nobody avails themselves of this possibility, but it exists, and it’s something we should fight against.”
To Swinburne, what we do in this life sets our character for all eternity. God will not impose righteousness on us. The choice is ours, as are the consequences.
But eternal punishment for temporal sin will always trouble me. And judgment is so important for characterizing God.
The Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, a quantum physicist who became an Anglican priest, believes that “God’s love and mercy are not time limited, that when we die, a final curtain doesn’t come down. And if we’re caught on the wrong side of that curtain, God does not say, in effect, ‘Too bad: You had your chance, now off with you.’ I think that God’s offer of love and mercy will always be there, but I also think that the decisions and actions that we take in this life will shape our character; and if we turn away from God—particularly if we do so deliberately —it is spiritually damaging and will make it more difficult to respond to God’s offer of mercy and love beyond.”
He continues: “Judgment is not appearing before a testy, celestial judge who is anxious to throw us into prison and torture us as quickly as possible. Rather, it is an encounter with reality. Judgment is seeing ourselves as we really are. That will be a painful experience for us because we shall find all sorts of dross and misshapenness in our lives, and we’ll have to come to terms with that and allow God to reshape us in ways that are true fulfillment. That’s what judgment is—it is an account of reality. Not a sentence of punishment.”
To Polkinghorne, judgment is ultimately “a hopeful word” and the process of judgment is something that “we should not seek to avoid, but we should ultimately welcome.” He argues, too, that judgment is a temporal process. “Process is how God works,” he says. “Not in a blinding flash of elimination.”
He says, “Nobody will be turned away from the kingdom of heaven who wishes to enter it. But equally, nobody will be carried kicking and screaming into the divine presence against their will. And there may be people who will resist God’s offer of mercy and love forever, and if there are such people, then they are in hell by their own choice. The doors of hell, as the preachers say, are locked on the inside to keep the life of God out rather than on the outside to keep the sinners in.”
What about heaven? Polkinghorne’s picture is “the unending exploration of the inexhaustible riches of the divine nature unveiled before us.” And if finite human beings are really to come to know the infinite reality of God, he says, “it is a step-by-step process that never ends.” Life in heaven isn’t going to be boring, he stresses: “It isn’t going to be just sitting on a cloud strumming a harp and shouting out hallelujahs. It’s going to be this deeply fulfilling and unending exploration of divine richness.”
Polkinghorne is blunt: Judgment is a vital part of God’s plan and must not be brushed aside. Moreover, judgment should be welcomed, not feared. Departing from tradition, he asserts that judgment is a “process” or “course,” not a verdict or sentence. And it proceeds beyond death.
If a judgment there be, that would be a judgment I’d like.
But to explore God’s judgment, one cannot ignore Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
Islamic philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr appreciates ultimate things. “First of all,” he says, “to have a judgment, we need a posthumous existence, in that a man’s soul does not die with physical death. Islam shares with Judaism and Christianity that judgment involves what we’ve done in this life. What defines us as us survives our physical existence in this world, and what we take with us into the next world is the fruit of our actions.”
Nasr continues: “The question of God’s judgment is always combined with the aspect of God’s mercy. We cannot predetermine God’s judgment. There are self-righteous people in all religions who try to do that. But that is really an insult to God. The Quran is very, very strong on that. In the Islamic hell, which does not much differ from that of Judaism and Christianity, the highest pain is separation from God. (Because in this world, we do not see the beauty of God, we don’t much care whether we’re separated or not.)”
Although Islamic theology is multifaceted, in some schools there are posthumous states of transformation that correspond to purgatory, Nasr explains. “We have a journey after death as we had in life,” he says. “It’s not that black and white. Something stops at death. But the soul continues development.”
Though colored by culture, the Islamic judgment—postmortem existence of the soul; a God of mercy and justice—is similar to the Christian judgment.
As for Hinduism, physicist V.V. Raman notes that “the notion of a judgment is part of the idea of the law of karma, that we reap the consequences of our actions. And it is not as if there is some god sitting there passing judgment on what you have done, but it is simply a natural consequence of what you have done, both the good and the bad, according to a moral framework.”
In the Hindu world, Raman says, there is no “judgment day.” Judgment is perennial; it is always happening. “We do not dread judgment,” he stresses. “It is determined by the consequences of our actions, but ultimately, it is a positive thing. Somebody once said that the pessimist may be right in the long run, but it is the optimist who has fun all along the way. The Hindu view is somewhat the opposite. Maybe the pessimist is right in terms of the horrible things happening here and now, but ultimately, it is the optimist who is right because ultimately we are all going to be one with the cosmic whole. We will not be thrown into a dungeon for life just because we don’t believe in this god or that.”
In the Hindu tradition, everyone, Hindus and non-Hindus, believers and nonbelievers, ultimately makes it. Raman contrasts Hinduism and Christianity. “Some Hindu temples did not allow non-Hindus to enter, whereas in most Christian churches all are welcome,” he observes. “Conversely, Christianity does not allow everybody to come into their heaven, but Hinduism does. The best would be if Hinduism would learn from Christianity that everybody can go to their temples, and Christianity would learn from Hinduism that everybody will go to their heaven. That would be a wonderful world.”
In Hinduism, karma is key. It’s not some God-imposed judgment, but rather the natural consequences of our own actions. Buddhism is similar.
The Venerable Yifa, a Buddhist nun with a doctorate from Yale University, states that “in Buddhism, nobody judges you and nobody punishes you. Your own actions generate your own judgment, the accumulated results of all your actions. This is karma.”
She continues: “Karma is not just physical actions, but includes words and thoughts. All this accumulation becomes what we call the ‘seeds of experience.’ They are stored in our consciousness and make up who we are. After death, the physical body remains on earth, and what we’re left with is this consciousness.”
Yifa compares consciousness to a “storage room,” meaning that “you store all these seeds of experiences, and this determines where you will be reborn. It’s a very natural process.”
To summarize God’s judgment: In the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—God does the judging. And it occurs after one’s bodily death. In Eastern religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, judgment is a natural process based on karma. And it occurs through innumerable cycles of reincarnation.
The contrast is stark, and to seek artificial harmony between them is to debase both.
In assessing the doctrine, I now stop. I cannot go further. But I do wonder how God’s judgment, if it would be real, might literally work.
Robert John Russell, an ordained minister with a doctorate in physics, is the founder of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, and he looks for explanations of ultimate things. He distinguishes questions of heaven and hell as being “quite different.” Heaven, he says, seems to be “a promise that we get in Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, and the Quran,” whereas hell “is much more of a construct that has been developed over the ages for social, political, and philosophical reasons, as well as for theological ones.”
I get right to the point by noting that the traditional Christian understanding of hell seems to be unconscionably and absurdly severe.
Russell doesn’t disagree. “To imagine that God would punish someone forever for what they have done in this life seems totally unfair,” he says. “If that’s the case, it can’t be true because God is not totally unfair—God is the source of fairness; the only solution is that we don’t see the whole picture. Hell cannot be eternal punishment, but a state in which people are given the possibility of transformation, which can be very rugged.”
Does Russell mind that he is rejecting the classical Christian doctrine of hell? He is diplomatic but unambiguous.
“I would reformulate the doctrine of hell,” he says. “I would preserve the idea of accountability, of radical accountability, and I’d want to preserve the idea of a chance to reform, to repent, to change, to grow through forgiveness. I’d hope that in the new creation, grace and mercy continue without the sin and brokenness. My hope is that spiritual growth carries over to eternity. It remains an open question.”
So does he believe there is a hell of suffering and no return? “No,” he says. “I do not believe that.”
Does he see God’s judgment as something that actually occurs for everyone right after they die? Or something that would be embedded within the flow of history? Or something that occurs uniquely only when there is a general transformation of the new heavens and the new earth?
“Actually all three,” he says. “It depends how you spell it out. The underlying issue really is continuity. What makes me, me—between the moment I die and the moment of resurrection? If you say, ‘I continue because I have an immortal soul,’ that’s one tradition. If you say ‘My death is coterminous with the resurrection or my new life or the judgment day,’ then you don’t need an immortal soul as a bridge between the two.”
Russell argues that, “Much of the hell tradition, like Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ is based on all human beings having an immortal soul” because “that’s what’s [supposedly] there, in hell—your soul.”
But Russell doesn’t believe in the immortal soul. Rather, he believes “we fully die. Our hope is the resurrection. And so there’s no need for an element of continuity, a soul, and therefore, there’s nothing to go to hell.”
From our personal perspective, Russell suggests, “the moment we die is as if it is coterminous with the moment that we’re all raised together in the judgment and resurrection. The individual transformation is at the time of the universal transformation. The former is seen from my perspective; the latter from the world’s.”
Russell, a good friend, has assured me (as best he could, of course) that I will be there in the resurrection along with him and the believing multitudes, even though what I believe now is not what he believes now.
I hope he’s right, of course. Who wouldn’t? Yet the vast assumptions required boggle my brain. To many moderns, God’s judgment seems so remote as to be irrelevant. Or so absurd as to be laughable.
If one believes in religion—any religion—judgment is core. If you ignore judgment, you reject religion.
If God does not exist, God’s judgment is nothing but a political trick, a millstone of mass control.
If God does exist, and if God is merciful as well as just, God’s judgment is ultimate truth, a milestone in a magnificent journey.
Millstone or a milestone—there’s nothing in the middle. One or the other is closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with Richard Swinburne, the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, V.V. Raman, the Venerable Yifa, and Robert John Russell in “What Is God’s Judgment?”—the 12th episode in the new season of the Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series (51st in total).
The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Thursday, participants will discuss the current episode.

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