Judgment or Love?

In one of the BBC's thoughts for the day this week, the Rev. Joel Edwards stated, "justice is the bedrock of the Christian faith." He wasn't talking about distributive justice - the justice that makes sure that the powerless are treated fairly by those in power. He was talking in the context of a courtroom setting, what is sometimes called retributive justice.

My first thought was that he was wrong - love is the bedrock of the Christian faith. Yet as I thought about the program afterwards, I realized that all too often he is right. For many Christians justice in the form of judgment is the bedrock of their faith. This, of course, is what Pelagius pointed out as the danger in the doctrine of original sin that his contemporary Augustine was postulating towards the end of the fourth century. It seems to me that for many Christians, the whole idea of their faith is for them to do well enough in the Final Judgment to get into heaven, rather than being chucked into hell. This is also, the whole point of the Left Behind series.

I find myself in Pelagius' camp. I think the doctrine of original sin - the doctrine that leads to judgment being the bedrock of the Christian faith - has not served us well. I prefer the Celtic Christianity before the Synod of Whitby forced Roman Catholicism on the Irish. Their belief was that we are all attached to the divine and no matter what we do, we can never totally eradicate that spark.

For me, the bedrock of the Christian faith is love - the love of God as taught by Jesus. When asked what the greatest of the commandments was, he answered, and I'm paraphrasing, love God, love others. Indeed, we are even to love our enemies, that is, see them as fellow human beings and children of God, and treat them accordingly.