This is the substance of the Christian doctrine of judgment, as taught in the New Testament. All else is accessory, and belongs to the rhetoric—is part of the mise en scène; but there are two points in the views of the apostle concerning judgment, which deserve further notice. The first is in 1 Cor. 6:2, where he says, “Know ye not that the saints shall judge the world?” and (verse 3), “Know ye not that we shall judge angels?” He speaks of this as of something which they already knew, or at any rate could know; something like an axiom, as when he says (verse 9), “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God?” or (verse 19), “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit?” This notion is based on the idea of the unity of Christ and his disciples. Christians are joint heirs with Christ. Whatever Christ inherits, they receive and share with him. If he judges the world, and judges angels, they do the same with him, because they share his spirit of insight. Paul thinks the essence of Christianity to be so profound, that even the angels, desiring to look into it, may not have seen it. Therefore Christians, to whose heart God has revealed it by his Spirit, may be able to set the angels right in some matters. But this does away with the notion of a literal day of judgment; for we can hardly imagine Christians to be assembled together and seated on a throne by the side of Christ, in order to judge the world. Some millions of Christians seated on a local throne as judges, with millions of men and angels standing before them, is an impossible picture.
The other point is the passage in 1 Cor. 11:31: “If we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged.” Here a principle seems to be laid down—that just so far as we apply [pg 350] God's truth to our own hearts and consciences, we do not need to have it applied by God. And this corresponds with the account of the judgment to which we have before referred, in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew. Those who are there called up for judgment, and who stand before the throne, are not Jews or Christians, but Gentiles (τὰ ἔθνη). The holy angels are with Christ in his glory. The heathen appear before him; those who have been doing good without knowing it are received by him into his kingdom, as those who have been blessed by his Father. They are Christians, it appears, without knowing it. They inherit the kingdom, from which the original heirs who have been wicked and slothful servants, and who have buried their talent in the napkin, are excluded. Christians who have judged themselves, and applied Christianity by their own lives, are not to be judged at the coming of Christ, but only those who have been doing right or wrong ignorantly.[45]
§ 11. Final Result.
The course of our investigations in the present chapter has brought us to this result. Orthodoxy is right in expecting the coming of Christ in this world, but wrong in supposing it wholly future and wholly outward. [pg 351] It is right in making it a personal coming, and not merely the coming of his truth apart from him, but wrong in conceiving of this personal coming, as material to the senses, instead of spiritual to the soul. It is right in expecting a judgment, but wrong in placing it only in the other world. It is right in supposing that all mankind, the converted, the unconverted, and the heathen, are to be judged by Christian truth, but wrong in supposing that this judgment must occur in one place or at one time. Finally, in this, as in regard to many other doctrines, Orthodoxy fails by neglecting the great saying of Jesus, “The spirit quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing,” and the similar statement of Paul, “The letter killeth.”