We Will Be Judged

We repeat this fact every time that we recite the Creeds, which for Catholics means at least once per week: Christ will judge the living and the dead. I was reminded of this as I read through the opening editorial of the May/June 2015 edition of Touchstone Magazine, "Ashamed of the Gospel: The End of Comfortable Christianity." Near the close of the editorial, Robert P. George writes:

Powerful forces tell us that our defeat in the causes of marriage and human life are inevitable. They warn us that we are on "the wrong side of history." They insist that we will be judged by future generations the way we today judge those who championed racial injustice in the Jim Crow south. 

But history does not have sides. It is an impersonal and contingent sequence of events, events that are determined in decisive ways by human deliberation, judgment, choice, and action....The idea of a "judgment of history" is secularism's vain, meaningless, hopeless, and pathetic attempt to devise a substitute for the final judgment of Almighty God. History is not God. God is God. History is not our judge. God is our judge. 

One day we will give an account of all we have done and failed to do. Let no one suppose that we will make this accounting to some impersonal sequence of events possessing no more power to judge than a golden calf or a carved and painted totem pole. It is before God--the God of truth, the Lord of history--that we will stand. And as we tremble in his presence, it will be no use for any of us to claim that we did everything in our power to put ourselves on "the right side of history." 

One thing alone will matter: Was I a faithful witness to the gospel? Did I do everything in my power to put myself on the side of truth?

History, too, will be judged. That is notwithstanding the ruling and/or chattering classes' insistence that we ought to change all--even our very beliefs--to bend knee to their whims, also known as "being on the right side of history." We will all be judged, not against history, but against eternity. I pray that I will be found on the right side of eternity--that is the only judgment that ultimately matters.