Judgment is the missing doctrine of the twenty-first century church. In the 1960s, TV shows and comedy skits would sometimes portray a deranged man with a long beard and a white robe declaring “The End Is Near,” or some other threat of judgment. It was not uncommon in those days to see road signs and billboards warning people: “Prepare to meet your God.”

On Saturday morning cartoons, Elmer Fudd or Bugs Bunny or Wiley Coyote would die from a misfired gun, exploding bomb, or a fall from a cliff, then ascend to heaven to be judged. Religious tracts – one thinks of the ubiquitous Chick pamphlets from the 1960s – warned the unrepentant sinner of a sulfur and brimstone future.

But things have changed. We might be glad that these theological caricatures are not so common anymore, but it is not only the caricatures that have disappeared. So has nearly all mention of the doctrine of judgment. This is not a good thing, for one cannot discard the doctrine of judgment and remain a biblically faithful believer.

The noun “judgment” and its verbal cognate “to judge” appear over 150 times in the New Testament, and more than 500 times in the Old. The testimony of the Scriptures is that God will judge the world. The proclamation of the church, recited weekly by millions of Christians in the creed, is that Christ “will come again to judge the living and the dead.”

One cannot ignore the doctrine of judgment, but how can one live with it? For isn’t the doctrine of judgment about an angry God who exacts revenge on people just because they don’t believe in him? How can the infinite punishment of those who have committed finite sins possibly be fair?

That raises a second issue about judgment. It is not only the missing doctrine of our time; it is the misunderstood doctrine of our time. What we think we know about judgment is more firmly rooted in cultural sources than biblical ones. Dante’s Inferno and Michaelangelo’s The Last Judgment play a bigger rolethan the psalms and the prophets. For that matter, many people’s understanding of judgment has more to do with Elmer Fudd than with the apostles. Ours is a generation of Looney Tunes theologians.

These cultural tropes have led us to think of judgment as a fearful, one might say, “God-awful,” thing. No biblically informed reader would deny that Judgment Day bodes poorly for those who reject God, but a careful student of the Bible would emphasize that is only part – and not even the most important part – of the picture.

The doctrine of judgment is only secondarily about what happens to those who reject God. At its heart, the doctrine of judgment is about God making right everything that has gone wrong, including people. The doctrine of judgment abounds with hope. The earth, long tortured by abuse and misuse, will be restored to its Edenic origins. And people, tortured by injustice and their own sins and failures, will be made new.

Because we have so badly misunderstood judgment, the psalmist’s euphoria at the thought of it is baffling: “…shout for joy before the Lord, the King. Let the sea resound, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it. Let the rivers clap their hands, let the mountains sing together for joy; let them sing before the Lord, for he comes to judge the earth.”

In the incredibly rich eighth chapter of Romans, St. Paul envision humans and all creation groaning in eager expectation of God making everything right. In Jewish thought, this meant that creation is longing for judgment. No wonder Paul included the doctrine of the judgment in his “gospel,” his announcement of good news.

N. T. Wright has written that “in a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance and oppression, the thought that there might be a coming day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be … a good God must be a God of judgment.”

It is time to recover – or, perhaps, to uncover – the hope-filled doctrine of judgment.