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When my Yale colleague Professor Carlos Eire visits his elderly mother, he often ends up as a resident theologian for a small Cuban-immigrant community of her friends. "Is it possible," one woman asked him, "for Castro to convert on his deathbed and end up in heaven?""It is possible," Professor Eire assured her. "This is what Christian faith is all about. Nobody is beyond the pale of redemption.""Well, if that were to happen," said the woman, "then I would not want to be in heaven."Karl Barth was once asked the antithesis of that Cuban expatriate's question: "Is it true that one day in heaven we will see again our loved ones?" Barth responded with a chuckle, "Not only the loved ones!" The sting of the great theologian's response—be ready to meet there even those whom you dislike here—was directed against our propensity to populate heaven only with people whom we like.Most of us have our own "Castros" with whom we would rather not share the space of the world to come. Heaven with them, we imagine, would feel more like a forecourt of hell.This dilemma contains a serious personal challenge and, it turns out, an inadequately addressed theological issue. How can those who have disliked or even had good reasons to hate each other here come to inhabit together what is, in Jonathan Edwards's memorable phrase, "a world of love"?The not-loved ones will have to be transformed into the loved ones, and those who do not love will have to begin to do so. Enemies will have to become friends. Sometime between a shadowy history and an eternity bathed in light, somewhere between this world and the next, a transformation of persons and their complex relationships needs to take place. Without such a transformation, the world to come would not be a world of perfect love but only a repetition of a world in which, at best, the purest of love falters and, at worst, cold indifference reigns and deadly hatreds easily flare up. But how will this transformation happen?

Our theology, unfortunately, has very little to say about this. Not even the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory compellingly addresses the social aspect of the transformation that needs to happen if we are to inhabit the world of love. Yet Christian eschatology has not left us completely without resources. Two of the "last things" it examines have to do with the transition between this world and the next: the Last Judgment and the resurrection of the dead. We can leave the resurrection of the dead aside in this matter because it concerns primarily our physical constitution; it is a response to the problem of mortality. The Last Judgment, however, is relevant to our question because it deals with the moral sphere; it is a response to the problem of human transgression against God and one another.There are two basic ways of thinking about the Last Judgment. A good representative of the first is Augustine. The Last Judgment, he believed, separates "the good" and "the bad" and ensures that "the true and full happiness" be "the lot of none but the good" and "deserved and supreme misery" be "the lot of the wicked, and them only." However, the function of the judgment is not to transform "the good" but to separate them from "the bad." So, the good will love perfectly after the judgment only if before the judgment they were already creatures of perfect love.The other way of thinking about the Last Judgment is associated with Martin Luther. For him, the Last Judgment is not so much an encounter with divine justice, which separates the good from the bad, but with divine grace, which justifies those who are not "the good." For believers, asserts Luther, the Last Judgment is above all an event in which sinners are forgiven and justified. Christ the Final Judge is none other than Christ the merciful Savior. "To me," writes Luther, "he is a physician, helper, and deliverer from death and the devil." Divine judgment at the end of history completes divine justification, grounded in Christ's redemptive work, in the middle of history.Yet it is not clear that the final justification would as such create a world of love. No doubt, it would ensure that we would meet in the world to come even those whom we have not considered particularly lovable in the present one. But for us to love the unlovable, two things would need to happen. First, in a carefully specified sense we ourselves would need to "justify" them—and, given that they may consider us no more lovable than we consider them, they would also need to "justify" us; and we all would need to receive this "justification" from one another.Second, we would also need to want to be in communion with one another. To usher in a world of love, the transition from earthly to heavenly existence needs to be understood not only as a divine act toward human beings (the Last Judgment) but also as a social event between human beings (the Final Reconciliation). Put in the form of a thesis, the argument is this: If the world to come is to be a world of love, then the transition from the present world to that world, which God will accomplish, must have an inter-human side.But why is this so? The answer lies in the nature of human beings, the character of sin, and the shape of salvation.

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October 23 2000, Vol. 44, No. 12