For many years I have asked myself why many Christians seem to believe that God will judge us by our orthodoxy, according to the beliefs which we hold in our minds.

I know some of the history of the reformation and the great freedom that comes with the doctrine of salvation by grace.  And I understand how grace gets connected with faith and how faith gets narrowed down to a matter of cognitive belief.  But in the end I want to trust in the grace of God and not to trust in my understanding of and cognitive agreement with the doctrine of salvation by grace.  (See post “Grace”)

I have sensed that there is more than history with its confusion of words and ideas going on here.  We must have a deep motivation to believe that God’s judgment will be determined by something intrinsic to our minds.

When we imagine life on the other side of judgment, life after death, it is our minds that do that imagining.  And what our minds imagine is some sort of reawakening of our consciousness.  The aspect of our lives which is easiest for our minds to imagine continuing on after death is our minds.  So if it is our conscious minds that we most desire to pass through judgment to new life, then the judgment which we can most easily imagine is one focused on the content of our minds.  God must judge us according to the rightness of our beliefs.  I catch myself thinking this way when I think about death and its aftermath.

But I have come to trust in the story of Jesus and his resurrection in the flesh.  I count myself among the many Christian witnesses who have confessed, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.”

So I am desperately seeking a strong connection between my consciousness and my body, between my flesh and my spirit, between my beliefs and my character, if for no other reason than that, in the end, my body might drag my conscious mind along with it into the resurrection.