This thread kind of went into this issue a lot. I approached it from a different angle and I still don’t think there was an adequate response to my opening analogy:
imagine this: we know of one million different people from many different generations, using different vehicles have all driven on this same road. Furthermore, we also know that each and every one of them has crashed and died without exception. Is it the drivers who are at fault, or is there something wrong with the road?
To use another analogy from the perspective of a teacher. If year after year, class after class, every single student under their charge fails their course, at what point do we have to start questioning the efficacy, competence and objectivity of the instructor.
The mantra that we are all sinners and all deserve death is pretty standard fare in Christianity. It is by grace that we are saved and somehow Jesus’ death on the cross played a role in this. I am aware of different models of the atonement but this one is pretty standard I think. Somehow Jesus’ sacrifice bridges the gap between God and man. This can range from mere solidarity to Jesus literally taking on sin in some ontological fashion but I digress. Keeping with the road example, I think situation is even more dire for God as theologians believe every future person who drives on that road will also crash and die and also, every person who ever lived and drove on that road that we don’t know about also crashed and died. All people are sinners, past, present and future. Now this is not some attempt on my part to find a sinless human, another Jesus, if you will, but if we assume by default that all seven plus billion people on the planet are sinners deserving death and all those yet born will also be sinners and the tens to billions of people who lived before us were also sinners, is this game not rigged? Is God not setting us up to fail?
For me the problem is not with God but with Christian doctrine. When Paul says all sin and fall short of the Glory of God I think this is true on ap personal level via enculturation but I don’t think we are judged necessarily by enculturation. Also, I get the sense Paul may be speaking corporately here…Jews and Gentiles as a whole.
But who says we can’t meet the standard? I think there are countless passages where we are expected to live a charitable life. Many passages that don’t say “just accept Jesus into your heart and you are saved.” There are countless passages telling us good deeds are required. Standard fare is for Christians to say accepting Jesus produces good deeds. Personally I am not sure if this is even true for many “Christians” and I am not a fan of uncritically merging what may be competing theologies in the Bible. This rests on the dubious assumption of modern inerrancy.
At any rate, I think will only be judged precisely because we can choose not to commit some sins and don’t. I am aware of modern Protestant doctrine about everyone being depraved and the absolute need for grace which seems more to be glorifying God than provide an adequate soteriology. I just don’t like casting these terms in common Christian ideology because they tend to carry original sin and penal substation baggage.
I think we are only responsible for the bad stuff we do that we could have avoided, or that we chose to be less proactive about. Everyone knows there are millions of people around the world starving. Yet here in the US we keep buying bigger and better.
We aren’t judged because of evolutionary traits or tendencies. We are judged for what we are responsible for. What we do with what we are given.
Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God’s eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing does dome tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.
It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man’s psychological makeup is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.