Is Divine Courtroom All There Is?
My impression is that in current Western Protestantism, and even more so in Catholicism, there’s an over-emphasis on the judicial side of what God has accomplished through Christ, and a severe under-emphasis on the existential side, so the present day restorative work of God through what’s been done through Christ and is currently available through the Holy Spirit is still largely ignored. Healing is one example of what’s been missing from the large picture until the last 100 or so years.
The symptoms of that skewed emphasis are evident in that the most prominent debates in Christian circles mostly center on justification. As a result, heaven becomes a future reward as opposed to a present position that we should operate out of, people talk about future hell (from the context, meaning gehenna, as opposed to hades, meaning a place of judicial punishment) a lot more than the present reality of death in its manifestations such as sickness and poverty, intellectual OSAS (once saved always saved) doctrines as opposed to present vital union with Christ and the reality of new creation as the source of security for believers, sickness as sometimes good if it may somehow aid in the process of securing a position “in heaven”, the next coming of Christ to help people with issues that have already resolved through Christ’s initial coming, and so forth.
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Terminal Salvation 