Unending lawsuit

In his book, Liturgies and Trials , Richard Fenn writes, “The individual is perpetually facing judgment by abstract and impersonal criteria that are only partially revealed while always calling into question the individual’s own sense of worthiness . . . the theme of the ‘last judgment’ loses its theological framework, and the process of adjudication becomes as endless as it is inescapable.” Without “religious guarantees to secular speech,” the “trial never ends.” This is a burden too much to bear: “The secularization of the divine lawsuit against mankind leads to desperate measures, strenuous achievements, quiet despair, and occasionally to renewals of religious fervor to obtain divine forgiveness.”