Feature
To Judge
or Not to Judge?
An Address to Seminary Students on the Forsaken Art of Christian Judgment
by A. J. Conyers
This is not a sermon, but I do have a text. It is a favorite nowadays for reasons that show how little we really understand it: it comforts when it is intended to indict.
Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, “Let me take the speck out of your eye,” while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye. (Matt. 7:1–5)
For two reasons we have difficulty reading this text. Both have to do with the fact that we inevitably read it as modern people and hardly suspect that there is yet another way to hear these words.
On the one hand, we are conscious of the absolute necessity of making judgments of different kinds in human affairs. So we are shocked by the unyielding tone of “Judge not, that you be not judged.” I have been noticing the lengths to which translators and biblical commentators go when faced with the stark words of Jesus, “Do not judge.” One translator renders it, “Do not judge others unfairly, lest you be judged in a similar way.” Then he places in the notes the warning that “unfairly” does not appear in the Greek.1 Indeed it does not. It remains that stark prohibition: You are not to render judgment.
On the other hand, and for different reasons, modern readers are likely to stop reading after the first three words, or the first two words in Greek, mê krinete, “Judge not.” We take it as a confirmation of the modern conviction that judgment, that is, discerning good from evil in ourselves and in others, is a private matter. It is for us an affair of the heart, one that has to do neither with reason as a public task nor with law as a public articulation of right and wrong, but rather with personal preference and private convictions. We have grounded this ethical nihilism, this privatized morality, in a kind of metaphysical and theological silence that we assume prevails in the realm of moral choice. Ellen DeGeneres said on television some months back, “My God is not a judgmental God. . . . My God does not judge.”
The Minister as Judge
But what shall a well-trained minister do, one who is given the responsibility of saying publicly and persuasively, “This is the way to go. Go this way and not this other and you shall live and not die?” Is it not inevitable that he make judgments? It is not all that a minister does, but it is not the least that a minister does.
Such a task involves us in a vulnerable and to some a foolish occupation because we who are charged with discerning right from wrong are as deeply implicated by what we might say as anyone to whom we might address it.
I recall once in my first full-time work as a pastor that I was approached by a woman named “Alice,” who was, it seemed to me, excessively concerned about community reputation. She had been having some trouble with her teenage son, who had got himself into a scrape with the law and who managed to escape the consequences by joining the army. She was terribly concerned that her son might fall in with the wrong crowd in the army. As it turned out, however, he got acquainted with a group of Christians.
He joined a Bible study group.
A. J. Conyers (d. 2004) was Professor of Theology at Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary in Waco, Texas, and the author of several books, including The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit (Spence, 2001).
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