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Judge Judging (Ethical)

Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament

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No account of judging in the Apostolic Church can be complete which is not based on our Lord’s prohibition, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged’ (Matthew 7:1 ff.). This is not to be interpreted as a disparagement of the intellectual faculty of criticism per se, but as a limitation of it in harmony with the Christian standpoint. In the corresponding passage in Luke 6, the repression of the critical spirit is directly associated with the character of God, who makes no distinctions in His gifts, but is kind and merciful to all alike. The section in Matthew has rather a relation to the temper of the Pharisee, which was supercilious and narrowly strict in its judgments of others. The Pharisee ‘despised others’; hence his incapacity to understand human nature, his judgments being routed in contempt. The citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven, on the other hand, has to avoid the censorious temper and make the best of everyone and everything; he has to repress the tendency to be uncharitable; otherwise, when he is obliged to utter a moral verdict, it will be of small weight. But our Lord never countenances the easy-going tolerance which in effect abrogates the right of moral judgment. He does not absolve His followers from discriminating between right and wrong-even in the case of a ‘brother’ (Matthew 18:15-18)-and indeed urges upon them the duty of ‘binding and loosing,’ condemning and acquitting, according to the recognized moral standard of the Kingdom.

The teaching of St. James has many echoes of the ethical injunctions of our Lord, and the passage James 4:11 f. in his Epistle recalls the spirit, if not the actual language, of the Sermon on the Mount. We are not to indulge in the habit of fault-finding: ‘Who art thou that judgest thy neighbour?’ We are never to judge from any other motive than the moral improvement of the person judged: we are to remember our own defects, and to utter our verdict with a due sense of responsibility; otherwise we ‘speak against the law and judge the law.’ The Apostle means by this that there is to be a proper standard of right and wrong, and not a subjective criterion formed out of our own likes and dislikes. If we make our own standard, we set ourselves above the law-giver and the law.

In similar strain St. Paul writes (Romans 14:4), ‘Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant? To his own master he standeth or falleth.’ The words are suggested by the relationship between the ‘strong’ and the ‘weak.’ The ‘strong,’ conscious of their freedom in Christ, may despise the ‘weak,’ who still feel it their duty to continue an ascetic habit, even though they have accepted Christ; on the other hand, the ‘weak,’ condemning what seems to them the laxity of the ‘strong,’ may be led into the habit of censorious judgment (see an admirable discourse by A. Souter in Expository Times xxiv. [1912-13] 5ff.). The same Apostle, however, while thus discountenancing the habit of judging one another, expressly advocates the duty of acting according to a moral standard in dealing with moral offences. In 1 Corinthians 5, e.g., he condemns the Corinthians for allowing a case of immorality to go unchallenged and unjudged. At the same time the Christian Church is to limit its judgments to those that are within; those that are without are to be left to the judgment of God (1 Corinthians 5:13). It would appear, then that the Apostle, while not absolving the Christian from the duty of judgment in offences against morality, advocates the widest tolerance in minor matters of everyday life, e.g. in Romans 14:4-10 -a passage which closes with the statement: ‘we shall all stand before the judgement-seat of God.’

In the same way the apostolic writers press upon their readers the duty of discrimination according to certain standards of right and wrong. They are to ‘test all things and hold fast that which is right’ (1 Thessalonians 5:21), and to ‘test the spirits whether they be of God’ (1 John 4:1, the word δοκιμάζειν being used, which more definitely suggests the approval which results from a test or touchstone than the simpler and more familiar κρίνειν). They are to pronounce anathema on the proclaimer of ‘another’ gospel (Galatians 1:9), and to refuse hospitality to a false teacher, on the ground that a welcome or salutation involves participation in his evil works (2 John 1:10 f.). Thus doctrine, like life and conduct, is to be brought to the test of a moral standard, and what is subversive of the person and teaching of the Lord is to be rejected. ‘Happy,’ says the Apostle Paul (Romans 14:22), ‘is he that judgeth not himself in that which he approveth’ (δοκιμάζει). This passage appears to combine the two ideas which enter into the NT treatment of the subject: the Christian must avoid censorious judgment and yet courageously exercise his judgment in the realm of ethics and doctrine; he is happy in the strength of his faith, which enables him so to act as to escape self-condemnation or misgiving. In another passage (Romans 14:13) St. Paul plays on the double use of κρίνω, viz. as indicating a hasty and uncharitable judgment, and as implying the determining of a course of conduct for oneself. ‘Let us not judge one another any more, but judge ye this rather, that no man put a stumblingblock in his brother’s way’-the latter sense being paralleled by 2 Corinthians 2:1, ‘I formed this judgment or determination for myself,’ and 1 Corinthians 2:2; 1 Corinthians 5:3, Titus 3:12. A similar usage occurs in the famous statement in 2 Corinthians 5:14, ‘because we thus judge that if one died for all,’ etc.-the word signifying a conviction that has been formed out of spiritual experience (cf. also 1 Corinthians 11:13, where there is an appeal to a judgment based on common sense).

For the judgments of others on the Christian there are two passages worth our notice, viz. Colossians 2:16, where the false teaching which infected the Colossian Church is made the subject of warning, eating and drinking being, according to the Apostle, mere shadows of the reality, and therefore not matters on which a judgment should be based-‘Let no man take you to task in eating and in drinking’: scrupulous ritual and asceticism are a return to an order of life which the gospel has rendered obsolete. The other passage is James 2:12, ‘So speak ye and so do as men that are to be judged by a law of liberty’ (cf. James 1:25). This is St. James’s variation on St. Paul’s ‘law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus’-not a system of codified regulations enforced from without, but a law freely accepted and obeyed as the result of a new relationship to God. ‘It will,’ says J. B. Mayor (The Epistle of St. James³, 1910, p. 94), ‘be a deeper-going judgment than that of man, for it will not stop short at particular precepts or at the outward act, whatever it may be, but will penetrate to the temper and motive.’ And it destroys all morbid anxiety and questioning ‘as to the exact performance of each separate precept’ if there has been true love to God and man. ‘The same love which actuates the true Christian here actuates the Judge both here and hereafter.’

The reader is referred to a concordance for the numerous passages in which God or Christ is spoken of as Judge of humanity; we have here limited our survey to the non-forensic side of judgment. There is a passage, however, which calls for comment, viz. 1 Corinthians 6:2, ‘Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world?’ This is to be taken along with a previous warning in 1 Corinthians 4:5, ‘Judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come,’ etc. The meaning is that the saints will be associated with their Lord in the act of judging the world at the Last Day, and their judgment will be exercised not only on the world, but on ‘angels’ (1 Corinthians 6:3), meaning the hierarchy of evil or fallen spirits. This doctrine of the future is stated in Revelation 20:4 and became a rooted conviction of the post-Apostolic Church, as we see from Historia Ecclesiastica (Eusebius, etc.)vi. 42, where the saints are called μέτοχοι τῆς κρίσεως αὐτοῦ, ‘associates in His judgment.’ The Divine Judgeship is a truth essential to human thought. Experience deepens the sense of the ignorance and fallibility attaching to man’s judgments. The epigram tout connaître c’est tout pardonner is in effect an expression of human helplessness; and the aspiration of David, ‘Let me fall now into the hand of the Lord … and let me not fall into the hand of man’ (1 Chronicles 21:13), is really the cry of humanity for ever conscious of the limitations of its own judgments.

See, further, articles Judgment and Trial-at-Law.

Literature.-C. Gore, Sermon on the Mount, London, 1897, ch. ix.; J. B. Mayor, The Epistle of St. James 2, do. 1897. p. 221; J. R. Seeley, Ecce Homo¹³, do. 1876, ch. ix.: J. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory³, Oxford, 1889, vol. ii. Ch. i.

R. Martin Pope.