Love, Judgment, and Judgmentalism (Part One)

[Click to access "Love, Judgment, and Judgmentalism (Part Two)."]

“It is virtually impossible to exaggerate the importance of love. Nothing is more basic to true spirituality than this singular virtue. Nothing is more central to Christian living. At the very heart of authentic discipleship is love. Without love, we are nothing.”¹ So writes veteran Bible expositor Steven Lawson in a valuable article in the February 2012 edition of Tabletalk magazine.² And, of course, he’s absolutely right. Without love, we are nothing. This comes straight out of what is perhaps the most well-known canonical passage on love – 1 Corinthians 13. There we are told that without love, every ounce of worship to God is in fact impoverished and worthless, and no amount of “good works” can please God. We are also told that we are to pay back every debt, except the debt of love which is always outstanding by nature of its never-ending necessity.

Love cannot be over-considered, and it can never be overly sought after or practiced, for no one loves perfectly. For proof, we need look no further to God’s own summary of all biblical commands:

But when the Pharisees heard that [Jesus] had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question to test Him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22.34-40, ESV)³

The second Person of the Godhead tells us what is required of us, synthesizing all of the varied biblical commands with concise accuracy: We are to love God fully, and this love will express itself in love for those around us. This is the entire summary of God’s will for our lives. So indeed, love’s importance cannot be exaggerated.

However, in the Western Church today there are some ideas about love that more really resemble what I was taught in counseling school about valueless therapeutic acceptance than what the Bible teaches about the nature of Christian love. This is evidenced to me the more I hear people say that citing a certain lifestyle or decision as debased – such as denouncing my State’s recent legislation legalizing same-sex marriage – is judgmental and unloving, and lacking in the spirit of Christlike charity. It seems that I am increasingly encountering this mentality, which is why I want to briefly consider the concepts of love, judgment, and judgmentalism from a Christian (biblical) worldview, with the hope of alleviating some of the accusations of hard-heartedness that often get thrown at those – like me – who stand in the historic Christian camp of express biblical, moral objectivism.

Love

copyright George Tooker, image obtained from http://calitreview.com/

In what may be appropriately viewed as one of the most definitive expositions of what it looks like to love one’s neighbor as self, the Apostle Paul writes:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. (1 Corinthians 13.1-8a)

What we have in this passage is a stirring tribute to the nature of Christian love, composed of a list of positive and negative characteristics. Positively, we can know we are loving as we ought if we are patient and kind with others, rejoice with the truth, bear with and endure the messiness of relationships, and believe the best about and hope the best for others. Negatively, we can know we are not loving as we ought if we envy others, are full of ourselves, are rude or testy or resentful, and delight in wickedness (getting pleasure and humor from immorality as entertainment would apply here, as well as gleaning joy from another’s difficulties).

Now consider two of the most widely circulated modern notions of love, even within the Church: (1) Love is a feeling – something that people can fall in and out of; (2) love is unconditional positive regard, avoiding any statement to or about another that even hints of evaluation – i.e. love is tolerance. How do these stack up against the love commanded of the Christian in 1 Corinthians 13 (as well as many other passages), namely ἀγάπη (agapē), or its verb form, ἀγαπάω (agapaō)? The love in which Christians are called to walk is unconditional, humble, self-sacrificing, creative-service love that seeks the highest good of the other above self – including enemies (Mt 5.44; Jn 3.16, 13.1, 4-5, 34, 15.9-10a, 13; 1 Jn 4.9-11).⁴ This is a tall order, to be sure, but one which we may pursue by the grace of God. It encompasses all of what the Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13.

Because such love is active and volitional, we can throw out the possibility of biblical love being a feeling that a person can fall in and out of (or even its being a feeling at all, though feelings may be included in the process). (The implications for marriage here are huge, by the way.) But what typically raises the most noise when considering value statements and their relationship to love is the second idea, that love is basically tolerance – something akin to the political correctness required of successful politicians and public figures in our modern American landscape. This makes sense. When we consider that love is patient and kind and bears all things, it is understandable that many see love as tolerance, with any hint of value judgment being interpreted as pharisaism. To be clear, for love to be love, it cannot be rude or arrogant or impatient, however I find that we have constructed a notion of love and kindness that actually works against valid expressions of biblical love.

Puritan Reformed Seminary President Joel R. Beeke, in a short exposition of the 1 Corinthians 13, helps us see why. He writes, “Verse 6 ["it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth"] rebukes the idol of relativistic tolerance that often passes for love in our culture; sincere love includes hatred for evil (Rom. 12:9). The greatest display of God’s love was also the greatest demonstration of His righteousness, as His Son satisfied God’s justice by bearing the penalty for our sins…. Love has strong feelings against sin and for righteousness.”⁵ Beeke cites Romans 12.9 as a cross-reference in making His point: “Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.” 

What we can be sure of is that whatever Christian love is – and we have a beautiful picture of it in 1 Corinthians 13 – it is not mutually exclusive with judgment, though it does preclude judgmentalism, as I hope to show in the next half of this article. So when we see a Christian or a Christian leader publicly acknowledging the wickedness of abortion or the illegitimacy of gay marriage or the sinfulness of gluttony or gambling, doing so – even in strong terms – is not inherently unloving. In fact, as we will see in the next half, this is more in line with biblical love than we might care to think!

Sinful People Calling Sin What It Is

The trouble lies not with calling sin what it is. The problem – in my experience and observation – is the fact that the good and upright thing of calling sin what it is is always done by sinful people! Allow me to use myself as an example. My “briefcase” is a messenger bag that has the following graphic in large print on the side:

In essence, I walk around trying to expose the heinous immorality that is abortion. I’m calling it murder, and my bag is trying to get people to go to a Website – abort73.com – that makes the same case. And all the while I am a wicked sinner – saved by the very grace of God I hope and pray for those who support and have abortions (Eph 2.8-10) – who has probably murdered a few people in my mind on any given week (Mt 5.21-22). It is at this point that the accusation, “You’re so judgmental,” or “Who are you to judge; you’re so unloving,” normally gets offered. So the question is raised: How is a sinful person to rejoice in the truth and abhor what is evil without being unloving or judgmental? In other words, how can we make a moral judgment (which no person can avoid doing) while maintaining a proper spirit?

As we will see in the next post, we are called to judge within the Church (1 Co 5.11-13; Mt 18.15-17), and we are called to decry and work actively against wickedness in the culture with grace and truth, abhorring and working against what is evil while concurrently holding out the Gospel of the mercy of God by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone (Pr 24.11; Mic 6.8; Ro 1.18-32 [God's decree - v 32 - came by revelation spoken through sinful men]; Eph 5.11-14). The distinction, then, between judgment and judgmentalism in relation to love is Gospel-motivation, humble attitude, and kind presentation, among other things. (Kind presentation does not at all contraindicate boldness in proclamation, by the way, or else we would have some serious interpretational issues with Paul and the Prophets, as well as Jesus.)

A Personal Confession

As I said before, I am a wicked rebel-sinner whose very existence flies in the face of God’s holiness. I have been accused of judgmentalism by others, and more particularly have been accused of self-righteous pharisaism. I want to affirm three things:

(1) I have missed the boat more often than I can count regarding loving my neighbor as myself. I blow it countless times every day, in fact, and there’s not a second of my life in which I do not fully deserve the wrath of God in hell forever! In conversations and written dialogues I have sought to speak the truth boldly and in love, but even while trying to be intentional I have blown it, if not in content then certainly in motivation. I am truly sorry for this and have sought the grace of God through His Holy Spirit to help me repent of unkindness and lovelessness, all while walking in the command to speak the truth in love. This leads me to my second affirmation.

(2) I have never claimed to be perfect; in fact, I boldly proclaim the opposite (as you just saw)! Making a moral judgment, to which we are called, does not equate with self-promotion. When I walk around with a messenger bag denouncing abortion as murder I am not saying that I am not guilty, nor am I saying that I do not need to repent of my sins, nor am I torturing with condemnation those struggling through abortion or its aftermath, throwing their sins in their face, as it were. What I am doing is saying that abortion is wicked and ought to be stopped, and those who support it ought to repent. This is a far cry from condemnation, and I truly hope that we can distinguish between moralistic perfectionism and the reality that truth has always been proclaimed by sinful people, to sinful people. This reality, I hope, broadens to others who stand in the solid camp of truth; namely, I don’t know anyone who decries immorality while claiming they are without guilt themselves. (If that were the case, no one could make a moral statement.) Which leads to my final affirmation.

(3) The most magnificent reality of the universe is God. He is the reason that there is such a thing as morality, for all morality flows from His very nature of holiness, justice, truth, goodness, and beauty. Therefore, engaging in moral proclamation, far from being an exercise in unloving condemnation, is meant to point to Him. And if we follow the arrow to where it leads, we do find condemnation, but we also find mercy and grace. We find that all of us, with equal standing and vigor, are under the condemnation of a just and holy and good God Who must punish sin. But the same arrow that points us to condemnation also points us to mercy, as the same God Who must condemn and punish sin sent Himself among us in Jesus Christ to live the perfect life of love to God and others that we should have, die the death under God’s wrath in His people’s place that we all deserve, and rose physically from the dead in victory over sin and death. What we find when we are pointed to God is true love – the Good News of His grace extended to all who would confess their wickedness to Him, renounce it, and cling in faith that Jesus Christ alone is their whole salvation. This is the Gospel, and this is what makes exposing darkness a worthwhile endeavor, because it points to Jesus from start to finish if done correctly.

Let me conclude with this beautiful summary from Burk Parsons as a fitting segue into the next post:

In the end, the one, true definition of love will, indeed, win because truth will win, and truth will win because Christ has won, and Christ has won because God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him would not perish but have everlasting life. To be sure, we deserve to perish – not just today but for eternity – and we don’t deserve life – neither the life we have today nor life for eternity…. Every man, woman, and child – no matter how good or bad we think we are – will perish without repenting from self-trust and trusting in Jesus Christ, who is the only truth, the only life, and the only way to the Father. True love means proclaiming the truth. True love means proclaiming the gospel. True love means proclaiming the love of God and the wrath of God, and the most unloving thing we could possibly do is withhold the truth from those who are perishing without Christ – the truth about God’s love, holiness, justice, and grace; the truth about man’s sin, death, and hell; the truth about faith, forgiveness, and an eternal life coram Deo, before the face of God in heaven, where God’s love will reign over us forever.⁶

Notes

¹Steven J. Lawson, ”Love’s Significance,” Tabletalk (February 2012), 10.

²I am referencing a handful of articles from this edition of Tabletalk due to it’s concentrated focus on the topic of love, drawing from some of the most prominent and capable expositors of our day.

³Unless otherwise noted, all biblical quotations are from the Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001).

⁴John MacArthur, “Languages Without Love: 1 Corinthians 13.1-7,” The Greatest of These (Grace To You, 2012), http://www.gty.org/resources/study-guides/47/the-greatest-of-these (accessed February 27, 2012).

⁵Joel R. Beeke, ”Love’s Attributes,” Tabletalk (February 2012), 17.

⁶Burk Parsons, ”True Love,” Tabletalk (February 2012), 2.