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The terrible responsibility of judging

Special for the Sun
Gene Davenport





There have been many ways of describing and explaining the difficulties, hardships and horrors of the world. Christian theologians agree, to varying extents, that life’s problems result from living in a world fallen from its original ideal conditions. Some people respond to difficulties with, “Well, that’s just the way the world is.” The Book of Genesis says the first human beings acted in such a way that God abandoned the world to its own self-destruction until God acts to renew it.

Disciplines differ over the origin of life’s difficulties and use different terms with which to speak of solutions. The social sciences view personal and social problems as susceptible to and overcome, to some degree, through individual or group manipulation. Some will find it offensive to say that the social sciences use manipulation. Those sciences assume, however, that if we know why a person or group behaves as it does, we can “help” it by influencing behavior with certain techniques. And that is manipulation. 

Within an individual or in a group, however, two or several problems usually are intertwined. A person with a cold will to some degree be affected mentally, physically and emotionally. Dealing with the problems, even “for the greater good of the individual, the group or society,” is, nevertheless, manipulation. That, too, is what it means to live in a broken world, a world out of sorts, an unpredictable world, a fallen Creation. It is a world in which it sometimes is necessary to use imperfect and unpredictable means to accomplish a “lesser evil.” The assumption that we can develop a better world without using various forms of manipulation is unrealistic and idealistic. The question that we ought to ask is, by what right do we assume that we know what is a perfect society? Adolph Hitler truly believed that he was building a better world — though for reasons and by means that humane societies rejected.

Different disciplines do not simply use different words to say the same things. Help from a psychiatrist does not require belief that the world is fallen. A psychiatrist who believes that a patient’s problem has theological dimensions must, nevertheless, deal with the psychiatric aspects in a psychiatrically responsible manner. Moreover, the assumption that a person’s problems resulting from accidents, catastrophes, or birth defects is to be treated as though sin is the primary answer met its correction, up to a point, in the Gospel of John. Seeing a man blind from birth, the disciples asked Jesus whose sin — the man’s, in the womb, or his parents — caused the man to be born blind. Jesus’ answer was that neither was the case. 

What is the distinction, then, between the sinner, the mentally deranged person and the hardened criminal? The murderer, the thief, the psychopath and the cancer victim, as well as all other problem-plagued people, manifest the brokenness of the Creation. Whose brokenness is to be punished by law and whose is to be treated by some branch of the social sciences or perhaps some branch of the medical arts with hopes for a cure? When does personal responsibility become the dominant feature? 

Actually, the people who work on specific brokenness — medical doctors, psychiatrists and the like — are as human beings themselves broken in some way. This is part of what Jesus meant by “Do not judge, lest you be judged likewise.”
