One of the most complex political problems facing Christians is that of judgment. The Christian notion of judgment—articulated most famously in Matthew 7:1, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged”—is especially difficult to apply in the United States, in which Christian theological vocabulary is entangled with the discourse of partisan politics. For some, there is little recognition that judgment or oppression are problematic at all; for others, judgment is personally distasteful and theologically rude, a transgression against the “civility” that should supposedly rule political dialogue (which, consequently, spurns calls for justice that are perceived as anything less than polite). As a result, both judgment and dialogue feel impotent as elements of Christian political action, frequently reinforcing hegemonic power either by engaging in bigotry or being complicit in it. Is there, however, a more nuanced notion of judgment and dialogue, one rooted in God’s call to encounter Creation and all the human lives that participate in it? I will seek to develop such a notion, reading the Gospels in the context of Martin Buber’s concept of dialogue in order to develop a more robust notion of Christian political judgment and dialogue.

Buber, a Jewish theologian whose work responded to the tumult of the twentieth century, is most famous for his mystically inflected conception of dialogue. In Buber’s view, most of our engagement with reality consists in relationships of objectification, in which perception is constituted between a perceiving subject, an “I,” and a perceived object, an “it.” Such “objects” are most frequently other people, who we know only insofar as the person “consists of traits…A face is nothing but a physiognomy, movements nothing but gestures of expression.”¹ As a result:

[T]his man is for [the observing subject] an object separated from themselves and their personal life…Consequently what they experience in this way…neither demands action from them nor inflicts destiny on them…

All our knowledge assures us, “Be calm, everything happens as it must happen, but nothing is directed at you, you are not meant; it is just ‘the world,’ you can experience it as you like, but whatever you make of it in yourself proceeds from you alone, nothing is required of you, you are not addressed, all is quiet.”²

An objectified relationship (called an “I-It” relationship) with reality, in this way, entails a sense of separateness that necessarily produces apathy, especially of an ethical form. We do not perceive our responsibility to work for justice specifically because we do not perceive that other lives have a fundamental relation to our own, that we are addressed by and are called to respond to the world around us.

But there exists, Buber says, an alternative to this objectification: dialogue. Dialogue, in Buber’s sense, does not refer to conversation but to a mode of perception that engages with our abiding relationality with the people (and, indeed, all things of Creation) who address us. By encountering the world in this way, we “becom[e] aware”³ both of those who address us and of the way we are called to respond to them. In turn, through this “I-Thou” relationship, we come to a momentary encounter with God, which may compound into an abiding revelation: “out of the giver of the signs, the speakers of the words in lived life, out of the moment God there arises for us with a single identity the Lord of the voice, the One.”⁵ Buber notes that such efforts at dialogue certainly face impediments, but argues that these impediments should not lead one to abandon dialogue and retreat into “I-it” relationships: “True address from God directs man to the place of lived speech, where the voices of creatures grope past one another, and in their very missing of one another they succeed in reaching the eternal partner.” Thus, even in our mortal inadequacy, we are not called to give up on the sacrament of dialogue, to not sink into empty platitudes or abstraction, but to engage ethically with the world around us and to find God in this process of searching. To engage in I-Thou relationality, then, is profoundly important to our call to witness God’s divine revelation.

With Buber in mind, it is evident that little of our contemporary political activity partakes of dialogue, more often manifesting in the objectification of other people than in involved awareness of them. But it does not seem that the bipartisan conception of “dialogue” is much closer to true Buberian dialogue, either. As Buber suggests, to objectify another is to assume that their lives have no relation to ours, that we have no responsibility to respond to the manner in which they address us—and I contend that this objectification is at the heart of “both sides” discourse, which seeks the convenient, comfortable apathy of empty compromise over the demanding work of real justice. And, troublingly, this centrist discourse employs the language of Christianity to defend itself, insisting that resistance to compromise is tantamount to the divisive judgment that Christ demands we avoid.

But what is judgment, for Jesus, and how does it differ from dialogue? On its face, Matthew 7:1 seems to tell the whole story: do not judge. But this commandment becomes more complex when we read it in the broader context of Jesus’ teachings. In Matthew 7:15-20, for example, Jesus reminds us that Christian witness will be assailed by false prophets, but that we may “know them by their fruits,”⁶ which certainly seems to entail judgment. Perhaps more confoundingly, Luke 6 sees Jesus deliver several woes to those who have turned from God, then exhort us to love our enemies.⁷ On its face, the contrast between these teachings seems puzzling. If we are meant not to judge, how could we recognize a false prophet, much less turn away from their teaching? If we are meant to love our enemies, how could we also affirm the woes that Jesus delivers to them?

The answer emerges in the implications of the Gospels’ language, particularly in the distinction between judging and knowing. In the original Greek, Matthew 7:1’s judgment is κρίνετε (krínete), the verb root of which is κρῑ́νειν, meaning not just to judge but to pick out by separating. This more complex meaning, we should note, evokes the motif of divine judgment that persists throughout Matthew, and which culminates in the Judgment of Nations, when the Son of Man “will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.”⁸ In other words, judgment is not synonymous with moral discernment but with separating human beings from the Body of Christ and from God’s rule. While such judgments are appropriate for the Son of Man, as his judgment is precisely that which constitutes the Reign of God (though this fact is complex enough to merit another essay entirely), it is an entirely different matter for human beings, for whom judgment means engaging in the “I-it” relationship that Buber warns against. When we judge, we assert that we share no relationship with other members of the human family, that we can divorce others from the Body of Christ—and thus, we divorce ourselves from the Body of Christ. 

Matthew 7:15-20’s discussion of “knowing” false prophets offers a different vision of encountering wrongdoing. In these verses, the word know is translated from the Greek ἐπιγνώσεσθε (epignōsesthe), whose root verb ἐπιγινώσκω (epiginóskó) refers to a form of deep knowing that comes through direct experience or personal encounter—akin to Buber’s concept of “becoming aware.” Critically, ἐπιγινώσκω is also used in the Gospels to refer to the way the Father knows the Son,⁹ the way Jesus intuits the intentions of the scribes who doubt him,¹⁰ and the way the disciples on the Road to Emmaus recognize the resurrected Jesus.¹¹ We should not underestimate the significance of this lexical recurrence: the profound knowing through which we encounter God, and indeed through which God encounters God, is the same knowing through which we are asked recognize those who work against God’s call to love. As a result, the form of knowledge that reveals false prophets is a knowing that is discerning while still being dialogical, capable of recognizing wrongdoing with the same depth through which we know God and God knows us. Indeed, recognizing wrongdoing is only truly possible because of this interpersonal encounter. As a result, while the Gospels channel Buber’s notion of dialogue as a channel to God, they also add a new dimension: they remind us that true dialogue, the deep awareness through which we come to know God, necessarily includes a recognition of all elements of a person, including their sanctity, their subjective validity, and even their wrongdoing. 

I place such emphasis on the New Testament’s Greek not because I am seeking to excavate a hidden Biblical loophole or to proscribe a definitive way of understanding the Gospels; rather, I want to open up one possibility through which we can discern the complex problem of judgment and encounter in the Christian political project. In our contemporary moment, when massive structures of dehumanization are reproduced through the actions of complicit individuals, we should remember that God calls us to avoid the judgment that would separate others from the Body of Christ—which demands that we enter into a dialogue that recognizes the totality of another person. 

This call is particularly urgent given that, in the United States, mainstream Christianity has offered a reactionary and unproductive notion of judgment. Many right-wing Christians seem to ignore the moratorium on judgment entirely, eagerly participating in the marginalization of queer people and people of color—but many centrist Christians are hardly better. While these Christians often take Matthew 7 to heart, aligning themselves (theoretically) with paradigms that advocate social justice and equality, their particular aversion to judgment can actually be an impediment to bringing about the Reign of God, orienting dialogue not toward material and spiritual justice but toward centrist equivocation. These formulations take for granted that we must “hear all sides of a debate,” insisting that we should respect even those “sides” who are fundamentally rooted in negating the lives of those at the margins. Consequently, these centrists elevate the appearance of harmony over the reality of solidarity, making ethics a matter of personal taste, not real encounter with the God-given beinghood of others—and thus, they engage in the very antithesis of real dialogue.

This means that, for our dialogue to be true, we cannot turn a blind eye to complicity for the sake of civility. On the contrary, the equivocations and false compromises of centrism partake of the same objectifying separation as oppressive judgment, assuring us that another person has nothing to do with us and that we are not responsible for holding them accountable for injustice. In fact, to engage in a deeper process of knowing, we must recognize wrongdoing. After all, how could we possibly know someone through the deep, personal dialogue of ἐπιγινώσκω when we ignore their participation in ongoing oppression? Instead, we must use dialogue as an opportunity to be honest and truthful, to take responsibility in engaging others in the difficult work to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to Earth.

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