Did Christ Teach Moral Relativity and that We can Escape Judgment?

Mat 7:1 Judge not, so that you will be not judged.
Mat 7:2 For with the judgment that you judge, you shall be judged: and with what measure you use, it shall be measured to you again.

The terms used here for "judge" and "judgment" are krino and krima, respectively. Krima means "decision" or "judgment," but krino is a much more complicated idea. Krino primarily means "to separate," "to put asunder," and "to distinguish." It has a lot of other secondary meanings, including "to pick out," "to choose," "to decide" disputes or accounts, "to win" a battle, "to judge" especially in the sense of "estimate," "to expound," or "to interpret" in a particular way. The primary meaning of "to separate" here is important because that is how Christ consistently describes God's judgment of people: separating good people from bad people, this idea of putting people into clear categories.

Is Christ saying that if we don't judge other people that God will not judge us? If you believe, as I do, that Christ does not contradict himself, this cannot be the meaning. So, what is Christ saying? He is saying that if we don't separate others into groups, other people will be less inclined to define us on the basis of one group or another. In our modern era, we have a term for trying to characterize people completely on the basis of one group or another that they happen to belong to. This term is "discrimination" in the negative sense of racial discrimination.

This interpretation is very consistent with what Christ says everywhere else in the Bible. His position is that only God can see into our hearts and only God can know us completely. For us to categorize others on the basis of the little we know, primarily on people's external features, is a mistake. That mistake leads to a world divided in meaningless ways. God can judge because only God has a complete picture. We cannot judge because by our very natures, our picture is an illusion, a small fraction of the reality.

This idea is consistent with the last part of the second verse. Again, is Christ saying that God will measure (metreo) with whatever measure (metron) we use? This would be the ultimate of moral relativism. It would mean that if we accept immorality in others, God will accept our immorality. That again, would be inconsistent with everything that Christ teaches about the law. The only way to understand this statement is that Christ is speaking about the measurements that we make in our society. In other words, people will treat us in the same way that we treat them. This is very consistent with everything else Christ teaches.

This connects again with the entire message of this sermon, that the world is divided into the physical, the spiritual, and the social. Here, Christ is not speaking about the physical world or spiritual world, whose rules are set by God. He is talking about the social world, where the rules are set by mere mortals. What Christ is saying is that good societies arise from good people, but that we cannot create perfect godlike rules by which society runs. Instead, we have to build our society upon the recognition that human judgments are far from perfect.

The first way we recognize this imperfection of human judgment is to avoid lumping people into general categories. We must we respect everyone as an individual as we would wish to be respected. We cannot divide people artificially and create a working society. We cannot apply different rules to different groups of people. In other words, we must treat all people the same under the law. This idea should be familiar to every American, since it is one of America's founding principles, and it is traced directly to this verse.

The second important aspect of this verse is that we make laws that we would accept for ourselves. We should not make punishments or rewards for others that we would not accept for ourselves. Christ continually accuses his opponents of being hypocrites because they used one set of rules for themselves and another set for other people. Christ, in his role as the historical catalyst changing human society, insists that, in our roles as social rule-makers we only make rules for others that we would gladly accept for ourselves.

In the previous verses at the end of Matthew Chapter 6, Christ says that we must trust God's working of the physical world to provide for us, but that we shape our social worlds ourselves an that we cannot accept God to make things in society right for us. Instead, we must follow his rules.