Touchstone Magazine republishes “An Address to Seminary Students on the Forsaken Art of Christian Judgment.”
We have a similar problem here. The passage only says to “never make judgments” if we abruptly stop reading before the passage has finished the thought. What the passage does say is that there is an irrevocable connection between judging others and the judgment we ourselves receive. The order of judging oneself before judging others is important. First take the log out of your own eye, in order that you might remove the speck that is in your neighbor’s eye. Reading the whole passage, we see that it does not forbid us from judging, or making judgments, but instead counsels us not to judge if we are not willing to stand under judgment, based upon the same standards by which we judge. Far from forbidding moral judgment, it tells us the conditions under which judgment might take place.
