In this life, we are constantly being judged. Employers judge our work; friends judge our attitudes; complete strangers judge our fashion sense; and tutors judge their students’ academic progress. Of course, we all do the same thing—we judge other people’s actions and attitudes, their fashion sense and taste in music—pretty much anything that can be judged, we make judgments about, and we do it almost automatically.
This isn’t a bad thing, in itself. Judgment rests on identifying what is good and valuable, and identifying the good and valuable is something we should be doing. It’s a human thing; and, moreover, it’s a Christian thing. How else can we know what is worth pursuing, what we should fight to protect, what we should love?
In this way, love relies on judgment. Judging rightly opens a path to loving rightly. We love God because he loved us first, and we recognize the great goodness and value of that love. As we come to better understand the goodness and greatness of God—which is to say, as we come to judge of Him rightly—we also come to love Him better. In a similar way, judging our neighbors rightly—seeing their goodness and value as not less than our own—gives us reason to love them as we love ourselves.
But just as judging rightly can lead to loving rightly, judging wrongly can lead us to loving wrongly. We can love things we should despise; we can despise things we should love. Less dramatically, we can love things more or less than we should—out of proportion with their actual goodness and value.
We are all prone to make mistakes in our judgments. We misjudge God, other people, events, accomplishments, and even—perhaps especially—ourselves. Knowing that we cannot entirely trust our own self-judgment, we seek the approval of others. We adjust our attitudes to please our friends, our appearance to please strangers, our work to please our employers, and our study to please our instructors.
There’s a pragmatic side to this, of course—pleasing these people (which is to say, earning their favorable judgment) leads to desirable results. Our friends become more friendly, strangers compliment our outfits, employers raise our wages, and instructors award us good grades. We come to rely on the judgment of others when evaluating our attitudes, our actions, our accomplishments, even our haircuts.
Again, this isn’t a bad thing in itself. In many circumstances, other people are better equipped to judge than we are. I trust my mechanic’s judgment about my car’s transmission; I trust Eliot’s judgment on Irish music, Chris’ judgment in the realm of physics, Brian’s judgment about film, Nancy’s on Kierkegaard, Cindy’s on Shakespeare, Kathleen’s on the German language; and, of course, I trust Charley’s judgment about anything having even remotely to do with salmonids. And I also trust their judgment about how to teach our mutual students. (Well, not the mechanic.)
Is my trust in their judgment justified 100% of the time? Of course not. Like everyone else, they make mistakes. Like I do. On balance, though, it’s wise to trust their judgment in areas they are qualified to judge. If Kathleen tells me, “The seniors’ pronunciation of German words is becoming really impressive!” I will believe her. She is in a position to judge their pronunciation, while I am not.
Class of 2025, when you came to us four years ago, you were putting your trust in our judgment, whether or not you realized it at the time. Thank you for that.
We quickly noticed that your class, as a whole, responded strongly to our judgments—especially as those judgments were expressed in the grades you earned. You also really wanted to hear verbal confirmation of your progress—those proverbial “words of affirmation.” (I remember your plan to get Chris Alderman, with his radio-quality voice, to record affirmations for you to listen to.) You really liked the words, but you believed the numbers—the grades. And why shouldn’t you? Grades are the standard metric for educational achievement.
I hope you have come to appreciate that the standard metrics for achievement aren’t always the best metrics. Sometimes they aren’t even particularly good metrics. So when you get a raise at work, be thankful, but reserve judgment. What you are paid may or may not reflect the quality of your work. Some people have accomplished great things with little or no compensation, and others have been well-paid for essentially doing nothing.
A college degree is another standard metric for educational achievement, one which you will be receiving from us today. So when Chris hands you your diploma, be thankful, but consider—are we qualified to make this judgment? Are we qualified to judge that you merit the title “Bachelor of Liberal Arts?” If you judge that we are, congratulations! You can be confident that your degree means something real, even beyond the value which you judge it to have. If you aren’t sure that we’re qualified to judge your educational progress, then you’re in the same boat as every student who has wondered, “Why did my paper get a B? I did everything right! It should have earned an A.” Or every employee who thinks, “Why did I get passed over for a raise again? I do everything that’s on my job description.” Whose judgment do you trust? Your instructor’s? Your employer’s? Your own? Your friends’, to whom you complain about these situations? If you haven’t figured it out already, deciding whose judgment to trust is another judgment you have to make.
But as strongly as you might feel about your grades or your wages, about what your friends think of you or how your family views your decisions or the value your culture places on your accomplishments, and as much as weighing such judgments can be a good thing—ultimately, all such judgments can only ever be secondary. Such judgments are secondary because their objects—the things they judge—are secondary. Your grades and wages and decisions and accomplishments are all secondary to you—to your self. We human beings are often qualified to judge secondary things like decisions and accomplishments. We are never qualified to judge one another as selves. To refer back to Nancy Scott’s commencement address a couple of years ago, we are selves before our Creator, and only He can judge those selves. Only God is qualified to judge you as a person.
And that is the other reason that judgments about things like decisions and accomplishments are secondary: they are fundamentally less important than a right judgment about you as a person, as a self. While your decisions and accomplishments do express something about you as a person, they don’t perfectly convey who you are. So when your fellow human beings form judgments about you, these judgments are necessarily imperfect. “Man looks at the outward appearance” and all that.
So God is your judge—your final judge, the only judge that matters in the end. This should be both comforting and terrifying. Think about God’s standard of goodness: how will you ever measure up? Consider the sheer, simple impossibility of His two great commands: to love him without reserve or limit and to love the imperfect people around us the way we love our own, imperfect selves.
And how can knowing that God is your final judge be comforting? When Christians in the Roman church were busy judging each other for eating meat sacrificed to idols or over whether to hold one day of the week more holy than the others, Paul enjoins them not to judge one another on the grounds that God has accepted them all. He then comments, “Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.”
I find great comfort in that final statement. If I am the Lord’s servant, he will make me stand, and I will not fall before his judgment. And you—Kate, Gracie, Samuel—if you belong to God, he will make you stand in the final judgment. So that leaves the question—what does it mean to be God’s servant, to belong to God? I dearly hope that the time you’ve spent here at Gutenberg has given you tools to pursue the answer to that question and has encouraged you in your desire to make that pursuit because I cannot give you a satisfactory answer to the question, being myself in the middle of the chase.
So, when the people and institutions of this world judge you, give those judgments the consideration they merit—not more but not less. Never forget whose judgment matters in the end. And never give up your pursuit of the One who is able to make you stand.
This address was given at the Gutenberg College commencement on June 13, 2025 and first appeared in print in the Summer 2025 issue of Colloquy, Gutenberg College’s free quarterly newsletter. Subscribe here.
