Ours is to judge: on Jesus and the adulteress

Recently, some shocking truths about Richard Dawkins have come to light. Not only is he sometimes unable to recall at will 21-word extended title of The Origin of Species - he is, on top of that, distantly related to some unpleasant people ! Honestly, a man who so often claims moral high ground over slavery-endorsing Christianity. How dare he be related to slave owners!

Never mind that a large percentage of the UK population, including most of its black populace, have ancestors who owned slaves. Never mind any subtle distinction between oneself and one’s relatives last millennium, or that the Church of England surely has a great deal more to answer for with respect to slavery than the House of Dawkins.

Last night, I coincidentally went to see Richard speak at an event some friends of mine hosted. There is one thing he said there, and which he’s said before, which I think deserves sincere criticism. (What follows is my best account from memory, 12 sleep-filled hours later, so I can’t promise it’s it’s a precise account - a recording will be on YouTube soon enough, though, so I’ll post it here once I can.)

When a discussion on stage with the host had run its course, the audience went on to proffer questions in the usual manner, and at one point a young man raised the microphone to his lips and declared, as if in profound realisation, ‘I get the feeling… [you think] religion is bad.’

He went on, for several minutes and to the consternation of the audience around him, to ramble somewhat incoherently on the notions of good and bad with respect to Christianity, appearing constantly to approach a rhetorical peak before collapsing into further drivel. The entire question, if indeed it was one, was far too nebulous for me even to try and paraphrase it here, and one felt sorry for Richard having to spend energy responding, but his answer made the broad and uncontroversial point that the Bible includes passages both laudable and vile. As an example of the former and a great teaching he thought most people in the room would immediately get behind, he gave the Gospel injunction, ‘he that is without sin, cast the first stone’.

It’s a teaching Richard has praised before, notably last year. Am I alone in being perplexed by this?

Of course literal stonings are undesirable, and of course reacting to transgressions overharshly is worth discouraging. But the point of what Jesus says is, he is without sin. Not being subject to paternally transmitted original sin, Jesus is the only completely sinless human being and was (to commandeer a phrase) born that way. This is what gives him moral authority, as the son of God, over the woman; it’s why only he gets to absolve her sins. When he tells the crowd, ‘You are not without sin’, he is telling them they don’t get to judge her.

The trendy, modern day determination not to judge or be judgemental is, I feel, probably one of our cultural inheritances from Christianity, and it only takes a fair amount of discourse with evangelicals before phrases occur like ‘That’s for God to judge, not me’ or ‘I don’t think you should be sent to Hell, that’s just what God thinks’. Here we have the broadest application of the ban on judgmental stonecasting; we mortals who have sinned and will again don’t get the privilege of moral independence.

That’s what the moral is, in the story of Christ and the adulteress. If you’ve ever done anything wrong, if you’re not perfect, if you’re guilty of being born a fallible human, yours is not to judge. Leave that to God. It’s not that casting stones is bad; it’s that only Jesus, perfect in his own terms, gets to cast them. He doesn’t literally do this in the woman’s case, of course, absolving her with a ‘Go and sin no more’ - but the point is that he, and not anyone in the crowd, is qualified to forgive or condemn her..

Isn’t that - the teaching that perfection is a prerequisite for judging people - actually a pretty demeaning, misanthropic principle? It suggests that because at some points in my life previously I’ve behaved with less than total moral credibility, I’m not allowed to look down on anyone else no matter what they’ve done. It ignores that past misdemeanours frequently make one more, not less, qualified to evaluate morals. And it tells us that as long as we’re watched from above by creatures of self-described perfection who do our moral thinking for us, ours is not to judge.

In the absence of gods, ours is always to judge. We just need to do it fairly. Richard, take note.

Alex Gabriel