One of the many valuable things I learned from my father was the strict instruction to refrain from judging the motives of others. This is a blessing beyond compare when it comes to cultivating a healthy marriage and family, and it is oil on troubled waters in many relational conflicts. But it is not an all purpose cure-all. The apostle Paul said that as far as it concerned us, we were to be at peace with all men. But sometimes the other party does not cooperate, and you cannot be at peace with them. A refusal to impute motives does not automatically fix everything — but frequently it is a great help in not making things worse.
What is it to impute motives? I am judging the motives of others when I not only accuse them of wrong-doing, but I also publicly declare the internal heart reasons they had for doing it. If I see a man hop into my car and drive off in it, I can know that he stole my car. But what I don’t know is why. If I go down to the police station and report that so-and-so stole my car out of envy, I am judging motives. And this is something that is beyond my competence to judge. I don’t know that, and if all I have seen is the back of his head, I can’t know it. A man could have many motives (unknowable by me) for stealing my car. It could just be his chop-shop job, it could be greed, it could be envy, it could be fear. I don’t know.
But this is not true when I know the other person very well, or if I know him reasonably well and have talked to him a great deal. The Bible teaches that the words of the mouth reveal the intent of the heart. Sometimes it is overt, and other times it is implicit. In other words, we are not always left to guess why; sometimes the offender is obliging and tells us exactly why. “I will never forgive you for cheating me out of my share of the inheritance,” says one sister to another. Now the second sister knows the motivation for all her sister’s subsequent behavior, and she knows it without imputing motives.
Imputing motives in the destructive sense happens this way: a woman hears her husband answer her questions with monosyllables only. She knows that if she answered him that way it would be because she was ticked off at him, and since he is answering her that way, he must be resenting her. But this is not true. He is answering her this way because he is a blockhead. And she has a worse situation because she imputed motives — she is dealing with what she thinks is malice when she ought to be dealing with stupidity.
The motives of others can be known, but not through what I call great experiments in telepathy. We cannot peer into the heart of another and figure out what is going on there. But we can listen and hear, and ponder and know. If someone tells you what his plans are, and then systematically goes about implementing them, then it is not hubris to think you know what is happening.
There are at least two motives for trying to figure out the motives of others, one good and one bad. The bad one first. When someone has wronged you, a very natural and carnal response is to want to strike back. “You’re a thief!” doesn’t seem to cut it. Presumably he knows that already. But “You’re a thief who stole my car to make up for your feelings of vast and profound feelings of inferiority! Compared to people like me!” has a real punch to it, although he might not hear the last part since he already turned the corner, and your muffler has a hole in it. This is one of the reasons people come up with motives when they don’t really know them. It makes it easier to condemn with turbo-charged enthusiasm, and those who want to retaliate against others with value-added condemnation are forgetting the Lord’s extensive teaching on this subject. William F. Buckley said somewhere that intellectual probity can be seen, not only in what a man says and does, but also in what he puts up with from others. The sinful desire for vengeance is one of the driving forces that tempts us to see motives in others that we cannot really see. Seeing that motive inspires us to strike back harder. When we have been wronged, it is rare that we come up with exculpatory motives for the offender. “He probably stole my car because his wouldn’t start, and his wife must be in labor and he had to get her to the hospital, and I didn’t answer the door fast enough.”
But another reason for dealing with motives is pastoral. One of the reasons for trying to figure out why a person is doing what he is doing is in order to be able to help him. Did a man commit adultery against his wife because of good old fashioned lust? Because he was starved for respect and this other woman offered him a counterfeit and flattering version of it? Because he was in a desperate situation in his marriage and he wanted to do something drastic to blow it up, something that would make his wife divorce him? Motives matter, and pastors are trained to draw them out. And sometimes it is not necessary to draw them out — the motives are lying right on the surface of virtually everything the person says in a counseling session. One man may find himself in constant conflicts with his neighbors because he is a belligerent gorilla. Another man may be in the same position of constant conflict because he is drastically insecure and he is trying to compensate for it. Another man may be appointed by God to the Tishbite on his block, and so he goes around rebuking abominations, confident that he is doing the will of God. Motives vary, and motives matter. But motives cannot just be grabbed out of the air and randomly assigned to people.
In the various controversies I have found myself in, I have to say that the motives of some of my antagonists are almost a complete mystery to me. I would not presume to say anything about their motives, because I have no earthly idea. But with other adversaries, I have a pretty good idea of what is driving them, and I know this because I know them, and have talked to them at great length, and they have told me. Sometimes they know that they have told me, and other times they don’t know what they have revealed. But Jesus said, “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.” If you have been around someone who has routinely verbalized his envy, or competitiveness, or anger, or inadequacy, and he has linked them to his troubled marriage, or business partnership, or troubles at the office, then it would be pastoral folly to ignore it.
But here is the key when it comes to adjudicating disputes. Motives don’t really matter, except to the extent that (in a criminal case) the establishment of motives might pertain to an issue like premeditation. “The defendant told me three months before the murder that he was going to avenge an unconscionable slur upon his character by the deceased. He said the deceased had called him a baby-nut. Twice.” But in other ways, our touchy-feely era is way too interested in motives. This is why we now have stiffer penalties for hate crimes, which must be distinguished from those the ordinary run-of-the-mill love crimes. What matters is what was said or done, period. Say we are dealing with a case of slander. It ought not to matter to us if the slander was done for this evil motive or that one. If it was slander, which can be established, then whatever the motive was, it had to have been a bad one. But which bad motive it was ought to be left to the pastors and counselors. It is not relevant to the question of administering justice.
But in the church, it should always be remembered that the pastoral element should be predominent — a fact that litigious Presbyterians need to deal with. But to the extent that we are dealing with a question of justice (did he or did he not do what his accuser claimed?), motives are not really the issue. If the pastor did pilfer from the offering, his motives may be pastorally relevant, but they are not relevant to whether he should be deposed from office. And if he was falsely accused of doing this by a deacon, the fact that the deacon did it out of envy is pastorally relevant, but it is not relevant to whether he should be removed from the diaconate for his slander. Rightly balanced and rightly known, motives matter to persons, and in personal relationships, but there are important places in our consideration where we do not and must not factor them in.