The So-Called Sin Of Empathy

In 2021, James R. White posted on Twitter about his views on empathy & replied to his detractors in manner that reveals who & what he has become over the years.  It serves as a case study into the mind of man who is an expert when it comes to defending the doctrines of grace & who had suffered much at the hands of Roman Catholic apologists & many others, who takes time to read & understand his opponents, who reminds us that we should love Muslims & avoid the trap of equating all of Islam with the spirit of jihadism, while at the same time, his commitment to his American Conservatism has blinded him to his own moral problems that at times make him sound like yet another tantruming member of the Manosphere. 

He writes

When you start with man as image-bearing creature of God, you can understand why sympathy is good, but empathy is sinful.

Do not surrender our mind to the sinful emotional responses of others.

There is truth to that statement.  We aren’t to surrender our minds to the sinful emotional responses of others — but we are called to think God’s thoughts after Him & to know the pain of others the way God, according to Exodus, knew the pain of the Israelites in Egypt & to paraclete people with whom we disagree according to Matthew 5:41 - 48. 

And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. 42 Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.  (Matthew 5:41–48, ESV)

He continues 

 

1) I made the context that of creation, with man as the image bearer—the exact opposite of the secular worldview. Should have been a context-setter.

2) I asserted a direct contrast between the goodness of sympathy and the sinfulness of empathy.

3) I then made it clear what is sinful about this use of empathy: if involves the surrender of our minds to the sinful emotional responses of others.

God has made us His image bearers.  This is true.   James does draw a distinction between sympathy & empathy.   At issue is whether or not his distinction is congruent with the Bible correctly understood.   He then states that what makes this use of empathy a sin is the surrender of our minds to the sinful emotional responses of others.  

How does the Bible define sinfulness?  What makes baking the cake for a homosexual couple sinful?  Is it the fact that the couple happens to be two men or two women and/or the meaning of the cake?   If so, then God commends & condemns the baker based on the identity of the couple &/or the cake — not the inner workings of the baker’s heart & mind.  It’s sufficient for God and/or us to condemn the baker’s actions based on external factors.  We know he failed to love God & neighbor exhaustively & perfectly because he chose to bake the cake.   That’s all that is required.    

The baker, you see, surrendered to the encroaching liberal menace that reminds us that gay people are image bearers of God (even though they might  not use those words) & that we are to paraclete them.    Baking the cake identifies the baker as a man or woman who has come to surrender his or her mind to the sinful emotional responses of others.   It’s best not to bake the cake.   It’s best to dig down deep & refuse instead of listening to Proverbs & Romans 12: 

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” 20 To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.  (Romans 12:19–21, ESV)

You see; isn’t it obvious? The truly loving thing to do is refuse service & ignore the history of warfare between the LGBTQ community & Christians who opt to refuse their responsibility to replicate & restore to them, to women, & to any number of minorities in this nation.    

Perhaps if the Christian community paracleted the LGBTQ community more, Target and Bud Light wouldn’t be as strident with respect to what they are doing.   We should ask ourselves why, in the age in which gay people can legally marry, it is still legal in some states to discriminate against people with respect to sexual orientation in matters of employment, housing, and public accommodation. 

Christians have a checkered history with respect to these issues.  In the 80’s, Tom, Carol, Ted, and Alice were swinging while Jerry Falwell pointed fingers at gay men with respect to HIV/AIDS.   In the 90’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was controversial while Christians were openly lying about the efficacy of latex condoms and instituting purity culture and abstinence only sex education programs that excluded gay people from discussions except to send the message that that sort of behavior kills and is otherwise unacceptable. 

In the 2000’s the BSA decided to allow openly gay students into its ranks.  Christians in the churches, while saying that gays need Jesus and that the BSA chapters they sponsored were part of their outreach ministries, cut ties with the BSA and decided to do their own thing in order to exclude gays, thus sending the message “No Jesus for you!” to gays.   That happened concurrently with the standing in line at Chick Fil’A to oppose the gay agenda.   Did anyone who bought Combo 1 for Christ buy a one for their gay friend?  

Now TN is targeting drag queens in the public square and censuring African-American legislators in the State House for being agitators while cutting the Nashville Metro area government in half for brazenly political reasons - and all of this while their legislature is reliving another cycle of sexual harassment by one or more legislators.    

They even turned down federal funds for HIV prevention & education targeting socio-politically disapproved people like gays & drug users & instead opted to concentrate on pregnant mothers & first responders.    Their refusal to empathize led them to paraclete people in the list of socially approved people, which is exactly the opposite of what Matthew 5 teaches us.   

We live in the age of dutiful culture warriors who think that buying Chick Fil-A combo # 1 to stick it to the gays is a good thing, & who are at the present time doing anything & everything they can to point fingers at the world just like the Corinthian church did.  Meanwhile God keeps writing them letters about sexual immorality in their own ranks & calling attention to spiritual abuse.  

So allow me to briefly expand. Man is God’s creature. God has created man with a mind, the capacity to think, to reflect, to meditate. Man is told to be disciplined in these things. In fact, the greatest commandment is not “feelings, nothing more than feelings,” but is “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength.” You do not give that commandment to your cat, or your Siamese fighting fish. Man has the capacity to direct his passions, control his passions, rule over his passions, and the first two commandments (love your neighbor as yourself) prove it.

Yes you do give that command to your cat or your fish.  We live in God’s temple, in which God’s image is everywhere.   

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Romans 1:20, ESV)

God’s image image is in **every** living thing.  The animals also bear God’s image.  They too are God’s offspring as are the angels.    They are moral creatures too.  God commands that they too love God exhaustively & perfectly first then their neighbors before themselves, & then themselves — in that order. 

Also, those aren’t just the first two commandments.  Those two commandments summarize the first two tables of the Law (Matt. 22).  Romans 13 reminds us that perfect love fulfills the Law, & 1 John 4 reminds us that perfect loves overcomes fear associated with guilt in the Judgment. 

So I am actually functioning on the radical idea that God lays out for His creature man laws and guidelines and we are to live within them, seeking to love God and think His thoughts after Him, glorifying Him by living in His creation as He has commanded. And yes, I believe man is to master, control, and utilize his emotional life in light of divine truth. We are not to be mastered by our emotions.

I agree, but as we will see, Dr.White’s desire to not be mastered by his emotions is not what he believes it to be when comes to his pet issues.   He draws the line when it comes to LGBTQ people, women, & wokeness.   

So what is the problem with empathy today? We are, in fact, told to weep with those who weep, but that assumes those who weep have a reason for weeping that is in line with God’s revelation. We are not to weep with the drug dealer who accidentally drops his stash down the storm drain in New York City. We are not to weep with the bank robber who botches the job and ends up in the slammer. We are, plainly, to exercise control even in our sympathy. We are not to sympathize with sin, nor are we to sympathize with rebellion, or evil.

Why is the man dealing drugs?  Why do people rob banks?  Why do trans people pick up guns & murder 8 children in a Christian school?  Why does a man pick up a gun & murder a female business owner for flying a rainbow flag? Why does Jack Phillips renew his business license with his fingers crossed behind his back only to wind up in court yet again because of his Situational Ethics?   

But the new cultural (and it has flown into the church as well) orthodoxy is: you shall empathize. You shall enter into the emotions of others AND YOU SHALL NOT MAKE JUDGMENTS ABOUT SAID EMOTIONS. By so doing YOU SHALL VALIDATE ALL HUMAN EXPERIENCES AS SUPREME. The greatest sin of all today is to say, “The emotions that person is experiencing are the result of sinful rebellion against God, and hence do not require my validation, support, or celebration.” HOW DARE YOU! That is the great rule I stepped upon, and must now pay the price.

When these words become codespeak for “I know my views on these topics are unbiblical & I would rather live in self-reinforcing ignorance & emotional immaturity,” you have crossed the threshold into bigotry territory — the same sort of bigotry that James rebutted when his peers went after for daring to defy their assertions about Islam & jihadism, now applied to LGBTQ people, women, & wokeness. 

The Great Empathy Commandment has been very useful in the degradation of Christian morals and ethics, let alone evangelism, pastoral counseling, etc. Sixty years ago it was almost unthinkable that the Christian people would, by a majority, think homosexuality a “gift from God,” but that is the case today. Why? Empathy. “Walk a mile in their shoes. Consider their life. ENTER INTO their emotional experience.” Then it went from simple homosexuality to the redefining of marriage. Now, polyamory, polygamy. And with 2015, every form of gender-destroying “experience.” You must empathize. You must “enter in” or your are “unloving.” Already the push to empathize with those who naturally experience “intergenerational love” (pedophiles) is in the academy and the culture. Marrying your cat or your Siamese fighting fish is just around the corner. Just empathize with the experience. Validate it. Then submit.

According to Dr. White, the word “natural” in Romans 1:27 means “heterosexual/heteronormative,” & “unnatural” means “homosexual.”   On the one hand, God’s image is everywhere.  Only God’s  image is authoritative as a necessary, principled, & reasoned epistemic warrant for worship & sexual ethics.     On the other, there is a teleological principle embedded in the human body so that our anatomy & physiology (& psychology) sufficiently warrant our sexual ethics as to this issue.   

Which narrative is true? God has no sexual attributes.  His attributes are moral & their essence is infinite; eternal, & immutable. 

Dr. White rejects women as elders.  On that view, there is a genetics test to weed out women.  Men get to move on to the morals test.     If she desires the office of elder, she is automatically wrong. Ergo, it’s obvious that she does love God & neighbor as she should — as if men do therefore they can proceed. 

Isn’t the morals test itself designed to determine the quality and orderliness of love for God & others in someone?   Once again, God has no sexual attributes, & that means God has no sex & no gender.   His attributes are moral & their essence is infinite; eternal, & immutable.     How then is it that there is a genetics test for elders & deacons?      

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.  (Matthew 5:43–48, ESV)

Antiguilt laws, scrubbing particular terms from legislation & policy, even to the point of removing online material about sexual assault, rape, & the Holocaust, all of this furor emanating from American Conservatives in particular because “How dare you remind us of systemic injustices & how our society is, “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! 144,000! Guilty!” is a larger problem than empathy.   The sin here is lack of empathy, defined as a failure to love God exhaustively & perfectly first, then others, then yourself leading to a refusal to engage in acts of repentance that replicate & restore to those we Christians (and others) have historically failed.   This isn’t emotionalism, it’s just plain old fashioned obedience to the Law & the Gospel.