On Empathy, Once More: A Response to Critics (Part 2)

In Part 1, I described a puzzling combination of criticisms leveled against my writings on empathy from a handful of scholars and authors. On the one hand, they accurately express my concern and then offer a semantic correction (Criticism 1). On the other hand, they then grossly misrepresent me by attacking positions I don’t hold and defending ones I don’t deny. Criticism 2 is usually accompanied by accusations of narcissism and pastoral malpractice.

In Part 1, I identified four areas of misrepresentation: on feelings, on biblical passages, on psychological concepts, and on definitions. In Part 2, I want to walk through each of these areas, ask some clarifying questions, and frame the problem in some fresh ways in hopes of finding common ground. I’ll also address the most common concern raised by friendly critics, namely the rhetorical problem of using the provocative title “the sin of empathy.”

1) Regarding feelings, McKnight writes, “The fear some people today have of getting lost in another’s pain is a chimera and diversion.” And again, “If one gets lost in another’s feelings or emotions, that’s a lack of boundaries and has nothing to do with empathy.” (Other critics have said that empathy and enmeshment are categorically different and don’t even exist on the same spectrum).

This raises two questions: 1) Does McKnight really think that there is no danger of getting lost in the pain of others? Is it really an unjustified fear and chimera? 2) According to McKnight, empathy includes vicariously experiencing the emotions of others. Is it really true, then, that getting lost in another’s feelings “has nothing to do with” empathy? I find it hard to believe that he actually believes either of those statements. And if he did, we would have found a real substantive disagreement between us. If empathy is understood as vicarious emotion-sharing, then at the very least there is a danger that we could get lost in the emotions, pain, and feelings of others. In other words, getting lost in feelings seems to have “something to do with” empathy.

2) On biblical passages, some critics have argued that the Bible never warns about the danger of empathy. Setting aside the fact that the word was only coined in the last century, we can ask whether the Bible ever indicates that it’s possible for compassion or pity or sympathy to go wrong. The Bible describes a number of situations where Israel was to show no pity, such as when a close friend or family member enticed them to commit idolatry (Deut. 13:8), or when faced with a someone convicted of premeditated murder (Deut. 19:11–13), or when faced with a malicious witness (Deut. 19:15–21), or when Israel is sent to conquer the land of Canaan (Deut. 7:16). Thus, the Bible at least seems to be aware of the fact that pity and compassion may lead us to condone sin and thereby commit sin ourselves.

The story of Aaron and the golden calf may help to make this danger more plain. In Exodus 32, Moses is at the top of mount Sinai, with Aaron and the Hebrews at the bottom. Given what Aaron had seen God do, why did he cave so quickly to the people’s demand for idols?

Consider what he was facing. Here was a people who had been chronically oppressed and abused for years. When Moses first arrived to deliver them, his attempts to help only made things worse (Exodus 5). Then after ten dramatic (and potentially traumatic) plagues, the people are delivered. But their chronic oppression gives way to acute danger. Pharaoh pursues them, they find themselves trapped at the Red Sea, and they are only saved only at the last minute. After this, they face the wilderness and the threat of starvation and thirst (Exodus 16-–17), and then the threat of wicked nations who seek to prey on them in their weakness (Exodus 17).

Through it all, Moses has been their leader. He wields the power of God against Pharaoh with the plagues. He stretched out his hand, and the sea parted. He struck the rock with his staff and the water flowed. When his hands were lifted up, they prevailed in battle. When his hands fell to his side, their enemies prevailed. Moses, as God’s prophet, has been the living representative of God’s deliverance.

Then, at Sinai, Moses goes up on the mountain, and the people are distressed at his absence and delay. “We don’t know what happened to Moses,” they say. And so they demand that Aaron make gods to go before them. This is what Aaron is facing — a traumatized and distressed people, reactive and upset because their leader has seemingly abandoned them, and who simply want gods who will go before them, who will protect and comfort them. In the face of this, Aaron finds their distress intolerable and concedes what should not be conceded. His passivity and cowardice in the face of their tumultuous anxiety leads him to do something abominable. What Aaron needed was for his compassion for the people to be tethered to the holiness of God. In other words, in Aaron, we can see what happens when we are overwhelmed by the feelings, distress, and emotions of hurting people. That — whatever you want to call it — is the danger I’m addressing.

3) On psychological concepts, perhaps we could try to move the discussion over to a different and older conceptual psychology. What happens if we number empathy among the passions? By passions, I mean the immediate and almost instinctive motions of the soul which that are closely tied to the body. What if we regard empathy in the way we regard anger, grief, desire, fear, and anxiety? In their proper place, each of these is good, and yet we are all aware of how easily they go wrong.

Thus, in the same way that we can distinguish between righteous anger (Mark 3:5) and sinful anger (Genesis 4:5), or lawful sexual desire (Song of Solomon 7:10) and unlawful sexual desire (Romans 1:25), or holy fear (1 Peter 2:17) and unholy fear (Isaiah 8:12), or normal anxiety (1 Corinthians 7:33) and unbelieving anxiety (Matthew 6:25–34), or godly grief (2 Corinthians 7:10) and worldly grief (2 Corinthians 7:10), we can do the same with governed and ungoverned empathy.

In the same way, we might extend apostolic statements: “in your anger do not sin.” In your sexual desire, do not sin. In your anxiety, do not sin. In your grief, do not sin. In your empathy, do not sin. Or again, just as the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God, neither does the fear of man, the grief of man, or the empathy of man.

In sum, recognizing that empathy (or pity or compassion or whatever we call our natural impulse to share the emotions of the hurting) is a passion, helps us to see both its natural goodness, and its danger. For all passions are dangerous, and must be shepherded, guided, and governed by what is true and good.

4) This brings me to the issue of definitions and rhetoric. The most common criticisms leveled against what I’ve written have been in relation to these two issues. On the one hand, I’m accused of illegitimately redefining terms. On the other hand, I’m accused of overheated and misleading rhetoric (“the sin of empathy”). The latter criticism has even been leveled by those who share my substantive concern about untethered empathy, but believe that the language of “the sin of empathy” was unhelpful and confusing.

On the issue of definitions, my first response is that the definition of empathy is far less monolithic than critics suggest. I know this because I have had numerous critics insist on various “true” definitions of empathy. I’m told that empathy is less than sympathy and compassion and serves sympathy and compassion. I’m told that empathy is simply a synonym for compassion and sympathy. I’m told that sympathy and empathy are very different, and indeed empathy is the more loving response.

I’m told that empathy is emotion-sharing, or perspective-taking, or both. It’s walking a mile in another’s shoes. It’s vicariously experiencing the same emotions as another person. Or it’s an imaginative projection of a subjective state. And this doesn’t even take into account the different contexts in which the term might be used, from medical to psychological to popular use, and the ways that such contexts blur and change over time. And this isn’t simply my claim; here is how a recent article in Scientific American put it:

Empathy is a fundamentally squishy term. Like many broad and complicated concepts, empathy can mean many things. Even the researchers who study it do not always say what they mean, or measure empathy in the same way in their studies — and they definitely do not agree on a definition. In fact, there are stark contradictions: what one researcher calls empathy is not empathy to another.

And lest we think this only applies to academic or technical definitions, the article continues:

When laypeople are surveyed on how they define empathy, the range of answers is wide as well. Some people think empathy is a feeling; others focus on what a person does or says. Some think it is being good at reading someone’s nonverbal cues, while others include the mental orientation of putting oneself in someone else’s shoes. Still others see empathy as the ability or effort to imagine others’ feelings, or as just feeling “connected” or “relating” to someone. Some think it is a moral stance to be concerned about other people’s welfare and a desire to help them out. Sometimes it seems like “empathy” is just another way of saying “being a nice and decent person.” Actions, feelings, perspectives, motives, values — all of these are “empathy” according to someone.

My way of dealing with the definitional challenge has simply been to define very carefully what I mean and to avoid wrangling about words by being willing to translate the key concepts into different vocabularies while seeking to be as consistent as possible.

My second response to the definitional challenge is this: like Friedman, I’m not mainly concerned with the “true” definition of empathy, but with its use (Failure of Nerve, 137). The problem I’m addressing is not mainly philosophical or etymological, but functional and practical. But this leads to the rhetorical challenge — namely, that I provocatively used the phrase “the sin of empathy.” It’s the “the sin of ______” phrase that people struggle with. I’ve probably done more thinking about the rhetorical question than any other aspect of this. So let me try to untangle it.

To begin, we can see how numbering empathy among the passions may be clarifying. An article on “the sin of anger” or “the sin of sexual desire” or even “the sin of loyalty” is comprehensible to many, even though we all know that not all anger or sexual desire or loyalty is sinful (the same would be true for fear, anxiety, and grief). In each case, we naturally understand the phrase “sin of anger” to mean “sinful anger,” and we would need to actually read the article to determine whether there were clear definitions and proper distinctions made. (A friend recently sent me an article entitled “The Terrible Sin of Truth-Telling,” which helpfully highlights the sin of detraction [or, we might add, of gossip, which frequently involves the inappropriate sharing of true information] with the help of a provocative title.)

The issue with “the sin of empathy” is that few people in the modern world can imagine empathy being sinful or negative. As Friedman notes, empathy has “achieved such an inviolable, holy status in the thinking of some that to even question its value will be considered as irreverent, if not sacrilegious” (Failure of Nerve, 136). At the same time, Friedman asserts that, in his judgment, the emotional fusion with another that lurks beneath modern appeals to empathy “is far more destructive than lack of concern or understanding” (“Empathy Defeats Therapy” in The Myth of the Shiska, 119).

One hundred years ago, Chesterton said much the same thing. Vices, he noted, do wander and cause damage. But virtues wander more wildly and do more terrible damage. And virtues wander when they become isolated from each other.

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful. (Orthodoxy, 51–52)

What Chesterton calls an isolated and untruthful pity, I have simply called a sinful and untethered empathy.

Navigating Empathy and Its Distortions

But we can come at the rhetorical question another way. For simplicity’s sake, let’s define empathy as some kind of emotion-sharing. Empathy, properly understood, is less than sympathy and compassion and a servant of sympathy and compassion, both of which build on our emotion-sharing to move us to action in order to relieve suffering. Call this Empathy (A).

On the other hand, empathy, commonly understood, is regarded as an improvement on sympathy and compassion. It’s a deeper and more loving response to the hurting (since it suffers in and not merely with). Call this Empathy (B). Brene Brown is a prominent advocate of this way of thinking.

Note that Empathy (B) (according to Brown) “stays out of judgment.” It refuses to make evaluations (or offer corrections). As a result, Empathy (B), as frequently practiced, is untethered from truth and ungoverned by the good. It finds itself at the mercy of the sufferer’s feelings and easily loses sight of the sufferer’s true and lasting good. It is therefore susceptible to emotional manipulation and blackmail, and it is in this latter sense that we can talk about “the sin of untethered empathy” or “the danger of empathy” (which is the most precise way of summarizing my concern).

So again:

1) Empathy (A), properly understood, is less than sympathy & and the servant of sympathy.

2) Empathy (B), commonly understood & and frequently practiced, is regarded as superior to sympathy & and involves a dangerous untethering from truth and judgment.

We might call these tethered empathy (A) and untethered empathy (B), or governed empathy (A) and ungoverned empathy (B), with Empathy (B) as a corruption or distortion of Empathy (A).

But importantly, both concepts go by the name “empathy.” The common term is what creates confusion and raises the question of rhetorical strategy when seeking to expose it. The question is this: is it legitimate to expose a real sin by using its assumed (good) name? Or must we always and only use distinctive and negative terms for the distortion (in this case, terms like enmeshment, impulsivity, and codependence)?

There is also an additional issue of restricting ourselves to therapeutic language; it is not lost on me that my critics frequently use terms drawn from modern psychology — and not merely descriptive terms like enmeshment, codependence, and narcissism, but even evaluative terms like toxic and unhealthy. While I see some value in the therapeutic framework and its vocabulary, my use of the word “sin” combined with a therapeutic term like “empathy” was undoubtedly jarring to many ears. Indeed, I’ve wondered whether a chief part of the confusion is the difficulty in bringing the therapeutic framework into conversation with a more classical moral framework.

Nevertheless, I submit that because vices typically hide within virtues, it is legitimate to attack the vice under its assumed name. Such a rhetorical approach is frequently used to arrest attention, and we are more than capable of recognizing when it’s being employed. Here are a few examples, drawn from book titles:

The Intolerance of Tolerance by D.A. Carson

When Helping Hurts by Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett

Toxic Charity by Robert Lupton

In each of these cases, we recognize the rhetorical strategy in play. We know that Carson is not condemning all forms of tolerance. Not every attempt to help hurts, and not all charity is toxic. Instead, in each case, we recognize the rhetorical strategy being used and mentally add quotation marks around the key terms: “tolerance,” “helping,” and “charity.”

But some critics will want to distinguish these provocative titles from mine. “Toxic Empathy” or “When Empathy Goes Wrong” or even “Sinful Empathy” would have been clearer and less objectionable. And I really do understand and sympathize with those friends of mine who think a less provocative title would have helped to avoid misunderstanding (though the fact that my subsequent clarifications have not resulted in better critical engagement makes me less sure that the title was the problem).

Nevertheless, I still think that there is a place for such provocative rhetoric (especially in titling), and I believe even my critics are comfortable with it in other contexts. So let’s look at an even more exact parallel. Recently Peter Enns wrote a book entitled The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our “Correct” Beliefs. While it’s possible (and even likely) that I would take substantive issue with some of Enns’s arguments, I understand his provocative title perfectly well. What’s more, I know that it would be ridiculous to quote the dictionary definition of certainty (“firm conviction that something is the case”) and then pretend that Enns believes that it is sinful to have a firm conviction that God loves me or that Jesus rose from the dead.

And while I don’t know what my critics think about Enns’s title, I do know that one of them has recommended a similar book with a similar title. Eight years ago, Greg Boyd wrote Benefit of the Doubt: Breaking the Idol of Certainty. A provocative title. And in a similarly provocatively-titled post, McKnight enthusiastically commends Boyd’s book. And with a little sympathetic imagination (!), I think I can reconstruct McKnight’s perspective.

McKnight is a Bible professor. Over the years he’s seen hundreds of students in his classrooms. Some of them have made a dangerous error: they have prioritized knowing about the Bible over personally knowing the God who reveals himself in the Bible. They have searched the Scriptures, and tragically missed Jesus. As a result, they have a false view of God and a false view of the Scriptures.

McKnight then reads a book that puts its finger right on the problem. The book’s author identifies the problem and notes how frequently it flies under the banner of a certainty-seeking faith, a faith that strives to be mathematically sure that every belief is true and fearfully avoids anything that might cause one to doubt. In other words, the quest for certainty masks a deep insecurity that can only be met by the love of Jesus. And so McKnight commends the provocatively-titled book with an equally provocative title: “Certainty Is Idolatry.” He does so knowing that the people he believes are most tempted to this distortion (perhaps white, Type A, high achieving, Reformed, complementarian males?) will balk at the title. They may even take offense. He (and Boyd) are poking a sacred cow, and they know it. And yet the title remains.

Now I’m less concerned about the substance of Boyd’s book (which I’ve not read) or McKnight’s recommendation. But as one who loves the Bible and who desires to have a firm ground beneath my faith, I at least recognize the danger, both in my own experience and those of my theological tribe.

What I want to highlight here is how foolish it would be for me to criticize McKnight on the grounds that 1) my dictionary says that certainty is “the quality of being reliably true” and 2) therefore, McKnight is claiming that anyone who believes the Bible is reliably true is committing idolatry. Or if I said:

Boyd and McKnight are clearly advancing an unbiblical and dangerous argument. Are we really to believe that God was leading Abram into idolatry when he told him, ‘Know for certain that your offspring shall be sojourners in a land not their own’ (Gen. 15:13)? Was Luke encouraging idolatry when he wrote his gospel in order that Theophilus might “have certainty concerning the things” he was taught (Luke 1:4)? What a ridiculous position to hold!

This criticism would be even stranger if I leveled it after accurately summarizing McKnight’s true position as I did above. And yet this is exactly what McKnight (and many of the other critics) have done. I know good and well that they are capable of understanding (and using!) provocative titles when it suits them.

This is also why, whatever appreciation I have for friends of mine who believe that the present confusion is owing to the provocative title, I don’t share that perspective. I know people who love the title, understand the point, and agree with it. I know people who find the title unhelpful, understand the point, and agree with it. I know people who hate the title, understand the point, and agree with it. And I know people who hate the title, understand the point, and take issue with various semantic or substantive points. Thus, I don’t think the title is the cause of confusion and barrier to understanding that some think. Especially not at this point in the discussion.

Instead, I think the puzzling combination of Criticism 1 and Criticism 2 is a far more salient factor in sowing confusion. And I’m honestly of two minds on what’s behind the combination. On the one hand, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that my critics are being willfully deceptive in misrepresenting my position. In support of willful deception is the fact that each of them does, at some level, represent my position fairly. The accurate summary of my concerns contained within Criticism 1 attests to the fact that they’ve understood the point, even if they have semantic objections to it.

However, when they turn to criticize me, the accurate summary disappears and is replaced by a strawman with my face on it. In a bait and switch, they drop the definition and dynamic that I was actually addressing and substitute for it a positive and noble definition of empathy. And then they proceed to act as though I was attacking that. Thus, their readers come to believe that I’m at war with all vicarious emotion-sharing, or that I’m opposed to weeping with those who weep, or that I believe we should stand aloof from suffering, despite my explicit statements to the contrary. This is followed by the inflammatory accusations — narcissism, psychopath, abuse-enabler. My provocative title thus becomes a pretext for lying about and misrepresenting an opponent in order to stir up the anger and vitriol of their audience.

A Final Attempt at Finding Common Ground

But I said I was of two minds on the question, and my second mind is more charitable. Thus, in an attempt to believe the best of my critics, I offer this rationale for the puzzling pattern of combining Criticism 1 (Semantic) and Criticism 2 (Substantive Misrepresentation) in the same articles. I think my critics at some level recognize the problem of untethered empathy (or enmeshment or fusion) and believe the semantic issue is a major error on my part. Their concern is that using the language “the sin of empathy” will enable narcissism and pastoral malpractice (even if I carefully define my terms). Thus, Criticism 2 is an attempt to correct potential (and in their minds, almost certain) misunderstandings and negative consequences of my articles.

If that’s at all true, I suspect that what they would like to hear from me (and others who resonate with what I’ve written) is some awareness of those dangers. I see the dangers of empathy; do I see the danger in “the sin of empathy?”

So in an effort to build bridges, let me simply say this: it is entirely possible that criticisms of empathy could mask callousness, apathy, and narcissism. It’s even possible that my writings might be used in that way (though I believe such misuse would require someone to ignore the numerous encouragements to join people in their pain and wisely and humbly care for sufferers; if the Scriptures can be twisted to justify evil, how much more might the fallible writings of fallible men?).

But I’m curious as to whether these critics believe the reverse is true. Do they really believe that the danger of losing oneself in the emotions and pain of another is a diversion? Do they really believe that empathy and enmeshment have nothing to do with each other? Do they see no danger in emotion-sharing at all? Do they really believe that calls for empathy are never manipulative attempts to steer others? Do they really believe that empathy is an unalloyed good, incapable of corruption?

Or, like me, do they believe we should strive for both compassion and courage, for sympathy and sober-mindedness, for tethered empathy and Christ-rooted care?