Can Empathy be a Sin?

And welcome to the American Churchmen podcast, where we discuss issues and topics relevant for American churchmen and encourage you to take responsibility in your home, in your life, in the church. It has been three weeks since we did an American Churchmen podcast, I've missed it.

And as always, my co-host Matthew Pearson is with us. And so is our special guest today, Pastor Joe Kelly from First Baptist Church of Williams, Arizona. Pastor Kelly, how are you doing?

I am blessed, better than I deserve, that's for sure. Glad to be here.

Amen, thanks for joining us. And Matthew, how are you doing?

I'm doing good. Just always exciting and good to be doing this. Just had a good day at work and just been working on a lot of school stuff and then preparing for this. So yeah, I'm happy to be here.

The Love of God as a Divine Attribute

Yeah, I'm excited to talk about what we're gonna talk about today because it actually dovetails the love. Love is an attribute of God. Love is something that Christians should show one another and others, and then kind of this twisted version of it.

And we could use the word empathy, maybe in our discussion we'll discover maybe another word might be better, but there's been a debate about empathy lately and whether or not it's a good or bad thing, which is quite interesting to me.

But anyway, I think it would be good to just let everyone know first off the bat, this is a podcast sponsored by TruthScript. So truthscript .com. If you wanna see more, I was just looking at the website.

There's actually a number of really cool articles out there right now on the websites, on all kinds of things, government, preaching. There's even an article on seed oils. So if you can believe it, raw spiritual milk for seed oil Christians,.

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I actually haven't read that one yet. I'm looking forward to it. And then the one for today that's highlighted is by Pastor Jerry Doris Ahaziah, a would be Jewish pornographer. How's that for a provocative way?

My brother said, well, if you run out of things to talk about, just talk about that article. And I thought, I don't know. I don't know.

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But we have Dr. Bob. Dr. Bob is so faithful. Here he is. Good evening, men. And Mead Fit and Lean. The problem is unrighteous empathy. All right, we're gonna get there Mead. As always though, if you want to participate in the program, ask questions or just give us areas where you think we are wrong and you disagree, that's fine too.

You can go to the chat section on Facebook, on YouTube and on X. All right, with that, Matthew, let's start it off on the attribute of God this week, which is love.

Yeah, so John, as you said, this is sort of fitting for our conversation today. So we'll be talking about the attribute of God, which is love. And as always, I gotta cite my sources and my go-to that I always love to go to for the attributes of God because they're so clear and concise will be Richard Muller's Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms.

So if you think I'm talking about this and I'm just super duper smart, it's not me. It's mostly just me regurgitating Richard Muller. So do it that way. You will get that book because it is very helpful for just doing theology in general and seeing what our forefathers, how they define things.

Anyways, the love of God, we're gonna begin by reading some verses from 1 John. So we'll be reading 1 John 4, verse eight, and also from the same chapter, verses 15 through 16. So this is what the word of God says.

He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the son of God, God dwelleth in him and he in God. And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us.

God is love and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him. So when we speak about the love of God, we speak about God's love. There's a different variety of ways in which we can speak about God's love.

And we'll get into that a little bit with this discussion. But the love of God, when we talk about it in this context, we speak of it as a divine attribute, which can be defined essentially in this way.

It is the propensity of the divine essence or divine nature for the good, both in God's inward benevolence or willing of the good, and in the sense of God's external kindness towards creation. So when I say like this of God's inward benevolence or willing of the good, part of what that plays into is how the way that God loves or the way that God is love is that he directs his love somewhere.

So there's a sense in which God's love is directed inwardly at himself. So there's a sense of self-love by which God loves himself because God is the highest good and love orients towards the good. And there's also a sense in which each person of the Trinity, though they each possess the same will, they will, because God loves himself in the sense that we also are to possess a sort of healthy self-love because love your neighbor as yourself presupposes a sort of healthy self-love, which is not prideful.

There's also love among the persons of the Trinity in so far that they love themselves as God, they are loving each other as varying persons, the father who begets the son, the son who is begotten of the father and the spirit who proceeds from the father and the son.

And then there's also this external love of God, which he directs not just towards himself as the highest good, but towards all of creation. And the way in which God directs his love towards all of creation, we would sort of distinguish that in a threefold manner.

And I'm gonna be saying some Latin terms just to let you all know. I don't know Latin, so I may not be pronouncing this correctly. I most likely will not, but you're gonna have to bear with me because we're talking about God's love.

And if you get annoyed with me, you're being unloving or something. Kidding, of course. So the first one we'd like to speak of is the love of God. And then this is universalis. And again, I don't know Latin, but if I were to guess that's universal.

So universal love of God, the love of God universalis is that love which encompasses all things and is manifested in creation itself, showing God's love through his preservation of all things and his governance of the world.

So essentially this is just the fact that God upholds and he sustains all things. And part of the reason he does this is out of love because God is not bound to or obligated to do such a thing. He merely bounds and obligates himself and he demonstrates his love in doing this.

So this love of God is generally denoted by the scholastics as a love of general good pleasure. It's a universal sort of love by which God upholds and sustains all things. The second form of love after the love of God universalis is the love of God communis.

And it is that love which is directed to all of humanity, be they saved or unsaved, elect or reprobate. This is just God's general love of humanity in particular. And it is seen in his benefits for all of mankind.

And we would think of certain natural gifts distributed to all men. There are certain native faculties that we have which lead us to want to have self-survival. There's a, we were talking about Ordo Amoris a few weeks ago about like loving your own, loving those who are closest to you, most closely bound.

Those are natural gifts which God has given us, which are just natural to man as man. And so in God loving us, in loving humanity in general, he gives us some of these native gifts as a way of communicating his love to us.

This love of God is a sort of benevolence in the sense of a general goodwill towards humanity. So the love of God universalis was love of general good pleasure for all of creation. This one in more particular is towards humanity in general.

Now, our last love that we want to speak of is this is like the most particular of loves. We had the love of God universalis, which is just the broadest general love of God for all of creation. We have the love of God communis, which is more particular, but still pretty broad.

This general love of God for humanity in particular. But this is the most particular form of love of God. This is a love of God specialis. And that is the love which is directed toward the elect alone.

And it's manifested through the gifts of salvation. So when we think of how salvation is a gift, think of Ephesians two verses eight, nine, for by grace you have been saved through faith and this is out of your own doing, it is a gift of God, not of words, lest any man may boast.

Notice how there's a gift there. The love of God specialis, it's the love which is manifested through the gift of salvation, the gifts of grace that we receive in sanctification through the infusion of grace by the spirit of God is part of this.

This love can be seen as that of, essentially this can be characterized not just as a general goodwill towards creation, not just a general goodwill towards humanity, but a special type of love. This is a love of friendship toward those who believe.

So all of that to say, God's love can be seen as both an essential characteristic of, as an essential characteristic of God, it being an attribute of the divine nature. Remember what we read in first John where it predicates love of God.

It says, for God is love, not love is God, God is love, God is love. And he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him. So we see that love can be an essential characteristic of God as an attribute of the divine nature, as well as one of the affections of the divine will.

So as an attribute of God, it subsumes various other qualities such as grace, mercy, long suffering, patience, and the clemency of God. So all of those things can sort of be umbrellaed under the love of God.

These are different ways in which God's attribute of love manifests. And as an affection of God, and when I say affection, I'm using very anthropological language almost because we know that God is without passions.

But as an affection of God, it's viewed as an aspect of divine willing, juxtaposed with something like God's wrath and hatred towards sin. And so we're talking in love, like scholastic gobbledygook you may be thinking, but like, you know, why is this important is something that we may be wondering.

And part of the reason that like God as love is so important is, remember what we just read in 1 John, you know, we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God and God in him.

It's so important to understand what love is and to understand how God is love because it is God alone who enables us to love. And remember, we spoke about the Ordo Amoris a few weeks ago. That's just so important to daily life.

And oftentimes when we speak about the Ordo Amoris, sometimes some people who wanna be like really edgy about it and be like, you know, like use Ordo Amoris for fun. It's almost like in their Ordo Amoris, it's like my people first and then this and then this.

But at the end of the day, who is at the top of every Ordo Amoris? It's God. That's why it's so important because love is not just a feeling, but it's a duty which we owe to God and to our neighbor. And not only that, the Holy Spirit who indwells us, gives us one of the supernatural gifts, which is love.

So this saying it has, it not only is theologically important in a theoretical sense, but it's practically important because it affects all of our fundamental human relationships with one another. You know, it's like love can be like spoken of in all these very abstract, deep theological terms, or you could just go to someone and say, hey, call your mom, tell your lover, because it's that basic and fundamental to humanity.

And that's why love is important. And as I always say, that is the attribute of love in a nutshell.

That's very good. That's very comprehensive there, Matthew.

Thank you.

Pastor Kelly, why do you think this attribute, maybe you just disagree with me. I think this attribute is very abused and misunderstood and it's the attribute that's probably the most often misunderstood.

But why do you think that is? Why do you think people so often use this attribute to justify sin? It's kind of a weird thing, right?

Well, if you ignore what Matthew just said and you suck out all the character of God and then backfill the word love with what we see in our society or in our own evil heart as a replacement for God's character of love, then you can justify doing anything you want.

The most heinous crimes and sins can be committed in the name of love, quote unquote, if you remove God as the source and ground of all love.

Yeah, it seems like there's an order to it. Like it goes along with an obligation or a responsibility somehow.

An order of amorous?

Almost, like an order of amorous, an order of loves. But it seems like when people justify, let's say having an affair because I love this other person and not the person that I'm supposed to have a responsibility to, they take love out of the conditions in which love is supposed to operate and it's not tethered to anything anymore.

It's just except their own, I guess, fleshly desires at that point. But it does sound so noble though. I mean, it's the only way that you can paint an affair as a noble thing and even have movies that portray it that way is by trying to frame it like it's love and not just lust.

So, but we're smuggling in the good reputation of a word that I guess we lost Pastor Joe.

Are you still there? I just went black.

Yeah, I don't know what happened there. Well, Pastor Kelly, if you come back in, I'm gonna take you out of the chat. If you come back in, I'll see it and we'll put you right back on the stage there. But yeah, so it does seem to me like love is this attribute which people find convenient to justify all kinds of heresies too.

Like we should accept homosexuality in the church because it's the loving thing. We should accept it in positions of authority because it's the loving thing. Really all hierarchies have been eroded based upon this notion of, it's not loving to have a disparity or a hierarchy or something like that, which is kind of weird, but yeah.

Love, Duty, and the Order of Affections

Yeah, I think that we always like, John, I feel like you and I just make this point all the time, but it does just need to be said. The reason why that sort of thing happens with love is because our culture nowadays can only ever, they can't view love with duty in mind as well.

The only way they can view love is in relation to the affections as well. And you can't just say love is entirely without the affections. Now we can make super special exceptions to say someone that's a psychopath who becomes a Christian but still doesn't really feel a lot of emotions, he loves only out of duty.

But no, affections and things are bound up with love but you can't divorce that from duty. The reason why we can say that it's not, that it's unjust for somebody to try and justify, I don't know, being like a pedophile and saying, oh, but it's love is because like, no, like that still is harmful to the other person and you are not doing your duty.

You're not giving to someone that which is their due, you are doing them an injustice. The reason why we can say the same thing about like homosexual relationships is because it is disordered, unnatural, it is sinful and thus you're not giving someone that which is their due, you are not doing your duty.

And that's the thing is that people try to justify or use love to justify whatever they can when they divorce it from duty, when they divorce it from justice. And the reason you can never do that with God is because God's attributes all cohere and work with one another because all that is in God is God.

And so like, if you are to love God, you are giving God that which is his due. You're not doing it perfectly because we're fallen sinful people but that's where the healing grace of God comes in and restoring us as a new humanity through the working of the Holy Spirit and sanctifying us so that we may be made able to do that.

But even with the sanctifying work of the Spirit,.

We're not perfect,.

Which is why we have the active obedience of Christ, which is why we have Christ paying the death for our sins, the imputation of Christ's righteousness. This all ties in entirely. You can't divorce love from duty.

Yeah, obviously the primary example of love, right? Is the son loved the father, the father loves the son and then, and also the son loved those who are his own. So no greater love has this than a man laid down his life for his friends.

So Christ in obedience to the father, he commits the ultimate sacrifice and it's also for those to whom he was bound in a relationship of duty. And it can't just be duty, obviously, there's more to it than that.

But duty is one of the qualities that seems to be, part, it's required, it is part of this. So not sufficient, but necessary for there to be.

Yeah, certainly.

Yeah, well, unless Pastor Joe there, you kind of, I don't know what happened to your phone there. You were in the middle, I think of saying something though. Do you wanna continue that thought?

No, I wasn't, I was listening, but it was a phone call, you know, a pastor gets phone calls, so.

So you were loving him, there you go.

All right.

No, I had to hang up on him, so it was unloving and so I'll have to call him.

Not very empathetic of you.

No.

Well, I think this is a good transition to talk about empathy. We actually have a number of people weighing in already on this and I'll just show you a few of the comments. If sin is tolerated in the name of empathy, it is one of the most insidious sins as it wroth the ecclesia.

Welcome to the modern church. So W .T. Henry, a little black filled on this term empathy. Kathy Hart says, apparently Jane Fonda lectured Republicans on empathy. Sounds like it can be and is a sin when used to manipulate.

I love Joe Rigney's take on this topic and look forward to reading the book. And let's see, we have, all right, that's about it on the empathy. We have other people weighing in. I don't know when you first came across this.

I think the first time I heard empathy as a negative was Doug Wilson back in, I don't know, 20, maybe 2017 or so, I wanna say. I heard him on a podcast talking about empathy as a negative and I think it was the first time I heard anyone use it that way.

I think I probably even used empathy and sympathy almost synonymously, probably more so sympathy, but empathy was certainly viewed as a good thing by me. And I think most people view it as a good thing.

If you're empathetic, you can put yourself in someone else's shoes. You can relate to them. I always try to relate to people if I can. That's probably a fault I have sometimes. It's like I, you know, it can be even insensitive because not everyone goes through the same kinds of things, but I'll look for something in my life that's similar to something someone else is going through.

And some people would call that empathetic, but there is a type of empathy. And I think it's important to emphasize type of empathy. This isn't like all empathy. Joe Rigney is not even saying it's all empathy.

He even, I think calls it empathy B. There's a type of empathy or a way that empathy is used where it can be weaponized against people and it can be used to justify sin. And it could be used to push public policies and morally posture one group and their policies over another group by claiming it's empathetic.

And of course the same thing is done with love. Like this is more loving. This is more empathetic. So with that as an introduction to the topic, Pastor Joe, I'd like to maybe ask you first, since you are in the trenches there doing counseling with people who have serious problems sometimes.

I know my dad's a pastor sometimes, marriage counseling or whatever. I know that there's like a good kind of empathy, right? And you should, like a husband should relate to it. They actually, scripture even says a husband should understand his wife, right?

But there is a limitation, right? Like you can't completely understand what someone who's not you is going through. So maybe help us sort that out in a counseling situation if you ever give the advice to, for someone to relate or understand someone else.

Are there limits on that?

Oh, for sure. Because as you said, I can't empathize with you or you with me or any of us with anyone else to the nth degree. There's only a certain amount of, there's a limitation to our ability to empathize with someone.

And like you said, I think we tend to, our tendency because of our cultural steering is we try to overdo that in ways that oftentimes comes across as not genuine. If someone has an illness, I think it's, or some sort of hardship, it's quite common for us to, in listening to them, try to show that we can empathize with them by offering our own illness that we had, that we think is similar, that compares, or a tragedy that compares so that the person sees us in a favorable light.

And I think that can be very dangerous oftentimes.

What happens, like what does it look like when it becomes dangerous? When you, I guess that's where, I mean, even Michelle here, Peterson is saying, hey, as a nurse, there's actually a place for empathy.

It can be very helpful, but it can also be taken too far. And that's what I keep thinking myself is like, this can be good, but it can also be taken too far. What does it look like when it's taken too far?

Well, I think in one of the interviews that Joe Rigney did on his book, he gives the illustration. I don't know if it was a true illustration or if it was just a made up illustration, but the idea was that there are people who have these empathy Olympics with each other, a group in a room, it takes turns sharing their hardship.

And then after they're finished, they pass the ball. And then someone one-ups them on how much of a hardship they've had that's even worse. And then it just goes around the room. And it's like, and I think he used the sort of phraseology. They're circling around this drain going down the tubes of overly emphasizing their hardships and empathizing with one another in a way that it all just gets hijacked into like navel gazing, right?

And pity party, that sort of thing.

And so

And I would assume you're owed something too, right? Like if you endure a hardship, you should be treated differently.

Right, and everyone has to affirm that as a legitimate hardship. So now you're kind of like in the Me Too's type category. There, you're in the Me Too area. And so you could have, you know, it can get very toxic very quickly when you're doing that.

And no one's really being helped, right? It just turns into a big pity party that's toxic. And you can just have a situation where you're basically cursing the darkness without any sort of light shining into helping people with their actual problem to solve it or to get better or move past it, to forgive, to love, right, to love others in the midst of our suffering.

So yeah, it can be bad in a lot of ways.

Matthew, I was thinking about Gen Z a little bit. You know, I think about them sometimes. Every once in a while, I have a thought. I'm like, you know, Gen Z's out there and they're kind of lost, some of them.

Not you, but you know, others in Gen Z. But I was thinking that, someone said something the other day to me. Of course, I'm joking, but someone did say something to me the other day about the identity issues that people from unstable backgrounds and particularly younger people in Gen Z sometimes have, and they will make, this was about one person in particular, but they will make their suffering or even their perceived suffering, they may not even be suffering, but they want that victimology.

They wanna grab something that says, I've got it hard, and they make it part of their identity. They can't see themselves without it. Like you would erase them if you took that away from them. Is that an accurate depiction?

Is this a generational thing where like a lot of Gen Z folks have these hangups? And I mean, I just assume that you're like the Gen Z expert here since you've talked about it before in the podcast.

Yeah, I definitely do see that, and I actually have a fairly good example of this. So I myself was diagnosed with ADHD. That's just something I have. I'm fidgeting with something right now. I'm always fidgeting on the podcast.

If you see my eyes looking off somewhere else, it's probably because I'm fidgeting with something. I'm listening, I'm hearing, but I'm probably just doing that. It's not my whole personality though. I don't see it as something that inflicts me.

At most, I just see it as, I just sometimes go, oh squirrel and get distracted or whatever. Like that's literally it. It's like, is ADHD even real or is it just me being a rowdy dude? I don't know. But the thing was, is my example that I thought of was, I followed this one.

I saw like a funny like ADHD meme or whatever from this one Instagram page. I was doing what every Gen Z person does and watching my brain rot on Instagram reels, of course, just swiping and scrolling.

And I saw what I'm like, oh, that's pretty funny. And I went to the account and I saw a few more and I'm like, oh, that's a pretty funny relatable ADHD meme.

I'll follow.

And I was following it and I ended up unfollowing it. You know why? Because the account on it's like, it's posts were like kind of funny, but on the story, it was like all about like awareness for people with ADHD and like how like ADHD people like suffer and like the whole personality.

And like, I went to some of the people who was following and it was these, there was one that was like advocacy for ADHD. And then it was like, I saw this one girl's bio that I followed said like, she or her diagnosed with ADHD.

And it's just like, what are you, what are you doing? But no, there definitely is this understanding where it's like, you know, I think it's like, I forgot who it was that said it. It's like one of these big like mega, I think it was Peter Thiel, who actually said that like, wokeness is kind of like, like taking like the Christian ethics and then like over inflating them.

So it's like almost like a hyper Christianization, but like away from it. And that in the same way Christ comes to redeem, like those who are like poor and lowly, like the widows and the downcast, you know, their salvation even offered for them.

Like what wokeness kind of does is it like takes that principle and it accelerates, divorces it from Christ. And now it exalts the faith. It like still upholds a certain hierarchy, but it puts the victim at the very top of that hierarchy essentially.

And I think that that's sort of what you see in a lot of Gen Z where it's like, people see how like, you know, DEI works. They see how like, minorities, women, and then people with like physical or mental disabilities are elevated to this way.

And so part of like getting clout with Gen Z is saying, look, yeah, I'm a straight white male, but I have ADHD or yeah, I'm like a white male, but I'm gay. Yeah, I'm this or that because the more you're able to do, the more social clout you're able to build among those people, the more benefits you're able to get.

And then furthermore, because we're in a culture where like we've been totally divorced from any form of identity at all. Everything's been stripped. We're like, you know, a lot of people are not religious anymore.

They don't have that religious identity. They're not aware of any national or like racial identity in any sense or ethnic identity, unless of course you're like a non-white, then you can have that because it's permitted.

But like, because people are so divorced from any identity and because they see, hey, the lowly people are the victims are elevated. There's like a sort of self-victimization that gets like pushed even with something as like, my new as ADHD.

Like if you really struggle with ADHD, like, come on, just, you know, I quit taking my ADHD medicine because I was basically an addict. So I got off that like a few years ago, but you know, if you really just need help, like, I don't know, just do some mental exercises, have some Zen, drink some coffee,.

You'll be fine.

You'll make it.

John said Zen, just so people know. Then the tobacco packets or whatever.

There is no tobacco in these. It's just pure nicotine, but you know, you'll get the microplastics from this. So if you want to have something organic, get a knickknacks instead.

Okay.

All right.

Would you like a boomer perspective on ADHD?

I was about to go there.

Absolutely, yes.

What are the boomers thing?

So yeah, it may not be apparent, but I am a boomer.

So either Gen X, I wasn't sure.

No, boomer.

Yeah. It's 1964. So the last.

Younger boomer.

The last of the boomers.

Yeah.

Back before ADHD was considered a thing when I was a child in school, they didn't diagnose you with ADHD or give you any kind of medication or anything. They just sent you to the principal's office. And the principal had a paddle and he or she straightened you out pretty quickly.

And so a few trips on there and it solved the ADHD problem. And nobody in school, I was a kid had ADHD. And they solved it with a paddle.

Yeah.

They would say today that, oh, it was a horrible oppressive time period where there were dinosaurs on the earth and so forth. And what a barbaric way to deal with that. But that's the biblical way, right?

Is discipline for sin.

It fixed it.

I'm a living example of having ADHD fixed at the principal's office.

There's really good. Kathy brings up here. She says, I read a book by a psychologist on empathy back about 10 years ago. And she seemed to believe that there are some who have an empathy disorder, such as people on the autism spectrum.

So I wanted to highlight that before we move on, just because. So I have someone close to me who has Asperger's, which is kind of like a mild form of autism. And that's one of the things in knowing this person that I realized they have.

Now we always kind of framed it as a lack of compassion, but I suppose you could say empathy. Like they don't really always relate to other people's situations. So they can walk into situations without practicing the normal manners that would be associated.

So for example,.

Someone loses their dad or something and you're in a funeral situation, like they could walk in and be like, Oh, how's it going? Like without thinking about what they're saying. Right. But is that a lack of empathy though?

Like, I don't know if, I don't know how to frame that. Like it's a, it's just a lack of like social awareness,.

I suppose.

Like, you know, that's I think what that is.

Right.

That would be a neurological issue, not a moral issue, right?

Good.

That's the separation I think I'm looking for.

Yeah. And I think that my illustration about ADHD and the principal's office was the actual compassion for children in those days to help them fix their problem instead of the letting empathy get hijacked and labeling children with something that's going to stick with them their whole life and hold them down and become a crutch, right?

Become a stigma for them.

Yeah.

So that's a way that you can have compassion or what's it? Sympathy, right? Those teachers and that principal sympathize with my situation and helped me.

Yeah.

Helped me get out of it. They didn't just let emotions, mine or theirs, hijack the situation and cause further problem.

Yeah.

And you can learn to behave differently even if it's a harder hill to climb.