Can Empathy be a Sin?

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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.

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It has been three weeks since we did an American Churchmen podcast, I've missed it. And as always, my co -host

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Matthew Pearson is with us. And so is our special guest today, Pastor Joe Kelly from First Baptist Church of Williams, Arizona.

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Pastor Kelly, how are you doing? I am blessed, better than I deserve, that's for sure.

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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.

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Just had a good day at work and just been working on a lot of school stuff and then preparing for this.

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So yeah, I'm happy to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to talk about what we're gonna talk about today because it actually dovetails the love.

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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.

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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.

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But anyway, I think it would be good to just let everyone know first off the bat, this is a podcast sponsored by TruthScript.

01:57

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.

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There's even an article on seed oils. So if you can believe it, raw spiritual milk for seed oil

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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.

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And I thought, I don't know. I don't know. We'll see. But we have Dr. Bob. Dr. Bob is so faithful.

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Here he is. Good evening, men. And Mead Fit and Lean. The problem is unrighteous empathy.

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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.

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You can go to the chat section on Facebook, on YouTube and on X. All right, with that,

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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.

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So we'll be talking about the attribute of God, which is love. As always,

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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

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Richard Muller's Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms. So if you think

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I'm talking about this and I'm just super duper smart, it's not me. It's mostly just me regurgitating

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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.

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Anyways, the love of God, we're gonna begin by reading some verses from 1

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John. So we'll be reading 1 John 4 8 and also from the same chapter verses 15 through 16.

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So this is what the word of God says. He that loveth not knoweth not

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God, for God is love. Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the son of God, God dwelleth in him and he in God.

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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.

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So when we speak about the love of God, we speak about God's love. You can, there's a different variety of ways in which we can speak about God's love.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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So there's a sense in which God, God's love is directed inwardly at himself. So there's a sense of self -love by which

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God loves himself because God is the highest good and love orients towards the good.

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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.

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There's also love among the persons of the Trinity. And so far that they love themselves as God, they are loving each other as varying persons.

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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.

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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.

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And the way in which God directs his love towards all of creation, we would sort of distinguish that in a threefold manner.

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And I'm gonna be saying some Latin terms just to let you all know, I don't know

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The love of God universalis is that love which encompasses all things and is manifested in creation itself, showing

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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And it is that love which is directed to all of humanity, be they saved or unsaved, elect or reprobate.

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This is just God's general love of humanity in particular. And it is seen in his benefits for all of mankind.

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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.

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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.

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

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This love of God is a sort of benevolence in the sense of a general goodwill towards humanity.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 is a gift of God, not of words, lest any man may boast.

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Notice how there's a gift there. The love of God specialis, it's the love which is manifested through the gift of salvation.

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The gifts of grace that we receive in sanctification through the infusion of grace by the spirit of God is part of this.

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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.

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This is a love of friendship toward those who believe. So all of that to say,

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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.

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Remember what we read in first John where it predicates love of God. It says, for God is love, not love is

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God. God is love, God is love. And he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him.

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So we see that love can be an essential characteristic of God as an attribute of divine nature as well as one of the affections of the divine will.

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So as an attribute of God, it subsumes various other qualities such as grace, mercy, long suffering, patience, and the clemency of God.

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So all of those things can sort of be umbrellaed under the love of God. These are different ways in which

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God's attribute of love manifests. And as an affection of God, and when

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I say affection I'm using very like anthropological language almost because we know that God is without passions.

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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.

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And so we're talking in love like scholastic gobbledygook you may be thinking, but like why is this important is something that we may be wondering.

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

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God is love and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him.

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It's so important to understand what love is and to understand how God is love because it is

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God alone who enables us to love. And remember, we spoke about the Ordo Amoris a few weeks ago.

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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, use

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Ordo Amoris for fun. It's almost like in their Ordo Amoris, it's like my people first and then this and then this.

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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.

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And not only that, the Holy Spirit who indwells us, gives us one of the supernatural gifts, which is love.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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I think this attribute is very abused and misunderstood. And it's the attribute that's probably the most often misunderstood.

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But why do you think that is? Why do you think people so often use this attribute to justify sin?

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It's kind of a weird thing, right? Well, if you ignore what

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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.

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Yeah. The most heinous crimes and sins can be committed in the name of love, quote unquote, if you remove

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God as the source and ground of all love. Yeah, it seems like there's an order to it.

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Like it goes along with an obligation or a responsibility somehow. An Ordo Amoris?

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Almost, like an Ordo Amoris, 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.

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It's just except their own, I guess, fleshly desires at that point. But it does sound so noble though.

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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.

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

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Pastor Joe. Are you still there? Yeah, I don't know what happened there.

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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.

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But yeah, so it does seem to me like love is this attribute which people find convenient to justify all kinds of heresies too.

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Like we should accept homosexuality in the church because it's the loving thing. We should accept women in positions of authority because it's the loving thing.

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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.

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But yeah. Yeah, I think that we always like, I feel like you and I just make this point all the time but it does just need to be said.

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The reason why that sort of thing happens with love is because our culture nowadays can only ever, like they can't view love like with duty in mind as well.

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The only way they can view love is in relation to the affections as well. And like, you can't just say love is entirely without the affections.

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Now like, we can make super special exceptions to say someone that's like a psychopath who becomes a Christian but still doesn't really feel a lot of emotions.

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He loves only out of duty. But no, like affections and things are bound up with love but you can't divorce that from duty.

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The reason why we can say that it's not, that it's unjust for somebody to try and justify,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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God. And so like, if you are to love God, you are giving God that which is his due.

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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

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Holy Spirit and sanctifying us so that we may be made able to do that. But even with the sanctifying work of the

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Spirit, we're not perfect, which is why we have the active obedience of Christ, which is why we have

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Christ paying the death for our sins, the imputation of Christ's righteousness. This all ties in entirely.

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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 also the son loved those who are his own.

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So no greater love exists 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.

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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, it's required, it is part of this.

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So not sufficient, but necessary for their appeal. Yeah, certainly. Yeah, well,

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Pastor Joe there, you kind of, I don't know what happened to your phone there. You were in the middle,

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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.

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So you were loving it, 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.

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Not very empathetic of you. No. Well, I think this is a good transition to talk about empathy.

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We actually have a number of people weighing in already on this, and I'll just show you a few of the comments.

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If sin is tolerated in the name of empathy, it is one of the most insidious sins as it wraths the ecclesia.

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Welcome to the modern church. So W .T. Henry, a little black -filled on this term, empathy.

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Kathy Hart says, apparently Jane Fonda lectured Republicans on empathy. Sounds like it can be and is a sin when used to manipulate.

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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.

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We have other people weighing in. I don't know when you first came across this. I think the first time

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I heard empathy as a negative was Doug Wilson back in, I don't know, 20, maybe 2017 or so,

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I wanna say. I heard him on a podcast talking about empathy as a negative.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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That's probably a fault I have sometimes. 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.

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And some people would call that empathetic, but there is a type of empathy.

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And I think it's important to emphasize type of empathy. This isn't like all empathy. Joe Rigney's not even saying it's all empathy.

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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.

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And of course, the same thing is done with love. This is more loving. This is more empathetic. So with that as an introduction to the topic,

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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.

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I know my dad's a pastor sometimes, marriage counseling or whatever. I know that there's a good kind of empathy, right?

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And you should, like a husband should relate to his wife. They actually, Scripture even says a husband should understand his wife, right?

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But there is a limitation, right? You can't completely understand what someone who's not you is going through.

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So maybe help us sort that out in a counseling situation if you ever give the advice for someone to relate or understand someone else.

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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.

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There's only a certain amount of, there's a limitation to our ability to empathize with someone.

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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.

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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.

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And I think that can be very dangerous oftentimes. What happens, like what does it look like when it becomes dangerous, when you,

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I guess that's where, I mean, even Michelle here, Peterson is saying, hey, as a nurse, there's actually a place for empathy.

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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.

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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.

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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

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Olympics with each other. A group in a room 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.

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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 emphasizing with one another in a way that it all just gets hijacked into like navel gazing and pity party, that sort of thing.

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

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Right, and everyone has to affirm that as a legitimate hardship.

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So now you're kind of like in the me too's type category. There, you're in the me too area.

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And so you could have, it can get very toxic very quickly when you're doing that.

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And no one's really being helped, right? It just turns into a big pity party that's toxic.

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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?

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To love others in the midst of our suffering. So yeah, it can be bad in a lot of ways.

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Matthew, I was thinking about Gen Z a little bit. You know, I think about them sometimes. Every once in a while,

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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.

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And, 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.

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And they will make, this is about one person in particular, but they will make their suffering or even their perceived suffering.

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They may not even be suffering, but they want that victimology. They wanna grab something that says, I've got it hard.

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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.

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Is that an accurate depiction? Is this a generational thing where like a lot of Gen Z folks have these hangups?

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And I mean, I just assume that you're like the Gen Z expert here since, you know, you've talked about it before in the podcast.

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Yeah, I definitely do see that. And I actually have a fairly good example of this. So I myself was diagnosed with ADHD.

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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.

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I'm listening, I'm hearing, but I'm probably just doing that. It's not my whole personality though.

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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.

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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.

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But the thing was is my example that I thought of was I followed this one.

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I saw like a funny like ADHD meme or whatever from this one Instagram page. I was doing what every

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Gen Z person does and watching my brain rot on Instagram reels, of course, just swiping and scrolling.

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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

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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.

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And like, I went to some of the people it was following and it was these AD, there was one that was like advocacy for ADHD. And then it was like,

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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?

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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.

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It's like one of these big, like Megan, I think it was Peter Thiel who actually said that like, wokeness is kind of like, like taking like the

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Christian ethics and then like over -inflating them. So it's like almost like a hyper -Christianization, but like away from it.

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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.

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Like what wokeness kind of does is it like takes that principle and it accelerates, divorces it from Christ.

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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.

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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,

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DEI works. They see how like, you know, minorities, women, and then people with like physical or mental disabilities are elevated to this way.

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And so part of like getting clout with Gen Z is saying, look, yeah, I'm a straight white male, but I have

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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.

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And then furthermore, because we're in a culture where like we've been totally divorced from any form of identity at all.

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Everything's been stripped. We're like, you know, a lot of people are not religious anymore. They don't have that religious identity.

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They're not aware of any national or like racial identity in any sense or ethnic identity.

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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.

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There's like a sort of self -victimization that gets like pushed, even with something as like, my new as ADHD.

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Like if you really struggle with ADHD, like, come on, just, you know, I quit taking my

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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,

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I don't know, just do some mental exercises, have some Zen, drink some coffee, you'll be fine, you'll make it.

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

30:08

There is no tobacco in these. It's just pure nicotine, but you know, you'll get the microplastics from this.

30:14

So if you want to have something organic, get a knick -knacks instead. Okay, all right.

30:22

Boomer, would you like a boomer perspective on ADHD? I was about to go there.

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Absolutely, yes. What are the boomers thing? Yeah, it may not be apparent, but I am a boomer.

30:35

So either Gen X, I wasn't sure. No, boomer, yeah. It's 1964.

30:42

So the last. Younger boomer. The last of the boomers. Yeah, back before ADHD was considered a thing, when

30:54

I was a child in school, they didn't diagnose you with ADHD or give you any kind of medication or anything.

31:02

They just sent you to the principal's office. And the principal had a paddle and he or she straightened you out pretty quickly.

31:11

And so a few trips down there and it solved the ADHD problem. And nobody in school, when

31:16

I was a kid, had ADHD. Because they solved it with the 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.

31:27

And what a barbaric way to deal with that. But that's the biblical way, right?

31:33

Is discipline for sin. It fixed it. I'm a living example of having

31:39

ADHD fixed at the principal's office. That's good, yeah. There's a really good point

31:45

Kathy brings up here. She says, I read a book by a psychologist on empathy back about 10 years ago.

31:50

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

32:02

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.

32:19

So they can walk into situations without practicing the normal manners that would be associated.

32:25

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?

32:33

Like without thinking about what they're saying, right? But is that a lack of empathy though?

32:39

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

32:46

I suppose. Like, you know, that's, I think what that is. Right, that would be a neurological issue, not a moral issue, right?

32:56

Good, that's the separation I think I'm looking for, yeah. 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?

33:27

Become a stigma for them. So that's a way that you can have compassion or what's it, sympathy, right?

33:40

Those teachers and that principal sympathize with my situation and helped me, helped me get out of it.

33:47

They didn't just let emotions, mine or theirs, hijack the situation and cause further problem.

33:56

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

34:02

Oh yeah. You know, my brother is much better at social awareness than even

34:07

I am. And I don't know, I'm not that good in my opinion. Sometimes I stick my foot in my mouth and say stuff

34:13

I shouldn't. And my brother is like, he can read the room and stuff. I can't always do that. But I have learned and you can learn to show more sensitivity and compassion and that kind of thing.

34:26

But I think what we're talking about here is, to give an illustration that Joe Rigney gives is instead of sympathy, which he says is like you're holding a rope and you're throwing it to the person drowning.

34:40

Empathy is you don't have a rope, you just jump in with them. And so there's a requirement that you affirm whatever someone's telling you.

34:48

So if they say that they were molested, then maybe there's some doubts about the specifics of the situation.

34:57

You are forced to just believe them because they have a story and they feel a certain way. And it's on the basis of the feelings that you affirm whether it's valid or not, not on the basis of the evidence.

35:08

So obviously if this got into a legal arena, which it has, then it overturns justice completely because it's no longer about evidence and trying to establish the truth based on sources.

35:20

It's about the outcome and what story did they have.

35:26

And also it seems like in our day and age, it plays upon this identity thing. Like if you take away the victimhood and say that this person may not have been abused or whatever, you're like erasing them, you're denying them.

35:38

Like homosexuals activists say this all the time or in trans activists especially, they'll say like, you're erasing us because you say we don't exist because we'll say that like a guy can't be a girl.

35:49

They're like, oh, you're just denying my existence. Like, no, we just think you're either confused or you're suppressing the truth about your existence.

35:58

So yeah, we've talked about this a little bit, I guess in the church office, we could do that more, but on the political stage, this is just a disaster

36:09

I would think because this just overturns due process. Yeah, so it's also a disaster in the church.

36:15

And we have like repeated examples of this, all the time in the church, probably everywhere.

36:23

You probably are very aware of a situation in which there is a decision made by leadership to either discontinue a certain program or to discontinue a certain practice, something like that, or to emphasize something in the church over something else.

36:46

And then all of a sudden the person is hurt by that, right? They're emotionally attached to the thing that was decided against, and then they become offended.

36:56

Well, what happens? Church hopping, they leave, right? And then what gets worse than that is that their friend empathizes with them, their empathy gets hijacked and they totally emote with this person to the point, well,

37:15

I'm gone too, I'm leaving too because you treated my friend so badly.

37:21

And then, and again, like the facts of the situation are explored, the theology of the situation isn't explored, the realities, the reality on the ground doesn't matter.

37:33

What matters is that someone's feelings were hurt and then empathy kicks in and the empathy mob goes crazy and attacks whatever leadership or whoever decided on the thing you see.

37:46

So the same situation happens in the church all the time. Yeah, how often have you heard the word,

37:54

I've noticed this in the last like 10 years, trauma come up. Everyone has trauma. Right, right, everybody's trauma.

38:01

Yeah, the idea that soldiers used to come back from a war with PTSD, right, from actual real trauma.

38:11

And then now, I have a hangnail, so I mean, I've experienced trauma. If I see a pair of nail clippers,

38:19

I lose my mind. Yeah, I don't know if I've heard of that specific scenario, but yes, scenarios that are that minor, that you're like, you gotta get over this.

38:30

Like, every time you see water, it doesn't mean necessarily that you're gonna drown. Like you have a problem, we gotta help you overcome it, not just cater to it, which is what

38:40

I see with the empathy B or toxic empathy as Jaren calls it.

38:46

Like, it's this, we must cater to all your whims. Oh, you say you're a girl and you're a guy.

38:52

Well, we just gotta cater to that. We gotta call you these pronouns or else we're just denying you.

38:57

And this seems to be something that characterizes our age. And it's a curious thing.

39:04

Like, this isn't something that I see in reading human history much. People seem tethered to reality more.

39:11

And previous societies. And now it's like, there is no tethering to reality.

39:17

It's just whatever you say about yourself must be taken as truth. So what do you do?

39:24

Here's the question I have. What do you do if someone is truly, and I say truly, struggling with something?

39:31

Like, let's say they truly were molested and abused. And actually,

39:38

I don't even know if I wanna show this particular comment, but someone did weigh in in the chat box saying that they were essentially raped as a young person and this was something they had to overcome.

39:51

I just think we should have compassion, right? We should have some sympathy. We should have a good bedside manner.

39:56

So what does that look like versus empathy or the toxic empathy? Well, first of all, you call the police, right?

40:05

And that person that's experienced that trauma actually needs counseling.

40:11

They need love and they need care. And they need to have their friends and their family and their church come around them and help them to move past that to get, of course, those sorts of scars will last forever to some degree, but there should be at least improvement and progress made.

40:32

So that's what the mystery of the love of the church and the love of Christ is about, helping people to not live as a defeated victim their whole life, right?

40:46

But to experience a level of overcoming, to experience an increasing level of gaining ground in the grace of God in these sorts of situations.

40:59

So, of course, that's a very generic answer to a very specific situation.

41:05

I'm sure that that person's, the details of the reality should be taken into consideration if you're gonna give a comprehensive answer.

41:16

Yeah, and I do wanna maybe examine some specific situations if people have them. So I just put in the chat box, get in your questions now.

41:24

We've been going over 41 minutes. So we have just a little under 20 minutes left in the podcast.

41:30

But I wanted to ask this of you, Matthew, because this is something that I've noticed. I don't know if you're seeing it, especially with younger people.

41:38

It seems to me like there's whole communities now, if you wanna call them that, or groups that are forming based upon these hangups.

41:45

So people will find each other online and they'll share a story. Like, so the ex -evangelical craze is one of these things where they'll say like,

41:53

I was abused by the church. The church is horrible. It's all patriarchal. It was a terrible experience growing up.

42:00

And then they find someone else who they don't even know from across the country. No trust has been built, but there's like instant trust because that person will say,

42:09

I too was abused by the church. And there will be like a group and there's groups online.

42:16

You can go to Facebook. There are literally like these like survivors groups and all these things. And I'm not saying, I understand, like people who've been through war will relate to each other, even on opposite sides of a conflict because of a common experience they've had.

42:29

But it seems like there's situations I know of where there's people that really didn't even have, like you look at a situation, you're like, you weren't abused.

42:38

You had a great life. Like most people throughout history would have killed to be you and have everything you had, but they have this trauma identity.

42:47

And now the only people they wanna talk to are others who have the same identity or reinforce the identity.

42:53

So you're shut out if you're someone who doesn't reinforce that. I've seen, do you think this is more common with younger people?

43:03

Yeah, like I was saying before, with the whole idea of elevation of victims and how you can make yourself a victim for clout,

43:11

I definitely do see that as a case among younger people. I even think in more like generally, you know, right -wing circles, there can be, you know, seeing how people who are like, you know, young white men are, you know, oppressed by like certain institutions or shut out of jobs.

43:31

There can be the certain, you know, this is where conversations of woke right come in, but there can sometimes be certain proclivities to just play the victim in that sense.

43:42

And there's like something that we do need to do though is that first off, we do have to acknowledge that there are realities at play there, that you can be unjustly deprived of something because of something that you cannot control.

43:54

Like that is true. And that doesn't mean, oh, we'll just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and just like keep going along.

44:00

No, you can continue to notice things and like see problems that are there and try and make sure to, you know, have those resolved.

44:09

Because sometimes there's this problem where because we want to avoid victim mentality, there's almost like this encouragement to, oh, just don't even acknowledge it because you're not a victim.

44:18

Just, no, you should be able to acknowledge it and you should be able to say, sure, I am a victim here. That's fine.

44:23

But it's also about like the mindset of not, you can acknowledge a reality. If you are a victim, you can acknowledge that that is the case, that that is a problem and that you have been done something, which is like something has been done to you, which is unjust, while at the same time not having a victim mentality.

44:39

That is possible. And some people can't distinguish that. But there is like this sense in which, at least more in like the left direction, like you,

44:47

John, you brought up the ex -evangelicals where people will say, oh, you know, the church abused me spiritually or something.

44:54

Therefore I deconstruct and I no longer go to church. Well, there's a few things there.

44:59

First off, the problem that we have to deal with is the fact that all men, men and women, whether they're regenerate or unregenerate, are spiritually like, you know, they're still sinners.

45:09

Like sin does still exist. People do still abuse power, which ought not to be done.

45:16

And there's a sense in which like, sometimes people will try to use abuse of power as a justification for completely dissolving that power in general.

45:25

When like, you know, that's not the case because the church is, as an institution, is divinely instituted by Christ in giving the keys of the kingdom to the apostles.

45:34

And then like, you know, with the church transmitting to, or with the apostles transmitting to the church, the deposit of faith through the, you know, through the

45:42

New Testament, through the gospel preached, you know, and so what I would want to say about that is that abuse of power does not justify, you know, annulling that power in general.

45:53

So for example, the existence of husbands that are abusive towards their wives or commit adultery against their wives does not mean that the institution of marriage should be dissolved.

46:04

The idea that there were a communistic regimes in the 20th century who oppressed people and that there are still certain stately regimes that oppress people does not mean the state needs to be abolished.

46:17

And the reason why we as Christians say that is because, you know, we know these things are instituted by God.

46:23

We know the church is instituted by God. We know marriage is instituted by God. We know the state is instituted by God. So abuse of a practice does not justify the dismantling of that.

46:35

And so that's something that we need to keep in mind there, you know, because it's very easy. If somebody is, say for example, if a woman is abused by her husband and cheated on, she may very much say, oh yeah, we should abolish marriage because of what

46:48

I've been through, but that's not the case. And it's especially not the case for the church because the church is going to be made of sinful people.

46:56

There are wolves amidst the sheep. And just because there is a wolf present does not mean that you have to make the sheep go down with you.

47:04

That's not how it works, but because of like this culture of toxic empathy, because of this idolization of victimization, there's like this sort of revolutionary proclivity among people to just get rid of those things or to commune and meet with other people who have been wrong and talk about how wrong that thing was rather than saying, okay, here's what we can do to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen again.

47:30

I do know that there are some like ex -evangelicals who will do things like that, but the problem is that oftentimes their solutions is just capitulation to the world.

47:39

Because the church spiritually abused me, that means we have to acknowledge that homosexuality is permissible or something like that.

47:48

And that just, that can't be the case. You cannot use abuse as an excuse to tolerate sin or to tear down a

47:56

God -ordained institution. That's such a great point. And I'm thinking of some of these groups as possibly wanting to sit in these conditions.

48:08

Like Pastor Joe, you probably notice when someone comes into your office and they're not there to actually make progress and get help, but to probably just get your empathy essentially.

48:21

And like, they want you to read like the fact that they were abused or hurt or whatever. And I don't know how common that is, but I'm sure it happens.

48:31

No, it does happen. I know specific cases of that, that does happen. People come in and it's the whole me too thing where I've had folks in my office say, you have to believe the victim and you have to validate their story, regardless of if there are any facts, regardless of if it's a credible story or not.

48:56

The credibility of it's not the issue. The fact that they're making the claim is the issue and you must empathize with them.

49:04

And you've reported on this, to you're probably nauseous about it, but the whole me too situation in the

49:11

Southern Baptist Convention, right? Where as Joe Rigney says, that when the empathy mob gets wound up, they become the most abusive people that there are.

49:24

And that empathy mob that was unleashed on the

49:31

Southern Baptist Convention, through, I forgot her name now.

49:37

Oh, are you talking about Hannah Kate or? No, no, the lawyer lady, the one that was the -

49:45

Oh, Rachel Denhollander. Yes, Rachel. She became the most abusive person, you know, attacking the

49:53

Southern Baptist Convention with all the craziness that she whipped up with her, you know, empathy mob, that has turned out to be, you know, almost completely basis, right?

50:05

There hasn't been one conviction of anyone, you know, of credible accusations of abuse that they were trying to push forward.

50:16

But yet it costs the Southern Baptist Convention millions and millions of dollars and basically destroyed the executive committee and so forth and so on.

50:30

You know, I have personal acquaintances that were run out of the

50:36

ERLC because of, no, not the ERLC, the executive committee, the

50:43

SBC executive committee. Yeah. Because, yeah, the EC, because they were trying to stand up to that stuff, but then whenever they had, they were forced into relinquishing what the attorney client privilege or whatever it's called, that they just had to -

51:00

The havoc that that whole situation, you know, wreaked on and is still, you know, wreaking on the

51:07

SBC was this empathy gone amok, right? Yeah.

51:13

I think it is important to point out, I'm just gonna do this for Southern Baptists. I've been holding my tongue, I suppose, a little bit, but I know one of the podcasts that got a lot of attention to this issue was on Al Mohler's podcast with Joe Rigney, right?

51:27

Last week. And I just wanted to say the whole Me Too thing in the SBC really has a genesis with Al Mohler telling people that Jennifer Lyle was abused by David Sills.

51:39

And without, and now this has been a horrible thing for them because David Sills sued, but that's really the genesis of the, or the introduction of the

51:50

Me Too stuff to the SBC. You could also look at, what was the guy's name from the

51:58

Sovereign Grace Music? C .J. Mahaney. C .J. Mahaney. This was back in like 2017 or 18,

52:04

I think. No, maybe it was early 2019 actually, now that I'm thinking about it, where a bunch of the guys who stood by C .J.

52:10

Mahaney were, when the Houston Chronicle story came out, Al Mohler was one of them, went out there and condemned

52:16

C .J. Mahaney. And so without getting into the details of those issues, I just wanted to say that,

52:23

I don't know if it's progress. I don't really know what to think of it, but I mean, it's kind of, I guess, it's interesting to me at least to see

52:29

Al Mohler out there promoting Joe Rigney's work on empathy when like he was one of the worst abusers of it in my mind.

52:37

Like he really - Come on, Jon, you know the answer. I do know the answer. You've given the answer on your podcast in episodes past.

52:45

It's the chameleon effect. Yeah, the opportunism there. Yeah, the flip -flop, the switching, the finger in the wind, the moving to position yourself for your legacy.

52:57

You know, you've told it all. There's all these new people who haven't seen the past things.

53:03

And so I figured for their benefit, I'll try to walk them down the garden path here. With a few minutes left, we got some questions coming in.

53:09

Is empathy and effeminacy linked by Cripple Creek Carl? Hmm, that's an interesting question.

53:17

What do you think? I didn't understand the question. What do you think about it?

53:23

I didn't understand it. What was he saying? Oh, is empathy and effeminacy linked? So in other words, you know, if you have -

53:32

Feminacy, okay. Yeah, being effeminate. I do see women more often going down this road,

53:40

I would say. Men tend to be a little more nuts and bolts about things and skeptical.

53:48

I don't know if that's because of, you know, the women being the weaker vessel or what it is. Men are protectors, they're wired differently.

53:55

But women have this maternal spirit that does seem to jive more, or at least it's a greater temptation, right?

54:03

To have toxic empathy, so. But in my experience, those men who do get sucked into this toxic empathy are harder to deal with because of the fact that they're more aggressive, they can be more nasty than women.

54:25

And yeah, I've seen that aspect as well. Yeah, Michelle Peterson says, great point,

54:35

Matthew. And therein lies the problem with the church abuse crowd. There is language in their circles that the white male patriarchy system will abuse because it is inherently abusive.

54:45

That's the problem. There's no redemption or reformation. They want psychologists and therapists, preferably women, running the show.

54:52

It's intersectionality, plain and simple. So not a question, but - Yeah, definitely. No, I agree fully, yeah.

55:00

Barry Moss says, question, I'm a bit late. Did we conclude that empathy is sinful? Toxic empathy.

55:08

We distinguish, we distinguish. You know, this is one of the questions I had, and maybe this is a good thing to end the podcast on.

55:16

You know, I wanna call sin what the Bible identifies as sin. And this is one of the reasons I have not gone down the road of identifying empathy as a sin.

55:24

I wanna look at like, okay, so what's the actual behavior behind it? And I think Rigney does do some of this in the book.

55:31

So if you're looking for the sin, it's pride, it is idolatry, it's lying, right?

55:42

Essentially, we've been talking a lot about lying, like someone saying something that isn't true, but not actually fact -checking or cross -examining it, and then changing other people's lives to accommodate this victimhood status.

55:57

And you're really just promoting a lie at that point. So, I mean, that's a sin, right? The idolatry aspect of it is making man the measure of truth.

56:08

You're not using the tools God has given you to ascertain what the truth is. You're letting man decide those things because they feel that way.

56:16

And then the, what was the first thing I said? Pride, pride. So the political play where you morally posture yourself as the one with more compassion or empathy so that you can manipulate situations to your advantage.

56:33

And I see this happen all the time, especially in politics. I'm the one who truly cares.

56:41

Trump is terrible. What he's doing at the border is terrible. He doesn't care. I care,

56:47

I empathize. And it's usually some like sob story about these people are, and it doesn't mean there are victims, right?

56:53

It doesn't mean there's not victims in situations. It doesn't mean that there aren't terrible situations that happen, but when it's untethered from truth and you're just using a raw emotion to tell a story to get people to come to your side, then this is wicked, this is evil.

57:10

So I don't know if you guys have any comments on that. Yeah. Well, caring is actually bringing about a solution.

57:20

So those who want to say they're the ones who cared are mostly advocating, let's just keep the same status quo going.

57:31

Let's just keep the border wide open, right? Because we care. Well, that's not a solution.

57:37

That doesn't solve anything for anyone except for the leftists who want to destroy the country.

57:42

So that's not actual caring because caring gives in the sense to make a solution for the betterment of those that are being cared for.

57:53

Yeah, and who do you care for? The citizens who are suffering or the people coming?

57:59

They only focus on one class of people. Right, right. I think Joe Rigney pointed this out, that empathy as a word is only come into use in our culture recently.

58:15

And in Christian parlance very recently with the new international version translation that translates the text that we have a great high priest who can empathize with our sufferings as opposed to the older and more literal translations using the word sympathize.

58:37

And so that's sort of turned the tide a little bit with that translation. Yeah, I memorized it sympathize.

58:45

That must've been new King James. But, well, we only have about a minute left in the podcast.

58:52

What church do you pastor Joe asks Barry Moss. So go for it.

58:58

What's the name of your church, Pastor Joe Kelly? Oh, it's First Baptist Church Williams. And people can listen to your sermons on the website?

59:05

Actually no, ours are not recorded and put up. Oh, wow.

59:11

Is that all? Well, you gotta come in person. We had some technical difficulties with our equipment and then we just haven't gotten it up and running again, so.

59:23

Yeah, I empathize with that now. Yeah, you gotta come in person. Gotta come in person.

59:30

Just like who was it, the famous English preacher that said he was like against recording sermons. I'm trying to remember.

59:36

Martin Wood Jones. Right, right. He thought, right, his sermon was for a specific congregation at a moment in time.

59:43

Gotta respect that, so. All right, well, we are 10 seconds away from the end of the podcast.

59:50

Thank you, Matthew, and thank you, Pastor Kelly for joining me on this. I appreciate it. And we should be back next week with the

59:59

American Churchmen, same time, same place. God bless. Take care, y 'all.