Some respectful pushback: My understanding of your most recent post is that you argued “empathy” is a more accurate translation of the inspired word “συμπαθής.” Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Using Hebrews 4:15 as the textual basis, I would argue that neither etymologically nor historically is “empathize” related to συμπαθῆσα, but that “sympathize” is.
In the Warhorn article you argued that etymologically, empathy comes from ἐμπάθεια, not συμπαθής. English Bible translations recognized this distinction in the Greek, preferring to render συμπαθῆσαι in Hebrews 4:15 as “sympathize” rather than “empathize.” This was true up until the NIV 2011 update, which was the first translation to read “empathize.” Therefore from 1873 until 2011, English Bible translators, including those who produced editions far stronger than the NIV 2011, had the word “empathize” available to them and chose “sympathize” instead. So why now is “empathy” a better translation, when etymologically it is nowhere in Scripture and historically was not preferred?
Dear Carver, no. I did not argue “empathy” is a more accurate translation of Scripture’s συμπαθής. And no, English translators did not have the word “empathize” at their disposal “from 1873” on. As I said in that article, “the English word ‘empathy’ was coined” thirty-six years later, in 1909.
Regardless, empathy has never been a sin, and isn’t today. Basing an argument that it is a sin on the original languages of Scripture is not worthwhile, brother. It won’t help you in your defense of an obvious error. Love,
What’s interesting is that while I’m not very emotional I’ve been told that I’m empathetic. I suppose it’s true. It drives me to help those in need. Can it mislead me? Sometime I suppose it can, or make things feel personal that aren’t. Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s a sin, I think it’s like our mouths that must be tamed. Running about like a self made martyr is certainly not virtuous, being a busybody is not virtuous. As the preacher reminds us to every season there is a time for ….
Wisdom helps us recognize the season. Empathy without wisdom is always self-destructive. Wisdom without empathy is vanity.
This is the point. Empathy and sympathy can both be abused and used sinfully, but to define empathy as sin is the kind of Muscovite hyperbole we’ve been afflicted with for years (objectivity of the covenant, presumptive regeneration, one-lane eschatology, facemasks as idolatry, if you don’t commune children you are excommunicating them from the church, public education is negligence).
Wary of someone always claiming they are recovering something, that they’ve discovered something new. Novelty is the opiate of young men and women who have zeal but no knowledge.
That’s a very helpful summary of what’s behind this argument @adionne. Thank you.
Is there a place to discuss the merits of the book? Oversimplified title aside, there is much in the book to be commended. And it would be a shame to write off valuable resources just because we disagree with parts of them. I’ve been on that train…doesn’t lead anywhere good.
No book is perfect, no book says everything, and even books we disagree with can be useful teaching aids. In fact, maybe books we disagree with can be some of the most valuable teaching aids.
Tim has made the point many times that the abuse of empathy has been a tactic of liberals or anybody who wants to manipulate others to justify their sin. We’ve been seeing this move employed by Revoicers for years. They whine that they don’t have any fellowship in the church, and that’s the play they use to manipulate the compassion of people to allow them to bring ministries into the church that norm sexual perversity. It’s a strategy to forbid repentance. We get it. We hate that. It’s sin.
But, an argument could be made that categorizing empathy as sin is itself an abuse of empathy. It’s a play to manipulate the emotions of conservatives to allow them to justify the deep rejiggering of their ordo amoris so they don’t have to enter into the lives of the poor, the immigrant, the unclean, the depraved, other church members, people not like themselves, or anyone other than their own tribe. It’s a helpful play for the CN Christendom movement as it serves to justify their heartlessness—a heartlessness I see in myself and work to fight.
This discussion is shaping up to me something of a proxy war, which is commonly the case when we go to fisticuffs over the meanings of words (2 Tim. 2:14).
Here’s how I see it, fellas. Years ago, Rigney made some great observations about the way the word “empathy” gets invoked in modern culture. He set out to make some useful critiques about that. Then he did that one Man Rampant episode, and gained all sorts of accolades from it. It was the first big thing which made him tight with the Moscow crowd. From that moment on, it kind of became his schtick. It basically became the point of identification for Rigney, culminating in the need to defend the thesis by writing a book about it. Defending the thesis = defending his Moscow identity.
Because the thesis itself has become a point of identity for Rigney, the thesis cannot be abandoned. So challenging the thesis is now akin to challenging Moscow and his place in it.
I’m just following the math.
So when someone comes along and asserts that it’s a bridge too far to call empathy itself sinful, the inclination is not so much to deal straight with the meaning of things, but rather to descend as far as we need to into etymological debate to save the thesis. Because we’re really defending something different than the meaning of words. It’s not about the content of arguments, really. It’s a proxy war for a man’s identity.
The whole discussion is a reminder to me of the danger of becoming a guy whose identity gets built around a particular schtick. Because eventually, someone’s going to provide a salient challenge to the schtick (as Tim has done here), and it’s going to feel more intensely personal than it ever needed to. We need to labor to be men who stick to caring about the truth and the meanings of things, and not hitch our identities to defending talking points.
This was wrong to post, and I ask Aaron’s forgiveness. We just had time together and we said in person what we write in public. It would be good for everyone to know that about our friendship. Anyhow, there was no acrimony as he corrected me about what he does and doesn’t do and say, and I was wrong. Love,
To remind us of what I said about Rigney’s arguments in the OP:
Rigney gives a number of illustrations demonstrating how the abuse of empathy has contributed to the gagging of truth destroying the institutions and souls of the Western world, and many of his criticisms are true and helpful. But notice our phrase “the abuse of empathy”; this would have been a proper title for the book.
The abuse of empathy is often sin, but empathy itself is no sin. In other words, the valid distinction between the use and abuse of empathy is lost on the masses of Christian political activists. They claim empathy is “sin,” so empathy is never proper, compassionate, or faithful.
Going back to the argument over what the Ancient Greek words ἐμπάθεια and συμπαθής (the second used in Scripture a couple places) have to do with denouncing empathy “sin,” what hasn’t been pointed out here yet is that the Ancient Greek word ἐμπάθεια did not have a meaning anything like the meaning of the English word coined in 1909.
Here’s an explanation of linguistics’ “false friends” or “pseudophiles,” demonstrating the concept through the examination of the Ancient and Modern Greek word εμπάθεια and our recent English coinage, “empathy”:
False friends are pseudophiles, or Ψευδόφιλα, which comes from the Greek word ψευδής (pseudes), meaning “false/faux,” and the Greek word φίλος (filos), meaning “friend.” Pseudophiles are multinational, multicultural, and multilingual entities, and they exist among different languages worldwide. For a Greek, like me, who is reading and communicating in English, pseudophiles are especially important because there is a significant number of them in the English language, and they can be pretty tricky—to the point of sometimes causing desperation. Hellooo! This is not all Greek to me, because there are already numerous false friends between older forms of the Greek language (Ancient Greek mainly, but also Koine) and Modern Greek, resulting in a confusing and often misused triangular pseudophilia between Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, and English.
Let’s examine this article’s title, for instance. What is empathy? For a Greek, it is obvious; it is Greek, after all! Empathy is εμπάθεια (empatheia) from en + pathos. Well, not quite! Originally in Ancient Greek, empathy (εμπάθεια) meant “strong passion” about a person or an idea. It had neither a positive nor a negative connotation. It was neutral. The English “empathy” is, of course, not quite the same. Some scholars translated the German “Einfühlung,” which was an attempt by German philosopher Rudolf Lotze to retain the original meaning of the Greek εμπάθεια. English traditionally prefers Greek loans for words more than German loans. So, our beloved Anglo-Saxon “empathy” of today was born. The problem for a Greek- speaking person today is that, in Modern Greek, εμπάθεια means strong negative—and only negative—passion towards some person or some ideology. Thus, it means “obsession” or, even worse, “hatred”! It has a negative connotation only. A person with “εμπάθεια” is someone who is overwhelmed by prejudice, to the point of not being able to think or judge objectively—almost the exact contrary meaning of “empathy” in English! It is amusing (or tragic, depending on the case) to run across translations of the English “empathy” into Greek as “εμπάθεια.” Even if you try—now that you have read this far—to translate “empathy” from English to Greek using Google Translate, you will get the wrong εμπάθεια. By the way, the correct translation of “empathy” from English to Greek would be the word ενσυναίσθηση (ensynesthese). ("The Metα-Empathy of the Sycophantic Pseudophiles… and Other False Friends
by George Rizopoulos; from TELICOM 34, No. 1 — First Quarter 2022)
This is the needed caution when we might want to make the argument that the word “sympathy” being in Scripture makes it good and the word “empathy” not being in Scripture makes it less good. As I pointed out above, it turns out that the meaning of both Ancient and Modern Greek εμπάθεια has nothing close to the meaning of this modern English word “empathy.”
I want to stop the pendulum swinging endemic in both Moscow and in Evangel.
Dear brother, have you actually read what I’ve written in this thread? Or must I quote you directly to show my agreement?
You know better than most here that this is simply not true, both parts of it. It’s a character attack rather than engaging with what I urged above. Both can be true: the title is bad, and the content has value.
@jander is right. This isn’t about Rigney, it’s a proxy war. And I’m trying to stop the war. Neither @tbbayly nor @JosephSpurgeon is convincing anyone but his own followers in this debate. It’s beyond fruitless; it’s sinful. In arguing that arguing about words is bad we’re sitting here arguing about words (myself included!). Brothers, we all need a strong dose of 1 Timothy 3.3…‘not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome’. May I remind all of the regulars here that there are many on the outside watching these discussions…I pray they see something more than a private civil war.
Both can be true, there is a strain of Reformed Christianity that is swiftly becoming sub-human and remarkably lacking in compassion (and maybe we’re not as immune to this trend as we think we are), and there is value in what Rigney has written (have we so quickly forgotten what’s happened in last ten years?). Rigney’s thesis is sinful, and his book is godly. It’s a mix. It’s not all or nothing. It’s not one or the other. It’s men with feet of clay.
It seems so fitting that such an article would be written by a guy named George Rizopoulos.
That’s a useful read. This seems like a good case study to highlight the fact that disputes are rarely as simple as claiming the etymological high ground. Etymology itself can be such a moving target.
As I think about it, it’s only when words have been established with unambiguous meanings (e.g. fornication, gluttony, idolatry, murder) can we then proceed to denounce them as sinful. But while the definition of a word remains marked by ambiguity in the modern vernacular, it isn’t very helpful to denounce the word as sinful. Provocative, edgy, but not helpful.
I believe this is part of what the apostle was getting at:
" A good teacher ought to look at nothing else than edification, and to give his whole attention to that alone. . . λογομαχέω means to engage earnestly in contentious disputes, which are commonly produced by a foolish desire of being ingenious. Solemn charging before the Lord is intended to strike terror; and from this severity we learn how dangerous to the Church is that knowledge which leads to debates, that is, which disregards piety, and tends to ostentation." - Calvin on 2 Tim. 2:14
Here is a question and Pastor Tim answered it partially above: When did the word Empathy enter the lexicon and why? You acknowledged its recent advent as to the beginning of the 20th century. But how did it come about and what was the purpose? I think you answer that question and then you get much closer to the thesis of Joe Rigney’s book.
It is quite silly to me to be attacking a book merely on its title alone. But I sympathize (not empathize) with not wanting to buy another book to read.
May I suggest that “Empathy is a sin” is only a lie per se if “empathy” has a clear, univocal meaning? The fact that so much wrangling over the definition and etymology and history of this word’s usage is even possible seems to indicate that it’s a slippery gestalt word over which invested parties have determined to fight a cultural proxy war. The idea that “empathy” is sin may be less a lie than just meaningless – and therefore irresponsibly confusing despite the useful questions it can raise about what kinds of sympathy/empathy are appropriate and right.
“The Sin of Empathy” is a title chosen to offend modern liberals because they’ll presumably slot in their definition of “empathy” as “the cardinal virtue of feeling bad for the socially approved classes of people.” In that regard it worked (Vox article), but its fundamental posture is therefore against the world, not for the Church.
Additionally, I would have more sympathy for Rigney if he’d let the title be a kind of provocative open question about the implied meaning of “empathy” in modern media, politics, etc., instead of trying to dichotomize “empathy” and “sympathy” and rigidly assign new meanings to each as in-group shibboleths.
Having met some of the men at Canon Press, I can attest that copywriting is their great strength and vice. As they have said to me, they are trying to sell books when they market them.
Whatever it takes to turn the eyes.
Therefore, while Abuse of Empathy would be a better title, The Sin of Empathy feeds their families.
Obviously this has lead to them doubling down on their publications even if they receive deserved criticism. Stephen Wolfe’s book is the prime example of this. One of their marketers told me Canon published it because of the content and author’s controversy. I cringed.
Dear Joseph, it has nothing to do with money. Pls stop saying it’s just the title I object to. As I say repeatedly, and has been shown by quoting Doug and Joe’s previous forays into this matter, the title is the thesis.
Did you get that?
Thesis.
You know, like “The Grace of Shame.” If shame isn’t God’s grace to us, don’t buy the book because that is its thesis. Love,
Good comments, Joshua. My problem is the numbers of men and women who are Christian Nationalist and angry, selfish, racist, hard-nosed, and remarkably easy to win over to celebrities’ discipleship. As Aaron pointed out early in this discussion, these souls (although I don’t attribute my descriptions to him, also) are the last ones who need another reason to reject love, compassion, understanding, sympathy, and empathy. From the beginning, they have been my concern. I know them and want to guard them from any slightest thought of talk encouraging their weaknesses and sins. Love,
As I’ve seen this discussion (both here and elsewhere) unfold, I have found value in a somewhat unlikely source: secular training that I received on being a group facilitator for business meetings. One of the core values of the approach I was taught is labeled “compassion”. In the training, the originator of this approach outlined his reasons for using this term instead of “empathy”. He was trying to balance the very real need to understand and feel for someone else without absolving that person of agency, accountability, and responsibility. Here’s what he writes:
Sometimes people think that compassion means feeling sorry for people and taking care of them in a way that rescues them.
Not in our approach. Our definition of compassion means appreciating their situation and holding them accountable. It means sharing all the relevant information with someone even if she may feel bad hearing it. Sometimes a client will say, “I don’t want to give a coworker negative feedback because it would hurt her feelings.” But when you withhold feedback that can help someone change and improve, you take away the chance to change. That’s cruel, not compassionate.
I’m not trying to have another entry in a dispute over words, so perhaps there is another way to express this. And certainly I care very much about the words that Scripture uses. But I found this balanced approach to caring for another by affirming agency rather than denying it to be helpful as I’ve grappled with the issue myself.
This is the point. Empathy and sympathy can both be abused and used sinfully, but to define empathy as sin is the kind of Muscovite hyperbole we’ve been afflicted with for years (objectivity of the covenant, presumptive regeneration, one-lane eschatology, facemasks as idolatry, if you don’t commune children you are excommunicating them from the church, public education is negligence).