An easterly wind is blowing across the Pacific and into some Aussie churches. Certain leaders are arguing that what we need today is a muscular Christianity that will defeat the hoards of hell who are using the powers of popular culture, academic institutions, corporate policy and political legislation to impose worldly ideologies. What we need, they say, is a strong Christianity, a ‘masculine’ Christianity.
True, the same Jesus Christ who is gentle and kind is also the risen judge of the world. He is both the God of mercy and the God of justice, the Lion and the Lamb. But this is approach to Christian identity and ethics, gospel ministry and mission is, I contend, sufficiently distorted in one direction that it is ultimately as big a problem as the spiritual and moral hopelessness for which it claims to be the remedy. Alluding to the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22–23), author, apologist and public intellectual Neil Shenvi captures the problem well:
If a man were described as kind, gentle, patient, loving, peaceful, joyful, good, and faithful, large segments of Twitter would call him effeminate.
I am sure the ‘theo-bros’ on X will dismiss me as another weak ‘effeminate’ ‘woke’ pastor. But let no one take me for a fool. And if you do, then tolerate me just as you would a fool, so that I may do a little boasting. In this self-confident boasting I am not talking as the Lord would, but as a fool. Since many are boasting in the way the world does, I too will boast (see 2 Cor 11:16). I learnt to shoot when I was ten years old. I know from experience how to chase down a thief and stand up to a violent man (I am out of my mind to talk like this (2 Cor 11:23)). I have a son who made grown men cower when he bowled and I am proud of my eldest who is serving in the military. But, like the apostle Paul, I would rather not boast of such worldly things!
‘The Sin of Empathy’
This mode of Christianity found recent expression and widespread exposure on an episode of Thinking in Public with Al Mohler, in which Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, approvingly interviews Joe Rigney from New Saint Andrews College for his book, The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits. Over the years, I have appreciated some of what Al Mohler has said and stood for. This interview, not so much.
The ‘sin of empathy’ (Mohler calls the phrase an ‘exaggeration’) might be described as a ‘sinful over-emphasis on empathy’, but then again, Rigney seems to use ‘empathy’ with little definition and more as a descriptor for female emotion. Indeed, Rigney considers ‘the sin of empathy’ to be a particularly female flaw. In the interview, he says of women that
it’s a glorious design feature that God made women to intuit emotions, share emotions, feel emotions, respond to suffering people with care and compassion. This is a great and glorious gift that God intended to be used for his glory and the good of others.
But this gift, he says, means that women are not suited to the role of strong leadership in the church:
There is a reason that the empathetic sex … are barred from the pastoral office, they were barred from the priestly office in the Old Testament for the same reason. Because … priests in the Old Testament, pastors and ministers and elders in the New Testament, are charged fundamentally with guarding the doctrine and worship of the church, of setting the perimeter for what is in and out. That’s the calling.
Empathy is more likely to become ‘sinful’ when it takes primacy. And, it is claimed, this is more likely to happen when women are in roles of leadership.[1]
Empathy and Theological Liberalism
It follows for Rigney that if the church is influenced too much by women in leadership, their over-emphasis on empathy will cause the church to slide into theological liberalism:
Every church faces some version of this kind of pressure to have women in the room where it happens … We won’t call them pastors, at least initially, but once you’ve started down that road, you’ve effectively ceded the ground that men and women are interchangeable. We don’t know why the Bible says that only men can be pastors. And until we can twist that verse, we’ll hold the line on that one little thing, but it’s a complementarian thread that’s trying to hold up an egalitarian boulder, and it will not hold in the long run.
Mohler enthusiastically agrees with Rigney: “I don’t know of a single body that has genuinely affirmed women in the pulpit that has not eventually affirmed the LGBTQ revolution.”
Like most slippery slope arguments, this isn’t actually as inevitable as they claim. One reason is that there are different hermeneutical grids among egalitarians theologians. Not all egalitarians are identical. There are some who hold to a more liberal theological framework that does slide much more readily into adopting the latest cultural norms of sex and gender. But there are others whose theological convictions do not permit the slide.
In fact there is a risk that a strong suspicion of empathy, motivated by modern cultural and political concerns, might permits a slide away from the biblical teaching about our Lord Jesus Christ.
Our Empathetic High Priest
How does this decrying of empathy square with Christ who is our empathetic High Priest?
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. (Hebrews 4:15, NIV)
In his commentary on Hebrews, Paul Ellingworth paraphrases this as: “Our high priest can feel with us in our weaknesses, because he has been tempted in all respects as we are”. The verb συμπαθῆσαι (sumpathesai) and its cognates, as Ellingworth notes, “are used most often of family affection”. In his commentary, Peter O’Brien explains,
Believers have in heaven a high priest with an unequalled capacity for empathising with them in all their weaknesses, especially the weakness that result in sin… the verb rendered empathise was used of a bond similar to a mother’s feeling for her children or one brother’s feeling for another.
Or again, Puritan Thomas Goodwin writes:
The word is a deep one. He suffers with you, he is as tender in his bowels to you as ever he was; that he might be moved to pity you. He is willing to suffer, as it were, that one place to be left naked, and to be flesh still, on which he may be wounded with your miseries, that so he might be your merciful high priest.[2]
Mohler and Rigney suggest in the interview that empathy is a twentieth-century word. The word itself may be new, but is the concept new? Thomas Goodwin and the author of Hebrews suggest otherwise. What’s more likely is that the overly forced division between sympathy and empathy is a twentieth-century construct.
The discussion also raises serious concerns for me in its overly negative portrayal of empathy and thus its overly negative portrayal of women. But, of course, men are also sinful, and masculine strengths also a have a dark side.
Worldly Empathy and Worldly Strength
What is now called complementarianism is the biblical teaching about men and women in church leadership and in marriage that has been the norm among Christians churches throughout its history. But we don’t advocate for it by adorning men with worldly cultural masculinity—with a six pack and a rifle slung over the shoulder and a gruff voice. Especially not if we excuse worldly morality in the process. Rather, we advocate the Christian vision of masculinity by primarily urging men to be more Christlike. Any distinctive masculine Christianity must be thoroughly representative of the Second Adam, the man from heaven.
Can empathy be problematic? Of course it can. When we sever any human emotion or disposition from the work of the Spirit, we are in danger of misuse and misapplication. But I am unconvinced that distorted empathy is the primary sin of our age. Some Christian men have the impression that showing the gentleness of Jesus somehow inhibits our masculinity and the church’s doctrinal steadfastness. Certain groups want to be like the Lord Jesus overthrowing tables and using a whip in the temple courts. They love to argue fiercely online and are quick to jump on others with sarcasm, denunciations, mocking laughter emojis. But strength and power, when separated from the Spirit, are just as destructive of true Christian vitality as the gentler virtues.
Real masculinity does not deny strength, but uses it in the service of others. It is therefore humble, sacrificial, gentle and kind. It doesn’t demean women, it honours them. If your version of strong Christianity produces misogyny, think again. If anything, I believe the church needs more godly empathy. Remember how the Apostle Paul who rebuked the Corinthians:
Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
Or consider his extended argument against the strong ‘super apostles’ in 2 Corinthians 10–13.
If you think empathy or gentleness are signs of ‘effeminate’ weakness, I suggest you take that up with our Great High Priest.
The original version of this article was published on Murray’s blog.
[1] Beyond church politics, there are larger cultural and political issues that intersect with Rigney’s line of thought. For example, an economically socialised and progressive interventionist civil government can be cast as maternal, feminine and sinfully empathetic.
[2] Quoted in Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers (Crossway: 2020).
