Empathy, Hammers, and Handguns

22 April 2025

Much has been said in certain quarters about the sin of empathy. How ought we to think about this?

Back in the seventies and eighties, Francis Schaeffer used to get criticized for oversimplifying the philosophers he spoke about — Hegel, for example. Professional philosophers would complain that Hegel was actually quite a bit more nuanced than Schaeffer was letting on, and not necessarily vulnerable to the criticisms Schaeffer would level against him. I can’t really discuss the validity of the criticism; I’m no expert on Hegel either. But for the sake of discussion, let’s grant that the professionals are right, and Schaeffer really was oversimplifying Hegel.

Where did that oversimplification come from? Was Schaeffer just straw-manning Hegel? No indeed, and here we need to remember Schaeffer’s actual ministry context. He wasn’t ministering to Hegel himself, nor to professional philosophers. Overwhelmingly, he was serving college students. When you’re working with a college sophomore who has misread (and oversimplified) Hegel and thinks he has hold of a profound truth, what’s the task at hand? Do we try to make him a better Hegelian? Or do we just start from where he actually is and minister the gospel to him?

Obviously the latter, which is what Schaeffer did. It might be fair to say that Schaeffer’s treatment isn’t up to dealing with all the nuances of Hegel’s actual views, but it his work deals admirably with Hegel as portrayed in popular culture of the time. He dealt with the actual beliefs of the people in front of him, as well he should.

So when my brothers to the northwest wax eloquent on the sin of empathy, I can see their point. They are not (as we will see) addressing what empathy actually means, but the sin they are expertly skewering is a real sin, it is rampant in our culture, and the people who are committing it often call that sin “empathy.”

Why is it that the popular definition so diverges from the real one? For the same reason that we misuse “depressed,” “triggered,” or “autistic.” Psychotherapy is our culture’s unofficial religion. Religious terms with specific meanings always get debased, usually in a quest to apply a virtuous gloss to whatever the adherent wanted to do anyway. (Hence, for example, one of the most intemperate displays of modern times calling itself the “temperance movement” in the early 20th century. In contemporary usage, someone who’s triggered (the real definition) should be treated with compassion, so people describe themselves as “triggered” when they’re just mad, so as to garner more sympathy than they deserve.) The clergy and theologians — psychotherapists and counselors, in the case before us today — always object: “That’s not what the word means!” But people go on abusing the terms anyway. It’s an unfortunate trend, and clearly psychotherapy is not immune to the term-debasing trend that has long afflicted other religions.

Whether our brothers ought to cede the term “empathy” is a separate question. As it is not a biblical word, they are under no obligation to fight for it if they don’t want to. On the other hand, there’s no sin in fighting for the proper definition, either. Since the actual meaning of empathy is both a biblical concept and a necessary spiritual discipline, that’s what I’m going to do below.

Properly defined, empathy is not a virtue and it is not a vice. It is a tool, like a claw hammer, a chef’s knife, or a handgun. That tool can be used to build or destroy, to nourish or injure, to save life or to kill. So what does the word “empathy” actually mean?

Empathy: n. understanding a person from their frame of reference rather than one’s own, or vicariously experiencing that person’s feelings, perceptions, and thoughts. Empathy does not, of itself, entail motivation to be of assistance, although it may turn into sympathy or personal distress, which may result in action. In psychotherapy, therapist empathy for the client can be a path to comprehension of the client’s cognitions, affects, motivations, or behaviors.

APA Dictionary of Psychology

A seasoned psychotherapist I know put it this way: empathy and compassion are two fundamentally different things. The best con artists have perfect empathy, but zero compassion. They can see the world through your eyes so well that they can manipulate you into giving them everything you have. (See also Chris Voss on “Tactical Empathy.” Click over and just listen to the first minute of the video; he gives a good definition.) So it’s fair to say that seeing things from another person’s point of view is not inevitably a virtue.

On the other hand, some virtues are impossible without it. In Chris Voss’ case, he’s using his ability to see from another’s point of view to rescue hostages from criminals. In a more everyday setting, husbands are commanded to exercise this ability where their wives are concerned: “Husbands, likewise, dwell with them with understanding, giving honor to the wife, as to the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life, that your prayers may not be hindered.” (1 Pet. 3:7)

The Golden Rule requires similar insight. The proverbial young husband who buys his wife a drill for her birthday because that’s what he would want is obviously not applying the Golden Rule correctly. He would like a birthday present that he wants; therefore he should buy her a birthday present that she wants. But he can’t really do that without seeing the world from her point of view, can he?

Empathy is a component of wise love, a necessary but not a sufficient condition. You can’t love another person well if you refuse to see things from their perspective; that way lies well-intentioned cluelessness. Neither can you love love another person well if you get so pulled into their perspective that you fail to exercise sound moral judgment and good sense. You should not believe everything you think or feel; you should not allow empathy to suck you into believing everything someone else thinks or feels either. Discernment and emotionally sober judgment is required: love well, and love wisely.

So what are we to say about the “sin of empathy?” Well, our brothers would defend their position by pointing out that the behavior they are criticizing really is a sinful use of empathy. Yes and amen!!! These same brothers would likewise criticize the sinful use of handguns in murders and robberies, but something tells me we won’t be seeing a book titled The Sin of Handguns from them anytime soon. Why not?

This to say, the phrase “sin of empathy” is clickbait, ragebait, copping a rhetorical pose. I don’t really mean that as a criticism. They’re copping that pose in service of taking down a real sin and making the takedown memorable—excellent work to be doing, and I’m glad they’re doing it. But we shouldn’t pretend that rhetorical pose is anything more than it is. Equal weights and measures, if they mean anything, mean that we can’t pretend anybody who approvingly mentions “empathy” has necessarily endorsed a subchristian morality, any more than we would pretend that somebody who approvingly mentions handguns has necessarily endorsed murder.

Maybe the guy’s just not ignorant of the word’s actual meaning.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

An Update

12 July 2024

I had a chance recently to chat with Chris Morrison about the continuing “Content of Saving Faith” debate.

2 Comments | Bare Minimum Gospel Foolishness, Controversies, News, The Free Grace Food Fight | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Beware the Abstract Nouns!

4 June 2024

A bit back, I posted a link to this article on my Facebook feed. The response was predictable: my comments were full of Christians objecting to the notion that Jesus wasn’t a nice guy. 

Now, I’m not complaining; this is trouble I’m happy to be in. Jesus was not, in fact, a nice guy, and I don’t mind annoying folks who think He was. As you can see, I have a mug in the cupboard for just such occasions. 

(Yes, really. My daughter-in-the-faith Anna got it for me, and I love it!)

If you need a demonstration that Jesus was not a nice guy, go ahead and re-read the gospels. I’ll wait. This post isn’t about that. This post is about the trends I’ve noticed in the outraged (or “concerned”) responses to such observations. I’ve noticed three major defenses against the council of God here: christological heresy, pragmatics, and abstract nouns. 

Christological Heresy

Now obviously, there are the folks who will trot out the old chestnut, “Well, Jesus was God and you’re not, so….” Ignore these people. Their objection is functionally a christological heresy, the notion that Jesus is not human the way you are human, such that He presents you with an example of what a human life should look like. Besides, honestly, they’re being intellectually dishonest. These same people are in favor of being christlike when we’re talking about humility or caring for the poor or washing someone’s feet; it’s only when you start talking like Jesus in ways that will get you uninvited to the cool kids’ table that they trot out their “Jesus was God” excuse. 

Besides, John the Baptist wasn’t God, and he called the religious leaders a “brood of vipers” too. Amos wasn’t God, and he famously called the mall rats of Jerusalem a bunch of cows. Ezekiel wasn’t God, and his comments about donkeys continue to scandalize 2500 years later. Paul wasn’t God, and he publicly wished the circumcision party would just chop it off. All these mere humans were led by the Holy Spirit to describe scandalous things honestly, in a scandalous way. Obviously this is a tool a righteous man can be led by God to employ. 

Pragmatics

Some folks won’t bother to argue about whether Jesus did, in fact, say these things, or even about whether we’re allowed to say them. They’ll just encourage you to “keep the main thing the main thing,” remain “gospel-centered,” and promise you that you’ll see better results if you just focus on the gospel rather than “getting sidetracked.” What these folks are missing is—in their terms—that the gospel is supposed to be the center of something. We’re here to proclaim the full council of God, and to follow Jesus’ whole example, not just a core sample of Jesus’ praxis that happens to fit some tight-shoed schoolmarm’s canons of niceness. They seem to honestly think they can get better results than Jesus got by taking a different approach than He did. All I can say is…good luck with that.

Abstract Nouns

Finally, there are the folks who will bury you under an onslaught of abstract nouns. This approach will start with an appeal to a basic biblical command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “Let your speech be always with grace.” “Be kind to one another.” 

Then you will be challenged to be loving/gracious/kind based on the biblical command, which , ex hypothesi, means that you’re not allowed to talk like Jesus did. 

Any appeal to Jesus’ example will generally be met with the “He was God” objection, above, and any appeal to any other example will be met with “That passage is descriptive of what the person did in his human frustration, but what makes you think it’s prescriptive for us?” The net result of this hostility to the biblical narratives is that there are no concrete examples to which one might appeal for anything. Then, the abstract nouns like “love,” “kind,” or “gracious” become empty suitcases that we can fill up with whatever we like.

In the absence of having our tastes catechized by the biblical stories, we tend to fall back on whatever our sentiments dictate to us. In the early 21st century church, that generally means we’re falling prey to weapons-grade niceness. In our imaginations, being loving or kind means you would never say anything hard; gracious speech means nobody is ever offended. If someone is offended, that automatically means you’ve done something wrong.

But no. When grace incarnate walked among us, He regularly offended the respectable people. In a particular moment, “children of snakes!” was the kindest, most loving thing anybody could say to the Pharisees, and we know that because Jesus said it.

Go thou, and do likewise.

Comments Off on Beware the Abstract Nouns! | Controversies, Doctrinal Inconsistencies, Speaking as God Speaks | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Proposition on a Cross?

21 May 2024

We all agree that how one gets from ‘unbeliever’ to ‘believer’ is a critical question. But the question of precisely what one must believe…that can go really bad places if you get too tight-fisted about it. There are serious problems with demanding a single proposition that accounts for every person’s journey from the one category to the other.

1. It simply is not a question the Bible ever poses or answers.

2. No proposed “saving proposition” accounts for all the recorded conversions in Scripture — a fact which should register WAY more prominently in the content of saving faith (COSF) debates than it does. Read the latter chapters of Gordon Clark, Faith and Saving Faith for a good treatment of this.

3. The COSF question makes a significant category error. It assumes that getting the proposition right is what matters, and that’s incorrect. A proposition was not nailed to the cross for your sins; you’re not saved by faith in a proposition, you’re saved by a Person in whom you trust. The Bible–Jesus Himself, in fact–uses multiple propositions to elicit and support that faith. The proposition is a window, and it’s true enough that not every window points out at Jesus. But if the conversion accounts of Scripture itself are to be believed, there are many windows that do. The point is not to get the exact right window, as if there were only one; the point is to be looking through the window at Jesus.

2 Comments | Bare Minimum Gospel Foolishness, Controversies | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Far Better, and Far Simpler

11 October 2022

As simply as I can say it, the new birth is irreducibly relational; you are born again when you trust Jesus Christ to save you. There is no consistent reading even of John’s gospel, let alone the whole New Testament, that successfully presents a single proposition as the content of saving faith. The thing can be described in propositions to an extent, but it’s not actually a matter of subscribing to propositions. Propositions didn’t die for your sins; Jesus did.

Many people balk. “How does one have assurance?” they want to know. “What must I believe, to be sure that I am saved?”

Ah, my friend, if you’re thinking in terms of “what I believe,” you’re missing the point: it’s not “what,” but Who! It isn’t about “correct belief” or “fulfill[ing] the ‘belief’ condition.” The news is far better, and far simpler, than that.

This Jesus that we meet in (say) the pages of John’s gospel — He wants to save you, sacrificed everything to save you, and He means to see it done. You need not fret about fulfilling conditions or fussing about with propositions any more than you need fret about your insufficient moral merits. Rest assured, you are inadequate! Whether we’re talking about your morals or your theology, you are inadequate! The whole point is that Jesus met the conditions for you, and He will save you. He’s got you; your assurance comes from knowing that it’s Him that’s got you.

Theologically speaking, that’s sufficient. Practically, there’s another avenue as well. Eternal life just is knowing God (Jn. 17:3) and it’s not something you hope to get eventually, it’s something you have now (Jn. 5:24). Assurance naturally grows in the living of it. I have the paperwork to prove that Kimberly married me, but where do I get my day-by-day comfort and assurance that our relationship is what I think it is? Not from looking at the paperwork – what kind of relationship would that be? I am assured that I know Kimberly in the day-to-day living with her, and so it is here, because like a good marriage, eternal life is not having your papers in order; it is knowing a Person.

2 Comments | Bare Minimum Gospel Foolishness, Controversies, Meditations, Person/Proposition, The Free Grace Food Fight, Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Not Theological Safecracking

4 October 2022

In the past decade and a half in one particularly small pond, a whole lot of folks have spilled a whole lot of ink on the question of what, exactly, one has to believe in order to have everlasting life. Some folks favor a focus on the promise of eternal life itself; others prefer to focus on the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus; there’s debate about whether someone has to understand the deity of Christ; whether repentance is required (and what exactly repentance would mean in that context), and so on. Stacks of arguments have been exchanged, and–more’s the pity–not a few anathemas.

But the presumption of the whole debate is that there’s a magical Stack ‘O Propositions somewhere in the platonic aether: believe all the propositions, and “Achievement Unlocked!” A trumpet sounds in heaven, angels dance, and you’re saved; miss one, and you’re not there yet. The whole debate is just about what’s in that stack.

The whole debate is fundamentally wrongheaded. Propositions are necessary, but they’re not stained glass; they’re plate glass. You’re not meant to look at them, but through them, at Jesus. The evangelistic passages in Scripture are a series of windows in the same wall, with Jesus standing outside on the lawn waiting for you to look and live. Does it matter which window you look through? Start anywhere; look through them all eventually. Certainly they’re all profitable — we should be interested in looking at our Savior from every angle we can reach.

He, not the propositions, is the object of your faith. However defective you may be, however defective your theology may be, if He is the one you’re trusting, you will be saved. Conversely, however flawless your propositions, if in the end you’re trusting your theological acumen for assembling the right set, you are failing to grasp the heart of the gospel. Eternal life is knowing a person, not theological safecracking.

Now, to some people, “knowing a person” sounds hopelessly vague and subjective. And you know what? It is subjective! Knowing a person can’t be purely objective; there’s no way to take the personal element out of personal knowledge. But it isn’t vague.

When you know a person, you know that particular person. When you know Jesus, it’s Jesus that you know: a particular person, the one that John baptized and that turned water to wine and that died for your sins and rose from the grave and ascended to the Father’s right hand where He intercedes for you — that one, not not Frank or Harry or Susan or Hay-zoos the taco truck guy.

“Ah,” says the proposition-meister, “but all those are propositions about Jesus.”

Well, let me be the first to say duh. Again, propositions are windows. You look at Jesus. He’s the one you’re knowing. Peter got some of those propositions wrong, once upon a time. Argued with Jesus about whether He was going to die. He still knew Jesus, didn’t he?

So why does this concept of knowing a person feel so hopelessly vague to some people? I’d suggest it’s because they have a prior commitment to a philosophical construct wherein faith is defined as persuasion of a proposition, and can’t be conceived of in any other way. From that vantage point, talking about faith in a person is at best shorthand for an implicit proposition, and at worst hopelessly vague.

There’s two problems with that view. The first is that the Bible regularly talks about faith in a person. We can’t be critical of how God actually says things. The second problem is that there’s not necessarily a good reason to concede that philosophical construct.

Moreover, if we follow the proposition-hunting to its logical conclusion, it necessarily leads down a particular road. If saving faith is nothing but faith in a saving proposition, then what’s the “saving proposition”? That question can only take us to one of two places. Either we conclude with Gordon Clark that there appear to be multiple saving propositions, any one of which will suffice (an option Clark seems to have found embarrassing), or we end up in a bitter fight over various options that can’t be ruled out. The latter option has been rather thoroughly explored over the past decade and a half, and I think we can safely say it sucks. If you end up down a road where there’s only two forks, and both of them are wrong, then you took a wrong turn a ways back, didn’t ya?

The wrong turn was taking faith as merely propositional. Faith is irreducibly personal; saving faith is trusting the right Person to save you. “Believe in Jesus” is the precise statement; the various “believe that” statements are looking at the same Person through different windows.

2 Comments | Bare Minimum Gospel Foolishness, Meditations, Person/Proposition, The Free Grace Food Fight | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Parable of the Hats

13 July 2022

Once upon a time, a feller named Jack grew disturbed at the number of people running around without hats. Finding hats both useful and stylish, Jack set about to change the trend, to which end he founded the Hat Society “to promote the wearing of hats.” Jack worked hard at helping see the advantage of hats, and the Society grew to the point that they were running on a half-million dollars or so a year, all to promote hats. Now Jack himself had always worn a fedora, but at Hat Society meetings you could find cowboy hats, homburgs, berets, bowlers, baseball caps, tams, even a few propeller-topped beanies.  

Over time, that began to change. The propeller-topped beanies were the first to go, but they hadn’t done much for the dignity of hat-wearing, and nobody really missed them. The guys in berets and tams kinda disappeared a few at a time. A few years later, baseball caps began to get scarce, and that feller in the fishing hat with all the flies on it was asked to never come back. 

Fast-forward a few more years, and there’s an occasional cowboy hat around, but pretty much everybody at the meetings is wearing a fedora. Jack himself is maintaining that a dark fawn fedora is the perfect epitome of hat-ness, and he never wears anything else. At one point, this led to a confrontation between Jack and the board; Jack asked all the non-fedora-wearing board members to resign, which they did.

Some folks claim that back in the day, Jack used to sometimes wear a grey fedora. Others maintain that it was always dark fawn. Nobody seems able to prove it for sure either way, and most of the people who were around back then have long since left. Oddly, it’s not called the Fedora Society; it’s still the Hat Society, and the mission statement still reads “to promote the wearing of hats.” 

Now Jack may be within his rights to promote the dark fawn fedora, and perhaps even to use Society funds for the purpose. But he can’t really claim to speak for the community of hat-wearers anymore, can he? 

Comments Off on Parable of the Hats | Discernment, Parables, The Free Grace Food Fight | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Precisely Personal

21 September 2021

It’s been a good while since I wrote anything about the Free Grace Food Fight — for a long while, there didn’t seem to be much to say. Of late, I had occasion to interact with a GES ally, and found that the discourse has (and in some ways, hasn’t) shifted. The current presentation, according to him, looks something like this:

If these 3 things are true of a person then that person is saved no matter what misconception he may have or hold…

  1. The right vehicle for reception of the gift of God: faith
  2. In the right Person: Jesus of Nazareth
  3. For the purpose of receiving the benefit of His offer: eternal life.

If it’s the correct condition – faith – in the right Person – Jesus of Nazareth – for the benefit He offers – eternal life – then this man is saved no matter what misconceptions about reality he may have. Period.

This person has, with the divine needed precision, fulfilled the condition to receive everlasting life.

Compared to that simple and precise formulation, I’m told, my own position is imprecise and will lead people to doubt. I see two problems here.

First, the precision they think they have is largely an illusion. It looks pretty clean: three well-formed, carefully worded statements, and that’s that. All neoclassically bright and shiny; what could be the problem? The problem is that in order for those statements to convey the precise meaning they have in mind, the terms have to be defined. Chiefly: Who is this Jesus of Nazareth? Without a definition there, the statements don’t mean much, and once we start defining who exactly we mean by “Jesus of Nazareth,” we’ll find that the position is a bit more complicated than they’re letting on.

Second, my position only looks imprecise from that vantage point because they’ve committed a serious category error. I actually agree that the Bible has specified precisely what is required to receive eternal life. It’s right there in John 3:16: believe in Him.

The difference between us is that they think “believe in Him” is imprecise shorthand, and their three propositions define it more precisely. I do not agree. That position requires an unstated (and insupportable) premise: that faith is always and only assent to certain specific propositions. If that is the case, then we can quibble over the exact content of the propositions (and boy, have we!), but something like their position absolutely must be true.

However, the unstated premise is flawed. Faith is a fundamentally personal interaction that can be truly described in propositions but is not reducible to them. You trust in Jesus to save you; that’s all. What if you stole a candy bar or committed a murder? Trust in Jesus; He’s got it. What if you flunked a soteriology exam? Trust in Jesus; He’s got it. Even if it was that really short exam from Evangelism Explosion? Yes, even then. Trust in Jesus; He’s got you. What if I somehow trust Him wrong? He’s already planned for that. Trust in Jesus; He’s got you.

There is no precise mechanism. There is no mechanism at all. There is a Person, arms outstretched, ready to rescue anyone who calls to Him for help. “Believe in Him” means precisely what it says: trust in this Person, and He will save you. It is as simple as that.

In nearly 20 years of pastoral practice and nearly 40 years of evangelism, I do not find this message to be grounds for a lack of assurance.

3 Comments | Controversies, The Free Grace Food Fight | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

A Prescription for Free Grace Theology

8 June 2021

Any theology can become a dead ideology instead of a living knowledge of God. For some people, Free Grace theology has become that, and you can see it in their lack of love. But the problem is not universal, and I see that as a promising sign; therein lies my basic prescription. The Free Grace movement must internalize the truth of 1 Corinthians 13: without love, it is nothing. When it begins to genuinely love God and its brothers first, with everything else a distant second priority, then we’ll see real growth.

Where love revives the movement, we’ll see a shift toward service and mission. Many Free Grace people are admirably engaged in evangelism, missions, and discipleship already. What is lacking is for the Free Grace movement as a movement to become outward-facing. As the movement is able to receive and embody life from God, it will serve the broader Church beyond its borders, and in the process, it will recover a robust practice and doctrine of Church unity.

I have written much about unity elsewhere, so I won’t repeat it all here. I will just say that we should love one another and get along together for the sake of our mutual friend Jesus. In my experience, that leads to doing as much as we can in partnership with as many of Christ’s people as we can, across all the denominational boundaries. When God’s people obey in this way, we find that all the scattered branches of the Church have something to offer us, and we to them…and we’ll get a chance to both give and receive. (And you don’t need to be in a Free Grace church to do this, either.)

I expect this proposal to be met with skepticism, if not scorn. I am sure a multitude of theologians can advance armies of reasons why it can’t work. I am willing to hear the counter-arguments, but at the end of the day, I will answer them all with a Chinese proverb: “The man who says it can’t be done should not interrupt the man doing it.” I am already living the proposal I am making here. It can be done, and productively, too: I am far more productive for the cause of Christ now than I ever was in my sectarian days.

Comments Off on A Prescription for Free Grace Theology | Bare Minimum Gospel Foolishness, Controversies, Ecclesiology, The Free Grace Food Fight | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Getting the Questions Wrong

30 March 2021

Once upon a time, many moons ago, someone asked, “What’s the bare minimum that a person would need to believe in order to be saved?”

Some of us, myself among them, were silly enough to venture an answer to that question. I have since repented.

There are two problems with this question, one exegetical and one practical. The exegetical problem is that the Scriptures never answer the question directly, which makes it very difficult to substantiate a “Thus saith the Lord” answer — which, in this case, would be the only answer worth fighting over. An answer based on theological reasoning isn’t out of the question — logical consequence is fair game in theology — but difficult, in that it’s easy enough to put forth an answer, but very hard to rule out competing answers. Thus far, nobody’s in any danger of decisively winning that argument.

But the practical problem with the question is the real clincher: why would you want to give anybody the bare minimum? Where does the Bible suggest giving no extra? No matter what you think the bare minimum is, you will find very few, if any, biblical passages that present only your bare minimum content. Meanwhile, there will be many, many passages that present additional (from your perspective, “extra”) content, and even more damaging, a number of passages that leave out something you regard as essential.

But over here in the real world, we don’t aim to convert anybody to a minimum understanding. We want them to get all of Jesus that they possibly can. We want them to know Jesus, and the more of His word we can give them, the better.

4 Comments | Bare Minimum Gospel Foolishness, Controversies, The Free Grace Food Fight | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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