Given the late hour, and the drifting snow, I thought I would take a break from 7 Takes today and try to work out a thought that’s been percolating in the back of my mind all week—how empathetic should one be? And toward what kinds of people and what manner of tribulations?
You will know it’s a good, replete week of online content if I come to the end of it bothered and annoyed by what I’ve read, either because someone was right and I didn’t want them to be, or they were wrong and I wished I could have corrected them, but couldn’t, because I don’t know them personally. In my annoyance, yesterday, at Mr. Bump of the Washington Post, who took up the hue and cry that the real problem with our society—if that’s what you want to call it—is people looking for information but getting sucked into disinformation, I fell into bitter recriminations. I fear that I began to think of the American public as victimized by its social media overlords. The American public wants to be good, I thought, but they can’t, because of Mark Zuckerberg and the World Economic Forum.
The trouble is, only half of that thought is true. It is correct, I think, to say that the poor rube wandering around on Google is being victimized to one degree or another by people with money, power, and an anti-human agenda that privileges the earth over the people who live there. The global elite who gather to solve the world’s problems in Davos are trying to be good, as far as they can understand that sort of thing, but, I think, they are unwittingly the handmaidens of darkness. Fixing the problems they themselves have created means destroying the lives and livelihoods of people with no money and no power and, therefore, no say. In the realm of social media, it is not too much to say that ordinary people are finding their spiritual lives destroyed by having to use the internet to get at the necessary goods of life. Whether or not anyone is acting with good intentions, or for nefarious reasons is beside the point. Indeed, Mr. Zuckerberg is probably trying to be good.
So, I was half right to be annoyed with Mr. Bump. Some people are victimized by other people. The bit where I was wrong was to take up the cause as if that were the whole story, and then amass all my empathy on the side of the little guy. The little guy isn’t good either. No one is good.
That’s an upsetting thing to admit, of course. We all want to be good. I don’t know of a single person who wakes up in the morning intending to be bad—I suppose some people might, after a long, hard commitment to doing evil, think consciously contemplate the falling snow and then say to themselves, ‘I will do the wrong thing on purpose.’ More usually, human evil slips in, unawares, as we try to do good and get good outcomes on our own without reference to the judge and measure of goodness—God. Here’s the great irony, though. Trying to find what is good without God is the worst evil, and because we are all committed to evicting God from the world he has made, we are all bad together. It’s the only real “we” out there—people trying to do good things without the source of goodness involved in any way.
I don’t expect anyone at the World Economic Forum to know this. Their overweening commitment to their own goodness is grotesque to observe, and entertaining, but it isn’t surprising or even that alarming. The Lord in Heaven laughs as they sit uncomfortably in their white plastic chairs and the shaman performs breathing exercises over their heads, indwelling them with Satan, probably.
This brings me to the second point of my irritation. I shouldn’t be annoyed at Mr. Bump of the Washington Post, he can’t help it. But please tell me it is fine to be seriously annoyed with professing Christians for not aligning their emotional experiences of empathy more closely with this basic truth that is communicated so clearly and directly all through the Scriptures—no one is good except for God alone.
As usual, I don’t want to incriminate the guilty, and so will describe what I mean in the vaguest possible terms. Essentially, there were a couple of blog posts and a slew of tweets this week that annoyed me. The blog posts functioned as lamentations over the victimization of others. The tweets purported to want to understand why some people who profess to be Christian still plan to vote for Trump. The authors of both were in the evangelical realm and, if not actually deconstructing, appear to be headed in that direction. They all shared several points in common that I think are misguided, if not theologically dangerous.
First, they all lacked an emotional appreciation for the nature of sin. Classically, the posture of the Christian towards herself and toward others is from the lived experience of being a sinner. You see what God requires of his creatures, observe that you have not met any of the requirements, feel terrible about it, and go to God with the problem. ‘Oh no!’ you say, ‘I’m a bad person! What am I to do?’ When you encounter evil in other people, you may want to make excuses and be patient and merciful, of course, but you don’t ever have to call what is evil good. When your three-year-old is pitching a fit, you don’t have to tell everyone that he’s literally Jesus’ little sunbeam as he’s screaming his head off. You are free to admit that he is a sinner and needs to be forgiven for his sins. It feels pedantic to say it, but sin is bad—really really bad. Bad enough to send you to hell.
Second, because these content producers lack a doctrine, or knowledge, or even a vague idea of the pervasiveness and perversity of sin and evil in the hearts of human people, when they come to the Biblical text on the one hand, and other Christians on the other, they fall into and spin around in little whirlpools of their own virtue. Instead of everybody being bad, God being good, and God having mercy through the cross, they begin to divide the world into good people, bad people, and an unknowable and arbitrary God whose cross is an insufficient balm for the miseries and ruin of sin.
Third, there’s no end to the personal virtue spin cycle. And as it spins, it grows into a miasma of empathy. Empathy isn’t bad, I suppose. If you want to walk a mile in my shoes you could try, I guess, as a way of understanding what’s wrong with me. But you’ll have a hard time because my feet are unusually small and none of my shoes fit any other person. Also, what would I gain? You wouldn’t really know me better because you’d still be projecting your feelings about yourself over mine. It will make you feel better but do nothing to help me. Whereas, if you were to exercise mercy, or compassion, or patience towards me, you wouldn’t get sucked into my troubles. We would still be two distinct people who didn’t have to live rent-free in each other’s heads. I would still be responsible before God for all my sins and you likewise. We could pray for each other, feel grief on each other’s behalf, and help each other with acts of material help. We could also have coffee and commiserate. But you wouldn’t have to defend your own goodness by making me into an innocent victim.
Fourth, when empathy is overgrown and misdirected, there must be something to balance it—a villain. There can’t only be a lot of good and innocent victims on one hand. The other hand requires the baddie who caused all the badness. And so the proverbial sheep are separated from the goats, not by their acceptance of Jesus, but rather by personal judgments about the relative evils perceived to be enacted against alleged victims. Instead of God being a judge, we have competing measures of certain populations of people, or individuals, who do things that remove “them” from the “we,” the corporate human family of sinners.
Finally, it is but a step from judging people and separating them into groups according to my own personal sense of what is good and what is evil, to then judging God and discovering that he does not care enough for the pains and traumas of people I most care about. God has shown himself unable to care for his people—his innocent people—who are suffering horrors such as ought not to be. Can he then be good? Questions of this sort may not be explicitly uttered, but they lurk at the heart of so many of the attempts of too many Christians to read the biblical text. The end result is deconstruction because the assumption of human innocence is the pathway for rejecting the goodness of God. As soon as all your empathies lie on the side of the human victim, your heart becomes too clouded to understand what the cross is trying to say. You might end up feeling sorrier for Judas than Jesus if you’re not careful.
Circle of Jan Gossaert - THE BETRAYAL OF CHRIST - Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
At the very least overweening empathy has brought into full flower the cacophonous and rancorous tenor of Christian “discourse” in the last ten years. Those preaching the traditional gospel—of the sinner needing to repent and accept the salvation offered by Jesus on the cross or else be separated from him forever, even if that sinner isn’t literally Hitler, but just never came to the point of forging someone a grave injury, and decided to be bitter instead, and never trusted Jesus for the forgiveness of her own sins—are turning into the enemies of “Good Christians” who know how everyone should vote and how everyone should feel.
Whereas, the way of peace is the way of the cross. Every single person looks at the only innocent person who ever lived—Jesus—and acknowledges that his ways are higher and grander and more glorious than some paltry empathy that has no power to save, but only to condemn.
So anyway, have a nice weekend!
"But please tell me it is fine to be seriously annoyed with professing Christians for not aligning their emotional experiences of empathy more closely with this basic truth that is communicated so clearly and directly all through the Scriptures—no one is good except for God alone."
Yes, it is perfectly fine.
One of the perks of being a Calvinist is that I never have had to make a post lamenting that "I'm losing my faith in humanity!" Because I never had any to lose.
Very meaty reading Anne. Wish I could find a local church that challenges me spiritually as much as this did. Not meant to puff you up but more to reinforce that I for one so appreciate your honest and self reflection on living as a Christ- centered Christian in the current cultural river of finding and identifying a side to align oneself with. I’m ok with being a sick sinner and living daily for the forgiveness and bread of life in seeking Christ and hopefully bringing others along with me to see Christ as the answer for all that makes us do that which we don’t want and seeking to do that which we do want in identifying and living in Christ.