‘Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you’ll be a mile away and have his shoes.’ (Steve Martin)

An easterly wind is blowing across the Pacific and blowing dust into some Aussie churches. From Moscow to Queensland, there is a mood swirling about that believes what we need today is a strong Christianity that will defeat the hoards of hell. Weakness is to be blamed for the status quo and to save the day we need a particular masculine-styled Christianity. Out with gentle Jesus, bring in Excalibur Jesus!

Of course, we don’t want to be reductionist and suggest that the Christ who is gentle and kind is not also awesome in power and the judge of the world. He is both the God of mercy and the God of justice. 

There is an emerging vigilante approach to Gospel ministry and mission which is, I contend, as big a problem as the spiritual and moral hopelessness it claims to be redeeming. 

And before the bros throw around their customary innuendos, I learnt to shoot when I was 10, I know from experience how to chase down a thief and stand up to a violent man, 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; so you can stick your manly verbiage in your salad!

Some of the masculine talking and taunting that’s coming out of the United States and sprouting in certain ecclesial Aussie backyards, isn’t  complementarianism and therefore not biblical. It’s two versions of a gender culture war playing ping pong against each other, and unfortunately using the church as the table.

If you don’t believe me, Neil Shenvi yesterday sent a test balloon on X, 

 “If a man were described as kind, gentle, patient, loving, peaceful, joyful, good, and faithful, large segments of Twitter would call him effeminate.”

With the surprise of learning that sea water contains salt, Shenvi is right.

This supposed muscular Christianity found recent expression on the Al Mohler show when Al Mohler interviewed Joe Rigney for his book, ‘the Sin of Empathy’.

Over the years, I have appreciated some of what Al Mohler has said and stood for. This, not so much.

No, I haven’t read Rigney’s book, and I have little desire to do so. Rigney has however, expressed his ideas in this interview, and so presumably he agrees with his own words to Al Mohler. In short, Rigney’s thesis is that empathy is sinful and responsible for churches losing their way today.

Rigney’s complaint is that churches are guilty of the sin of empathy,

“There is a reason that the empathetic sex that women are barred from the pastoral office, they were barred from the priestly office in the Old Testament for the same reason. Because priests and pastors, 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. And therefore the sex that is bent and wired towards care, nurture, compassion and empathy is ill-suited to that role. So it’s no surprise that in a culture that has become dominated by feminism, it’s deep in the American system at this point, that in that same timeframe, you would have an outbreak of empathy that would become the steering wheel by which every institution is hijacked.”

In other words,  empathy is a problem because it’s a trait found in women, and permitting that leads to the slippery slope of feminism and last stop, hell. 

No doubt, many readers will find this as problematic as do I, not least because it smacks of misogyny.

Rigney is convinced that the slippery slope of liberalism clambers back to a weak Christianity that is too sympathetic (by which he means, to feminine)

“Every church faces some version of this kind of pressure to have women in the room where it happens to let them make, let’s have them in the room, let’s have them making decisions. We won’t call them pastors, at least initially, but once you started down that road, you’ve effectively seeded 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 complimentarian thread that’s trying to hold up an egalitarian boulder, and it will not hold in the long run.”

Mohler has also bought into this line of thinking, 

“No, and the argument about hermeneutics is I think amply, tragically demonstrable. I don’t know of a single body that has genuinely affirmed women in the pulpit that has not eventually affirmed the LGBTQ revolution. Because if you can take the plain teachings of Scripture, and by the way, reflected all the way through creation order, and you can deny that when it comes to a woman as a pastor of a church, and it’s not that women don’t have many of the gifts, it’s that women, it’s ontologically forbidden by scripture.”

The problem with those statements is that it’s not necessarily true. The slippery slope argument is sometimes real and other times not. Now, before you suggest that I’m some wet slippery progressive who’s drinking the cool-aid, I’m writing as a convinced complementarian and someone who has expressed concerns about current gender ideologies, such that it’s made front page news on major newspapers. The reality is, there are different hermeneutical grids among egalitarians. Not all egalitarians are identical. There are some who hold to a theological framework that does slide into gender fluidity and adopting the latest cultural norms of sex and gender, and there are others whose theological convictions do not permit the slide. 

Take Mike Bird for example. Rigney said of Bird this week,

“This comment is particularly funny coming out of a decade or more in which feminism, wokeness, and soft-pedaling sodomy infiltrated the SBC, the PCA, and other conservative evangelical contexts. That’s who I wrote it for.”

yeah, nah. Mike Bird is egalitarian. He’s wrong on this one (and I still love him) but I also know he has a robust anthropology that will not let him fall down into gender relativity or matters like same sex marriage. 

The thing is, we don’t advocate for what is and has been the norm among Christian churches throughout its history by adorning men with a 6 pack and rifle slung over the shoulder and making them sound more gruff. Be more Christlike. Be more Biblical, not less.

How does this sin of empathy square with Christ who is our empathetic High Priest? At the very least, Rigney’s interview causes us to cast doubts over or to explain away Bible statements like Hebrews 4:15,

 “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)

In his commentary on Hebrews, Paul Ellingworth paraphrases, “Our high priest can feel with us in our weaknesses, because he has been tempted in all respects as we are…”

The verb συμπαθῆσαι and its cognates, as Ellingworth notes, “are used most often of family affection”.  Peter O’Brien explains, “the verb rendered empathize was used of a bond similar to a mother’s feeling for her children or one brother’s feeling for another.”

Peter O’ Brien notes, “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”. 

If that’s too much empathy for you, let’s bring in a Puritan, Thomas Goodwin,

“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.”

Al Mohler suggested in the interview that empathy is a 20th Century concept. Goodwin and Hebrews suggests that’s not the case. What’s more likely is that the division between sympathy and empathy is a 20th Century construct.

Can empathy be problematic? Sure, 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. That doesn’t mean empathy is the sin of our age; the church doesn’t need less empathy, but more.

Some Christian men have the impression that being ferocious like is Jesus is good, whereas showing the gentleness of Jesus somehow inhibits our masculinity and church steadfastness. Everyone wants to be Jesus overthrowing tables and using a whip in the Temple. They love to argue online and are quick to jump on others. Strength and power and angry tone is just as dangerous a foe to Christian vitality as those more gentle of virtues when separated from the Spirit.. Besides, real masculinity does not deny strength or power, 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 mysogony, think again.

Let’s remember the Apostle Paul who rebuked the Corinthians for their liking of strength and power,

‘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.’

This is part of the problem with this neo-masculine movement. It doesn’t want weakness and it derides anything that appears ‘effeminate’. If you think empathy is a sign of weakness, I suggest you take that up with our High Priest. 

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April 10 Update: Read Dani Treweek’s excellent and detailed review of Joe Rigney’s ‘Sin of empathy’ over at Mereorthodoxy https://mereorthodoxy.com/sin-of-empathy-joe-rigney-book-review