In polarizing times, we need more and better relational exegesis.

In our families, churches, or neighborhoods; in political discussions, situations of accused abuse, or racially charged conversations; we need robust compassion wed with relational exegesis.

Choosing compassion or exegesis is choosing a hand or arm. Imagine feeling a compassionate, sympathetic gut-level urge to help a daughter who was dumped, an ethnically misunderstood friend, an accused pastor friend, or an abused congregant friend. Wonderful! And (not “But”) how do you know precisely what would truly help? How do you gain particularized insights for this person or these persons in such a messy situation so that your compassionate urges and actions are wed with appropriate wisdom?

The answer is relational exegesis. There is a well-established name for this. Empathy.

1. Empathy as Relational Exegesis

I’m blessed to train pastors and teachers in the Majority World who have little or no access to theological education. In our curriculum, we include these core aspects of biblical exegesis:

1. Understand: Find and truly understand the author’s point—his cognitive point—getting into his mental shoes (or sandals), so to speak.
2. Resonate: Be attuned to and even resonate with the author’s emotions—his affective punch—such as feeling David’s or Paul’s desperation or joy or anger or comfort or disgust or hope, which are inextricably wed with how and why they write.
3. Self-Differentiate: Conduct these explorations while maintaining some sense of distinctiveness, knowing we cannot simplistically apply the author’s cognitive point and affective punch immediately to our own lives, context, and people. God intentionally governs the times, places, languages, cultures, technologies, etc. between his text and us. (As others say, you’ll need to “exegete” your audience too.)

The author’s (cognitive) point. The author’s (affective) punch. Your distinctiveness. Understand, resonate, self-differentiate. This rhythmic mantra captures the heart of exegesis.

Shift to empathy. General summaries of empathy say something like understanding and sharing the emotions and perspectives of others. Such are rightly directed but simplistic.

Jean Decety, a leading empathy scholar for four decades, often writes about “the affective, cognitive, and regulatory aspects of empathy.”¹Jean Decety, “The Neurodevelopment of Empathy in Humans,” Developmental Neuroscience 32.4 (2010): 260 (italics added). Below, italics are added unless otherwise noted. He and Philip Jackson explain:

Empathy is a complex form of psychological inference in which observation, memory, knowledge, and reasoning are combined to yield insights into the thoughts and feelings of others…. There are many definitions of empathy, almost as many as there are researchers in this field…. But regardless of the particular terminology that is used, there is broad agreement on three primary components: (a) an affective response to another person, which often, but not always, entails sharing that person’s emotional state; (b) a cognitive capacity to take the perspective of the other person; and (c) some regulatory mechanisms that keep track of the origins of self- and other-feelings.²Jean Decety and Philip Jackson, “The Functional Architecture of Human Empathy,” Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience 3 (2004): 73. Self-regulated self-differentiation is now a standard aspect of empathy, so researchers explore dynamics of how “the regulatory mechanisms of empathy” interact with each other and affective and cognitive dynamics: see Ke Jia and Xiuli Liu, “Regulating Empathy: Exploring the Process through Agents and Strategies,” Promotion 25.12 (2023), 1265–85; cf. Nicholas Thompson, Carien van Reekum, Bhismadev Chakrabarti, “Cognitive and Affective Empathy Relate Differentially to Emotion Regulation,” Affective Science 3.1 (2022): 118–34; Shannon Spaulding, Rita Svetlova, and Hannah Read, “The Nature of Empathy,” in Neuroscience and Philosophy, ed. Felipe De Brigard and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022). Spaulding, Svetlova, and Read not only discuss affective, cognitive, and motivational aspects, but also engage the self-regulated self-differentiation of empathy.

Empathy “yield[s] insights into the thoughts and feelings of others”—i.e., relational exegesis. More specifically, empathy involves the same three exegetical aspects as above!

Decety and Jackson’s “broad agreement” was noted in 2004. In 2021, Jakob Eklund and Martina Meranius analyzed fifty-two review articles from 1980 through 2019 on the state of empathy studies. Though “most articles and books about empathy begin by claiming that there is far from a consensus on how empathy is to be defined,” nevertheless there is “a developing consensus among neuroscientists, psychologists, medical scientists, nursing scientists, philosophers, and others that empathy involves understanding, feeling, sharing, and self-other differentiation.”³Jakob Eklund and Martina Meranius, “Toward a Consensus on the Nature of Empathy: A Review of Reviews,” Patient Education and Counseling 104.2 (2021): 300.

Eklund and Meranius’s “understanding” and “self-other differentiation” align with Decety and Jackson’s “cognitive capacity” and “regulatory mechanisms that keep track of the origins of self- and other-feelings,”⁴Cf. Benjamin Cuff, Sarah J. Brown, Laura Taylor, and Douglas J. Howat, “Empathy: A Review of the Concept,” Emotion Review 8.2 (2016): 144–53; Amy Coplan, “Will the Real Empathy Please Stand Up? A Case for a Narrow Conceptualization,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 Supp. (2011): 40–65; Jean Decety and Meghan Meyer, “From Emotion Resonance to Empathic Understanding: A Social Developmental Neuroscience Account,” Development and Psychopathology 20.4 (2008): 1053–80; Suzanne White, “Empathy: A Literature Review and Concept Analysis,” Journal of Clinical Nursing 6.4 (2007): 253–57; John Deigh, “Empathy and Universalizability,” Ethics 105 (1995): 743–63. respectively. But Eklund and Meranius separate “feeling” another person’s world from “sharing” it, while Decety and Jackson combined those under “affective response to another person” since the affective aspect of empathy “often, but not always, entails sharing that person’s emotional state.” The third primary component of empathy—self-regulated self-differentiation—may be the least known among laypeople. But at least since the 1940s, empathy researchers have observed that empathy itself involves the connected aspects of self-regulation of one’s own emotions and self-differentiation from the other’s experiences.⁵For a tiny sample cf. Nicholas Thompson et al., “Empathy and Emotion Regulation: An Integrative Account,” Progress in Brain Research 247 (2019): 273–304; Judith Hall and Rachel Schwartz, “Empathy Present and Future,” Journal of Social Psychology 159.3 (2018): 225–43, esp. 235; Buffel du Vaure et al., “Promoting empathy among medical students: A two-side randomized controlled study,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research 103 (2017): 102–07; Robert Eres et al., “Individual Differences in Local Gray Matter Density Are Associated with Differences in Affective and Cognitive Empathy,” NeuroImage 117 (2015): 305–10; Arnaud Carré et al., “The Basic Empathy Scale in Adults (BES-A): Factor Structure of a Revised Form,” Psychological Assessment 25 (2013): 679–91; Jean Decety and Margarita Svetlova, “Putting Together Phylogenetic and Ontogenetic Perspectives on Empathy,” Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 2.1 (2012): 1–24; Hannah Bayne, “Training medical students in empathic communication,” Journal for Specialists in Group Work 36 (2011): 316–29; Decety and Meyer, “From emotion,” 1053–80; Jean Decety and Sara Hodges, “The Social Neuroscience of Empathy,” in Bridging social psychology: Benefits of transdisciplinary approaches, ed. Paul Van Lange (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 103–09; William Ickes, Everyday Mind Reading (New York: Prometheus, 2003); Nancy Eisenberg, “Emotion, Regulation, and Moral Development,” Annual Review in Psychology 51 (2000): 665–97; Sara Hodges and Daniel Wegner, “Automatic and Controlled Empathy,” in Empathic Accuracy, ed. William Ickes (New York: Guilford, 1997), 311–39; Mark Davis, Empathy: a Social Psychological Approach (Westview, 1996); Daniel Batson, “Empathic Joy and the Empathy-altruism Hypothesis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61 (1991): 413–26; Batson, The Altruism Question: Toward a Social-Psychological Answer (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991); Carl Rogers, “The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change,” Journal of Consulting Psychology 21.2 (1957): 95–103; Theodor Reik, Listening with the Third Ear: The Inner Experience of the Psychoanalyst (New York: Grove, 1949). Reik’s fourth aspect of empathy, “detachment,” regards withdrawing from affective and cognitive exploration to engage in “detached” reasoning processes in order to better help.

My heuristic tripartite summary of exegesis can be applied to empathy:

1. Understand: Find and truly understand the other’s point—his or her cognitive point.
2. Resonate: Be attuned to and even resonate with the other’s emotions—his or her affective punch.
3. Self-Differentiate: Conduct these cognitive and affective explorations while maintaining clear distinctiveness, knowing that you are under no obligation to identify the other person’s thoughts or emotions as your own or as right. God created you as different—connected, but different—people, and his truth is bigger than any of us fully recognize.

The other’s (cognitive) point. The other’s (affective) punch. Your distinctiveness. Understand, resonate, self-differentiate. This rhythmic mantra captures the heart of empathy.

2. Is There a Problem with “Empathy”?

In his recent book, The Sin of Empathy,⁶Joe Rigney, The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits (Moscow, ID: Canon, 2024). Citations of The Sin of Empathy are indicated in the body of the article. my friend and former colleague Joe Rigney appears to be waging war on empathy. He is not. He just thinks he is. (Sort of.)

2.1. Is Empathy Itself the Problem?

Rigney explains:

Pity, of course, is a good thing…. But unmoored from what is good and right, pity becomes destructive. Compassion degenerates into untethered empathy, leaving destruction in its wake. And given the prevalence of appeals to empathy in our society, it is vital that we learn to distinguish good from bad, healthy from toxic, the virtue of compassion from the sin of empathy. (p. xiv)

Let’s exegete Rigney. Here he includes no category of good (tethered) empathy such that it (rather than compassion) could degenerate into “untethered empathy.” (Unless Rigney is conflating good empathy into compassion without saying so, which would be problematic.) Instead, his wording easily suggests that empathy is merely debased compassion and by nature untethered. Instead of distinguishing virtuous from sinful forms of empathy, Rigney constructs a dichotomy between “the virtue of compassion” (“compassion the virtue”?) versus “the sin of empathy” (“empathy the sin”?) and implies that empathy is merely a counterfeit of compassion.

Rigney recently clarified that he does “prefer,” thinks it “best,” to use “sympathy and compassion for the virtue and empathy for the corruption.”⁷Joe Rigney, “Once More Unto the Empathetic Breach,” American Reformer, 7 May 2025, https://americanreformer.org/2025/05/once-more-unto-the-empathetic-breach/ And it shows:

The world has sought to give compassion an upgrade, to improve it and make it more loving. Enter empathy (“All rise”). This book is about that shift—the shift from compassion to empathy—and how it wreaks havoc on families, churches, relationships, and societies. (The Sin of Empathy, xix)

The argument of this book is that the shift from “with” to “in” [regarding the shift in Heb. 4:15 NIV from Christ sympathizing, “suffering with,” to empathizing, “suffering in”] is of more than philological importance. At stake is the difference between virtue and vice, goodness and sin. (p. 2)

A deficiency of compassion is apathy…. On the other hand, empathy is an excess of compassion, when our identification with and sharing of the emotions of others overwhelms our minds and sweeps us off our feet. Empathy loses sight of the ultimate good, both for ourselves and for the hurting. (p. 14; cf. pp. 31, 89)

Yet in the foreword Rosaria Butterfield claims, “Joe Rigney is not against empathy” (p. x). I chuckled. But something else is going on.

2.2. Defining “Empathy”

Remember, empathy according to the myriad scholars who study it involves understanding, resonating, self-differentiating. When Butterfield says Rigney is “not against empathy,” she’s defining it as “the ability to appreciate and respect the feelings of another” (p. x). While terribly truncated, that is a sliver within empathy’s affective aspect.

Rigney, though, specifies two ways he will use “empathy” in his book:

[I]n this book, I will use the term “empathy” in one of two ways. The first is simply as “emotion-sharing.” Emotion-sharing in itself is neither virtuous nor vicious. It’s simply a common feature of human relationships. In this sense, it is a natural emotion, and not necessarily a virtue.⁸Closing the parallelism would be balanced: “neither virtuous nor vicious … not necessarily a virtue [or a vice].”

The second and more negative use is the sin of (untethered) empathy, which is the excessive and overpowering form of this passion. (p. 12)

In relation to the ABCs of empathy—(a) an affective response, (b) a cognitive capacity, and (c) some regulatory mechanisms—Rigney’s definitions fail badly:

• In Rigney’s first definition, he truncates (a) into only emotion-sharing (which is often part of affective empathy but not always), and he deletes (b) completely. (This helps Rigney’s agenda against emotions trumping reason—see below.)
• In Rigney’s second definition, by far his predominant one (49 to 1), he presents the contradiction of (c).

Rigney doesn’t mind truncating, deleting, and contradicting empathy research when defining empathy, and we’ll explore why in §3. For now, observe a quirk in Rigney’s book.

2.3. Inadvertently Commending Proper Empathy

Set aside for a moment Rigney’s rhetorical patterns, definitions, and main use of “empathy” (§2.1–2). Notice in Table 1 that throughout his book, Rigney actually commends each primary component of empathy.

Table 1: Three Elements of Empathy that Rigney Commends

Empathy Researchers	Rigney in The Sin of Empathy
(a) an affective response to another person, which often, but not always, entails sharing that person’s emotional state;	“It’s good to feel the same emotions as other people—to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice (Rom. 12:15)” (p. 7, which Rigney recognizes as part of empathy, cf. p. 5). And “this is a God-given blessing… vicariously experiencing the emotions of another—can be a wonderful thing in its place. It fosters connection and bonding” (pp. 79–80, there called “empathy”; cf. pp. 12, 104).
(b) a cognitive capacity to take the perspective of the other person;	“It’s good to try to understand others, to see things from their point of view, to recognize their ‘felt reality’” (p. 7, which Rigney recognizes as part of empathy, cf. p. 5).
(c) some regulatory mechanisms that keep track of the origins of self- and other-feelings; the self-regulation of one’s own emotions and the connected self-differentiation from the other’s emotions, experiences, perspectives.	One of Rigney’s main drives in this book is to help people “cultivate the moral strength and stamina to resist the inevitable emotional sabotage and manipulation while offering true care and compassion” (p. 100), which is only possible through “self-definition and self-regulation” (pp. 32–33). “Such differentiation and self-regulation on our part enables us to then rightly feel for others, care for others, identify with others, and respond to others” (p. 35).

This observation is for uncritical readers—that is, those who will uncritically swallow Rigney’s perspective and those who will uncritically spew out everything Rigney’s writes. Notice: it is good—even according to Rigney—to understand, resonate, and self-differentiate. Rigney (unwittingly) commends true empathy.

But, yes, questions of authorial intent enter here. What exactly is Rigney trying to say?

2.4. The Importance of Self-Regulated Self-Differentiation

Rigney is against emotional manipulation (pp. xiv, 23, 28, 61). But the main thing Rigney critiques is being emotionally manipulated, i.e., having or practicing certain qualities that make it easy for people to emotionally manipulate you (and others through you).

Specifically, Rigney critiques “identifying with” and “sharing the emotions” of others to such an extent that the mind becomes overwhelmed (p. 14). In Butterfield’s words, Rigney takes issue with “an emotive connection that exceeds and overpowers reality and good judgment” (p. x; cf. pp. 32–34, 61–62, 72, 75, 99). Rigney says he’s against “a concern for the hurting and vulnerable that is unmoored from truth, goodness, and reality” (p. 77; cf. pp. 91, 98).

As noted in Table 1, Rigney recognizes that resistance and thus proper care is virtually impossible for someone with poor or no “self-definition and self-regulation” (pp. 32–33). Rather, “such differentiation and self-regulation on our part enables us to then rightly feel for others, care for others, identify with others, and respond to others” (p. 35).⁹These four italicized aspects are closely associated with Rigney’s four points of compassion (see pp. 104–5). That is:

Ensuring that our feelings are directed in the right place requires that we maintain the appropriate emotional boundaries so that we can think clearly and rightly about our particular situation. In other words, compassion, with its insistence on self-differentiation and concern for long-term good, is what is needed. (p. 39)

Recite Rigney’s quote again, but with one tweak: “In other words, [proper empathy], with its insistence on self-differentiation and concern for long-term good,¹⁰Empathy is oriented toward long-term good, even enabling practical activity toward such: see §§2.3 and 3.1–2 of Jonathan Worthington, “Navigating Empathy,” Themelios 46.3 (2021): 503-21. is what is needed.”

That would resonate with empathy researchers, who regularly put forward two related points. First, being swallowed by someone else’s emotions and simply swallowing their perspective of their own experience are:

• “dysfunctionality in the face of others’ emotions,”
• “maladaptive traits,” and even
• “neurotic tendencies.”¹¹Hall and Schwartz, “Empathy Present and Future,” 230. Interestingly, Hall and Schwartz are two of the three empathy scholars Rigney cites (The Sin of Empathy, 2–5).

Yikes! Don’t do that, please—say empathy researchers. Rigney unwittingly stands with empathy scholars in this. (His unwittingness is due to a fundamental error in his approach to the research—see §3 below.)

Second, empathy scholars regularly and explicitly state that such relational malpractices—i.e., losing one’s sense of truth and self in another—are not only maladaptive and not part of empathy, but oppose a key aspect of empathy.

The wealth of empathy resources is at Rigney’s disposal, but he contents himself with using the term “empathy” to critique maladaptive, neurotic, anti-empathic interpersonal malpractices. C. S. Lewis even calls Rigney’s type of rhetoric “dangerous.” It’s like when the bastardized¹²Cambridge Dictionary explains “to bastardize” as “to change something in a way that makes it fail to represent the values and qualities that it is intended to represent” (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/bastardize). version of mercy (which has been corrupted to become un-merciful)¹³C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on THeology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper, reprint ed. (New York: HarperOne, 1994), 326–27; see Rigney, The Sin of Empathy, 44–45, 121–22. or the bastardized version of love (which has “cease[d] to be love” and is now actually “a complicated form of hatred”—Rigney’s words, p. 18)¹⁴C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, reprint ed. (New York: HarperOne, 2017). are nevertheless still called the same name as the beautiful thing—at which point they are “all the more dangerous.”

Rigney himself says “As with mercy, so with empathy” (p. 45), yet he doesn’t follow through with Lewis’s perspective. Because for Rigney, while love can be changed to become un-love (even hatred), and while mercy can be changed to become un-mercy, empathy becomes…“the sin of empathy.” Why not un-empathy?

Rigney’s rhetoric is “dangerous” not least because it will turn people against real empathy—which he commends (Table 1 above)!—and against the dysfunctional, un-empathic counterfeits of losing oneself and truth in another. A more accurate title, which simultaneously doffs the hat to C. S. Lewis, would be The Sin of Un-Empathy.

2.5. Exiling “Empathy” to Corruption Reveals Two Lacks

Rigney wants “to use sympathy and compassion for the virtue and empathy for the corruption,”¹⁵Rigney, “Once More.” but in his book he still uses “empathy” in a not-quite-wholly negative way. Why?

I’ve attempted to create room for those different contexts (popular vs. medical vs. academic) and for those who wish to continue to use the term “empathy” to refer to “compassion that is tethered to truth.”¹⁶Rigney, “Once More.”

This shows two significant lacks that need to be addressed.

First, this shows a lack of understanding regarding how academic studies should contribute to lay understanding. Creating silos for “empathy” (popular vs. medical vs. academic) is like expelling the academic study of Biblical Theology from how pastors and other laypersons use that term or concept.

Second, creating room for using “empathy” to refer to “compassion that is tethered to truth” shows a lack of awareness of the richness of empathy as relational exegesis. Empathy and compassion are an arm and a hand, functioning best when working together and not usurping the other’s gifting. Both lacks will now be addressed.

3. Empathy “Properly” Understood and Applied

Some readers will have long since pulled their retorts out of their holsters and pointed them at my use of proper, real, and true empathy.

3.1. Is There a “Proper” Understanding of Empathy?

But wait! some will say. How can you say “empathy properly understood”? Haven’t you read Rigney’s statements: “the term has no agreed-upon definition” among scholars (p. 4); “there is so little agreement about its proper definition” (p.5); “there is no single, standard definition of empathy” (p. 120)? He even quotes “a leading psychology professor in Scientific American” saying scholars don’t agree (pp.2–3)!”

Rigney takes the “challenge of definition” (pp. 2–5) as freedom to define “empathy” how he wants to use it. After all, Rigney explains, he’s “concerned first and foremost” with the use of “empathy,” “not with the ‘true’ definition” (p. xx; cf. pp. 5–6, 120).¹⁷This is from Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (New York: Seabury, 2007), 137. This is a destructive false dichotomy; Christians are better equipped to confront popular “uses” precisely by being sound and robust in definition and understanding. But Rigney thinks that if he is “careful” to clarify what he means (p. 120; cf. p. 12), then the admittedly different pop-culture version is fair game since researchers can’t agree anyway—right? No.

3.2. Lack of a Standard Definition Does Not Mean There Are No Patterns

Rigney has (misunderstood and therefore) misrepresented how academic research works. From there he launches into irresponsible thinking and damaging rhetoric.

For instance, take Rigney’s “leading psychology professor” (sic), Judith Hall and Mark Leary, in their 2020 opinion piece, “The U.S. Has an Empathy Deficit.” He quotes:

Empathy is a fundamentally squishy term. Like many broad and complicated concepts, empathy can mean many things. Even the researchers who study it do not always say what they mean, or measure empathy in the same way in their studies—and they definitely do not agree on a definition. In fact, there are stark contradictions: what one researcher calls empathy is not empathy to another.¹⁸Judith Hall and Mark Leary, “The U.S. Has an Empathy Deficit,” Scientific American, 17 September 2020, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-us-has-an-empathy-deficit

Ask yourself: How can they accuse the U.S. of “an empathy deficit” if they have no idea what empathy really is because of no agreed-upon definition? They do have an idea.

Recall: Decety and Jackson observed “broad agreement” among empathy researchers regarding its ABCs even after admitting “there are many definitions of empathy, almost as many as there are researchers in this field”; Eklund and Meranius observed how “most articles and books about empathy begin by claiming that there is far from a consensus on how empathy is to be defined,” yet there is nonetheless “a developing consensus among neuroscientists, psychologists, medical scientists, nursing scientists, philosophers, and others.”

(Interestingly, scholars such as D. A. Carson and Edward Klink and Darian Lockett have long confessed—though not as long as empathy scholars—the same thing in Biblical Theology research: no agreed-upon definition, debates and contradictions, still definite patterns and known non-options.¹⁹D.A. Carson. “Systematic Theology and Biblical Theology,” in New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, ed. T. Desmond Alexander and Brian Rosner (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 89–104; Edward Klink III and Darian Lockett, Understanding Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), 13.)

Empathy (and Biblical Theology) scholars all point out what Rigney does but come to the opposite conclusion. Why? There are definite patterns even within debates (as above).²⁰See Daniel Batson, “These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena,” in The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, ed. Jean Decety and William Ickes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 3–15. And what definitely is not meant is also known.

3.3. Clear Non-Options Are Known Even with No Standard Definition

Diverse aspects of research fit a relatively narrow sphere that excludes certain practices. Hence those pop-practices (“losing oneself” and “losing truth” in another’s emotions) are not only malpractice and unhealthy; they are also very much not empathy. Don’t give proper empathy a bad name by perpetuating that bastardized version of the term! You’ll turn people off from the real thing, which has so much to offer.

Imagine a parallel: a blogger counts “love” (574x) and “Holy Spirit” (94x) in the NIV, argues, “Love is obviously more important than the Holy Spirit,” and calls this his “Biblical Theology of Love.” Over eleven years, his animated video accrues 22 million views, and people reduplicate his “Biblical Theology” method.

People will agree (in parallel with empathy studies): That pop-project (“Biblical Theology of Love”) is not only malpractice and unhealthy; it is also very much not Biblical Theology. Don’t give proper Biblical Theology a bad name by perpetuating that bastardized version of the term! You’ll turn people off from the real thing, which has so much to offer.

A concluding connected critique of Rigney’s reasoning regarding research is necessary. Imagine someone reasoning: That blogger has 22 million views and many others are now doing it, so I will relegate the research on Biblical Theology to the realm of academics—they cannot agree on a single, standard definition anyway!—and use the term “Biblical Theology” the way the blogger does so I can critique them by talking about “the sin of Biblical Theology.”

This is Rigney’s approach to “empathy.” And there are consequences.

4. Consequences for Cultural and Pastoral Advice

Due to his poor treatment of empathy research, Rigney has hamstrung his own pastoral navigation of certain difficult issues within his book.

4.1. Consequences of Rigney’s Research for Cultural Advice

Why are some pastors retrospectively accused of abuse? To answer, Rigney rails against following a “concept creep” and “inflat[ion] beyond all recognition” of the terms abuse and trauma (cf. pp. 57, 59, 61)—even while investing a whole book in following a bastardized-beyond-all-recognition version of “empathy”—but he fails to explain why the expansion is bad. And he fails to consider how, first, some truly abusive practices may not previously have fit the narrower application of “abuse” but can finally be rightly labelled as such now; and second, how some recipients of truly abusive treatment may need to get out of the situation and debrief (for years!) to actually see it clearly. (Yes, even while other practices now labeled “abuse” should not be.) Digging deeper with relational exegesis would have opened more options than he assumes to adequately explain the situation.

Concerning church conversations on complex racial dynamics—to which we majority culture Americans are often relatively blind²¹Jonathan Worthington, “Jesus and Power Plays,” ABWE Magazine, 26 Oct 2023, https://abwe.org/blog/jesus-and-power-plays/.
—Rigney stops short of asking next-level relational exegetical questions. Yet such questions would have helped him plumb deeper cultural dynamics embedded in his and the black congregants’ ways of thinking, feeling, and offering help (pp. 57–59). Markers to the deeper layers were present in their responses to Rigney’s hypothetical pastor; he just didn’t recognize them as prompts to further humble exploration. So, he dismissed them as mere corrupt progressivism. Consistent practice of more and better relational exegesis would help.

4.2. Consequences of Rigney’s Research for Gender Advice

What’s more, Rigney reduplicates his approach to empathy research in a damaging way in his treatment of how women and men relate to emotions, logic, theological discussions, leadership, and empathy (chapter 5). (And I say this as a natural and ideological complementarian who finds that reduction itself needs better exegesis and research.) Writers he quotes as a basis for (or confirmation of?) his opinions show the same poor research practices as Rigney as they summarize and apply “research” in a way that betrays the very research cited (e.g., see p. 80). Practicing better exegesis (and not eisegesis) of research sources would help.

4.3. Consequences of Rigney’s Research for Pastoral Advice

Rigney’s treatment of empathy even hamstrings his generalized pastoral counsel in his book’s practical climax: his four points of “compassion” (chapter 6).

You feel a compassionate, sympathetic gut-level urge to help the suffering. Even at a glance you can tell it’s hard—which Rigney commends as his first point of compassion. But a limit faces you: you don’t know how hard or why. How might you find out? Relational exegesis (empathy).

You can compassionately see that they feel a certain way—Rigney’s second point. Another limit confronts you: details are fuzzy and you can’t yet really appreciate the weight they’re under. What could help? Relational exegesis (empathy).

Third, you will stand with them to help them through—Rigney’s third point of compassion (in which “some measure of emotion-sharing” appears, p. 104, which is sometimes a sliver of empathy’s affective dimension). But you’re not exactly sure the wisest way to stand with them, not least since you’re unclear about the details and weightiness of #1 and #2. What could help? Relational exegesis (empathy).

Fourth, you have hope to offer—Rigney’s fourth point of compassion. A limit stalls you: you are not yet sure how to make the offer in a mature rather than clichéd way. What could possibly help? Relational exegesis (empathy).

I expect Rigney will surely say he does appreciate all the relational exegetical questions and points I added above. Remember, sprinkled throughout his book Rigney does commend understanding, resonating, and self-differentiating—which constitute true empathy (§2.3). Nevertheless, Rigney’s agenda blinds him into whipping “empathy” after having swallowed a pop-culture definition of it (even though he is critical of practicing said version). So, he ends up offering pastoral counsel that has some truth but is relatively impotent for the complexities of communal life.

5. Conclusion

What we really need is proper empathy training. It would provide not only Rigney’s goal of self-regulated self-differentiation, but so much more—and without the confusion and damage. We need the richness of the relational exegetical (empathic) process and thereby the particularized insights needed for specific people and situations alongside Rigney’s compassion.

Here is my proposal for moving forward in a healthier direction.

(1) Don’t give empathy (relational exegesis) a bad rap, even in a desire to critique pop-culture malpractice and bastardizations.

Why?

(2) Because humble, careful relational exegesis (proper empathy) really is needed in our relationships in family, church, neighborhood, society, ethnic tensions, politics… and the list goes on.

Therefore,

(3) Get and then give proper empathy training.

Robustly understand. Caringly resonate. Carefully self-differentiate. That is, humbly empathize with enemies as well as friends—as did our Lord, Jesus himself, in his incarnation.

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