Wednesday, September 09, 2015
A Division The Church Needs To Relearn
Breitbart reports on a distinction Bill O'Reilly makes between compassion and justice. That is something I think the church needs to relearn. Not to mention we somehow confuse love with a sort of permissiveness that is a combination of compassion and empathy.
But the problem in the end is selfishness. No really, our empathy with the difficulty someone else experiences in, say, overcoming impure sexual impulses, hurts us. Empathy makes their struggle our struggle and so rather than have to struggle with their pain, we just decide that maybe they do not need to struggle with that.
That is classic tempting by the bad side of things. If you have not read Screwtape, recently, do so. Satan just loves to compromise us and make it look good with things like empathy.
Consider this, Christ's sacrifice on the cross was the ultimate emphatic event. He felt all sin for all time. But He was without sin and He had the power to come back from it. We do not. We have to learn strength in our empathy. We need to learn to divide our empathy from our love (which wishes the best (sinlessness) for its object and divide our empathy from justice which demands the best for all.
empathy justice love
But the problem in the end is selfishness. No really, our empathy with the difficulty someone else experiences in, say, overcoming impure sexual impulses, hurts us. Empathy makes their struggle our struggle and so rather than have to struggle with their pain, we just decide that maybe they do not need to struggle with that.
That is classic tempting by the bad side of things. If you have not read Screwtape, recently, do so. Satan just loves to compromise us and make it look good with things like empathy.
Consider this, Christ's sacrifice on the cross was the ultimate emphatic event. He felt all sin for all time. But He was without sin and He had the power to come back from it. We do not. We have to learn strength in our empathy. We need to learn to divide our empathy from our love (which wishes the best (sinlessness) for its object and divide our empathy from justice which demands the best for all.
empathy justice love
