A Word from Bob: 4 Guest Posts by Joe Hussung 

You’re reading Part 1 of a four-part blog mini-series by my friend and guest blogger, Joe Hussung. Here’s Joe’s bio.

Joe Hussung is the Director of Recruitment and Remote Counseling Coordinator at Fieldstone Counseling. He holds an MDiv in Christian Ministry and DMin in Biblical Counseling from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

To learn more about Joe, check out his longer bio at the Fieldstone Counseling site here.

As regular readers of my blog, you know that I’ve written a great deal on Empathy. For a free 42-Page PDF that collates some of my thinking on empathy, see my Empathy Is Biblical PDF. For a summary of my writings on empathy, along with links to a ten-part blog series on empathy, see my Empathy Is Biblical blog post.

I’m thankful for Joe’s insightful contribution to the important topic of biblical empathy in our lives and ministries.

Grounding in Scripture 

As I (Joe) share a little bit of the work I have done on empathy, I want us to keep in mind that my contribution is not contradictory to much that has been written before me. I want to show some of the preparatory work that should be done to ground that other fruit-bearing work in the Scriptures.

My wife loves to garden. We usually have around 100 tomato plants every spring, but there is a lot of work that goes into each plant. We amend the garden beds, break up the ground, plant the seeds at the right depth, and make sure they get plenty of water and sunlight. That is all before we see any growth coming up out of the ground, and certainly, before any fruit is produced by plants. This preparatory work is necessary for a good return on investment in gardening.

Is Empathy Biblical? 

Before answering this question, I want us to pause and consider the question,

“What would it take for empathy to be biblical?”

I don’t believe that we can just point to one place in Scripture and say, “There is empathy, right there!” There isn’t just one word that totally approximates empathy as a concept.

Most of the terms we consider “biblical” you could find easily by looking them up in a lexicon. This reality makes things hard, but not impossible. Our concept of what is and is not “biblical” should be broader than answering the question, “Is that modern word found in the Bible?” Still, empathy is slightly harder because it is a modern word, only coined in the last 100 years. What do we do with that type of word? Can a word or concept that is only 100 years old be “biblical”? Sure, it can be.

Empathy Is Biblical 

Empathy is, in fact, biblical.

Let me suggest a path forward to show this.

First, as a side note, this isn’t new to the biblical counseling world. We have always had to do this. We have just done it less about counselor skills and dispositions and more about typical problems. In David Powilson’s 2004 JBC article, “Is the Adonis Complex in Your Bible?” he lays out some principles on how we might think about finding how the bible speaks to this particular issue. He writes,

“So how is the Bible relevant? How exactly does God manage to speak directly to specific people from every nation, tribe, tongue, and people? There’s only one explanation. We must share underlying commonalities. Human nature and the human condition play variations on a theme. And Jesus Christ-the same yesterday, today, and forever—proves directly relevant to every variation, if only we learn how the connection works.”[1]

If this is true of relatively “new problems” then isn’t this also true of new constructs like empathy? In the same way that the Adonis complex is a new grouping of symptoms, empathy is a new word that speaks to a set of things that are newly being grouped together, but those things to which it speaks are not new.

When the Bible speaks to the human experience, it gives us a comprehensive guide on how to navigate and evaluate that experience. It both affirms and critiques our experience based on God’s perspective. This is what we are seeking when we think about empathy from a biblical perspective.

So, to ground empathy biblically, we need to. . .

• Define what people mean when they use the word “empathy.”

• Find what themes of the human experience the Bible has already established.

• Show if there are any parts of empathy that fall outside of biblical bounds.

• Define what a uniquely biblical idea of empathy looks like and how that would be utilized in biblical counseling.

Let’s Begin… 

When people say “empathy” what on earth do they even mean? Well… it’s complicated. C. Daniel Batson, a man who has researched empathy for decades, recognizes eight different things that are called empathy in psychological research.[2] But truly three main categories bubble to the surface.

First, empathy speaks to a capacity.

Humans have the capability of imagining and perceiving things outside of themselves. We do this to learn what emotions look like, we do this to learn physical movements, most of us do this innately. If you looked at a brain scan of one person watching another person eating ice cream, their two brains would likely look identical. One person because they are eating the ice cream, and the other because they are imagining themselves eating the ice cream. Researchers have identified something called “mirror neurons” that explain the biological way that humans do this but suffice it to say that most people intuitively do this.

Second, there is cognitive empathy.

Cognitive empathy is when someone attempts to understand what someone is going through from that person’s perspective. They are attempting to understand what they thought, how they felt, and what was the motivation behind their actions. This attempt to “get inside another person’s experience” is core of what most psychologists mean when they say empathy. But this isn’t just a process about gathering information and feeling our way into another’s world, it is also “a way of being.” Relational curiosity, the desire to truly understand someone else, is at the core of what empathy is all about. It isn’t just understanding, it is about knowing.

Third, there is affective empathy.

Affective empathy is when people feel alongside someone else. There are various debates on the approximation of the two experiences and whether they are the same or different, however, the important point is that empathy is affective. It involves the affections; it involves emotions.

So, I would define the modern concept of empathy as:

An innately human capacity that relates to other people by attempting to understand others from their perspective and to feel with them in that experience.

This is a good starting point.

The Rest of the Story 

In the next posts, I want to look at the key biblical themes that speak to what we call “empathy” and how those themes should shape our understanding of empathy and how important it is to the Christian and to counseling.

My next three posts:

• Empathy Part 2: Compassion: What Is It and What Does It Require?
• Empathy, Part 3: Understanding: Empathy as a Disposition
• Empathy, Part 4: Biblical Empathy as the Cog in the Biblical Counseling Wheel

Notes

[1]David Powilson, “Is the Adonis Complex in Your Bible?” Journal of Biblical Counseling, Winter 2004.

[2]C. Daniel Batson, “What Is Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena,” in The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, ed. Jean Decety, William Ickes (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 2009), 3-15.