Vulnerability, Finitude, and Community

A Defense of Empathy as We Approach Easter

Over the last decade, empathy has come under attack from some of my fellow saints, who have written that our collective religious and cultural emphasis on empathy is an example of virtue made into a vice. I believe, however, that these critics misconstrue the covenantal role empathy is meant to play in a Christian life. I submit that, despite its counterfeits, empathy remains central to our relationship with our Heavenly Parents, to our understanding of the atonement of Jesus Christ, and to our quest to become like Jesus.

The spiritual and divine importance of empathy has been insistently articulated by recent Latter-day Saint thinkers, theologians, and leaders of disparate inclinations, including Francine Bennion, Eugene England, Elder Neal Maxwell, Fiona and Terryl Givens, Chieko Okazaki, Elder Jeffrey Holland, and Melissa Inouye. I will quote only the last two of these.

In 2003, Elder Holland gave a general conference talk where he sought to dispel the notion that God the Father is a remote, patrician, impassive, or even vengeful, being. The climax of his talk comes when he says of the scene where Enoch sees God weeping: “That single, riveting scene does more to teach the true nature of God than any theological treatise could ever convey.” I am struck here to hear Elder Holland so clearly emphasize how central empathy is to God’s character.

Similarly, in a book written largely within the framing of the cancer that would soon take her life, Melissa Inouye makes one of the most comprehensive and eloquent defenses of the need for empathy. In Inouye’s articulation, that empathy is meant to flow both vertically—from God toward us—and horizontally—from us toward each other. Speaking specifically of the spiritual necessity of sharing suffering, she writes:

It was not enough for Jesus to wield healing power, to stop others’ wounds and lift others’ sorrows. It was necessary for him to feel wounds in his own flesh, to feel suffocating despair, to wonder when his misery would end. Christ's voluntary subjection to the horrible realities of this world transformed him forever. His vulnerability became his capacity to save and heal all humankind.

Here, Inouye is weaving together an emphasis on the necessity for God’s empathy with an unambiguous call for us, too, to be empathetic. She is echoing and elaborating themes that have been articulated by the long list of authors above, and likely others, as well.

Still, there is also a stable of thinkers who claim the emphasis on empathy has been taken too far. Their ideas matter and are worth considering seriously.

For example, writing for Public Square Magazine in November 2023, Dan Ellsworth makes the case not that empathy, per se, is bad, but that we have come to twist “empathy” into a set of actions and understandings that have malign consequences. In an essay entitled “Bridle Your Empathy so That You Can Truly Love,” Ellsworth argues that empathy has become an example of a “virtue gone mad.” Ellsworth’s concern is that we have twisted the meaning of empathy such that it now includes a set of understandings and actions that cause malign (even if unintended and often unacknowledged) consequences. Ellsworth’s most important distinction seems to be not the degree to which we cultivate empathy, per se, but rather the necessary leavening relationship between empathy and other virtues. Ellsworth (and other authors with whom he’s occasionally written on the subject) emphasize that empathy must be directed by a love for virtue and a concern for what is right. Thus, the conclusion seems to be that the concern is for an emphasis on empathy out of proportion to its place in the pantheon of virtues.

In a similar vein, in 2023 BYU Idaho professor Scott Woodward published an article in BYU Studies titled “A Close Look at Scriptural Teachings Regarding Jesus Feeling our Pains as Part of His Atonement.” Woodward frames his essay by articulating his concern that the nature of Christ’s empathy has become divorced from what the scriptures can support. At first, he says he intends to carefully examine the origin of Christ’s empathy but later goes on to also examine the nature of his understanding of our pains. He outlines the idea that Jesus intimately understands every experience through which we pass as the theory of “cosmic transfer” or the “empathetic atonement” and says that such an understanding “represents a profound expansion of our previous [conception] of Christ's atonement,” and continues, “If this is true, our atonement theology is being imbued with an intensity of intimacy and connectedness between Christ and mankind beyond anything previously understood.” However, he worries that if this theory of the “empathetic” is not correct, then “to teach that [Christ] did so obscures and detracts from the truth of what occurred. The risk is diverting church members’ faith toward an aspect of Jesus's atonement that isn't real.”

These two authors’ points are quite different, but both strike me as consequential. Ellsworth seems to suggest that many in the modern church have offered empathy a place that is simply too central in the understanding of the Christian life. Further, he suggests that, if left unchecked, this misunderstanding of empathy–or empathy shorn of its connection to other necessary virtues–could have significant church-wide or even societal implications. Indeed, it is perhaps unsurprising that, in his Public Square Magazine piece, he gestures approvingly to a piece from First Things magazine entitled “Empathy is Not Charity.” The conclusion of that piece reads, in part, “Our culturally sanctioned practice of empathy is an attempt to fill Christ's shoes; it is a reiteration of the sin of Eden in a fresh guise.” Woodward, on the other hand, has nothing to say about the modern practice of empathy, per se, but still seems concerned that we have read into our understanding of the atonement an element that we want to see there but which he does feel is supported by canonized scripture. I take both of these authors seriously and am glad to see both of them examining the place of empathy in our theology and our culture. That said, with all respect, I think there are ways in which their approaches can benefit from further examination and exploration. I hope to be able to provide that exploration here.

With regard to the centrality of empathy in Jesus’s atonement, I candidly don’t find Mr. Woodward’s critique convincing. I do think that he offers helpful context and cogent analysis of the settings and likely specific meanings of the scriptures whose significance he specifically examines. My objection, however, is that I don’t think the parts add up to the sum he suggests. In effect, his argument seems to be that because none of those verses specifically articulates what he calls the theory of “cosmic transference,” then we cannot conclude that cosmic transference is how the atonement works. I agree that these verses do not definitively or exclusively “prove” the theory of “cosmic transfer.” But I think this is more a commentary of our limited understanding than it is an indication that the theory of cosmic transference is wrong or unsupported. After all, this theory is consistent with one of our deepest spiritual needs—to know how much God loves us—and it remains entirely consistent with both modern prophetic and ancient scriptural discourse.

I would be loath to abandon it.

I would not want to leave it behind, in particular, because some version of this understanding of “cosmic transference” is precisely what allows our understanding of the atonement to meaningfully deliver a sense of individual relief to our particular experiences of our individual vicissitudes. This strikes me as the fullest and most resplendent—though, to Brother Woodward’s point, certainly not the only or definitive—interpretation of Alma’s teaching that “Christ shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind; and this that the word might be fulfilled which sayeth he will take upon him the pain and the sicknesses of his people. [...] that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.” I recognize that there is still some meaning to the fact that God became mortal at all, that Christ experienced suffering at all, and that He felt pain at all—but that plain fact simply is not as morally compelling as the idea of “cosmic transference.”

To abandon a Christ who suffers both with and as one of us dims unalterably the full measure of the glory and compassion of God. For me, this is not so much a matter of “proof” or of “doctrine,” but, rather, of simple yet unavoidably compelling moral suasion. Some truths speak so deeply to the needs of the human heart that, once recognized, they can no longer be dismissed or passed over.

Moving from beliefs about what Jesus’s atonement involved to the role of empathy in our lives as disciples, I respectfully disagree with the virtue’s critics here, as well. I believe that what they see as an overemphasis on empathy is actually largely a misconception of how empathy is meant to operate in a community of Christian disciples. A more precise articulation of this role helps to resolve many of the critics’ concerns.

Those who write about empathy’s excesses often assume that empathy leads inexorably to permissiveness, but I question this conclusion. I think of empathy not as a particular prescription for action (“this person is suffering and so I must remove that suffering”) but rather as a certain orientation toward the suffering person him- or herself. When I approach a person’s suffering with empathy, it is as if I am Moses at Mount Horeb—I might well be tempted to remove my shoes from off my feet because I can sense that to be invited into another person’s suffering is to be welcomed onto holy ground. I can recognize those who enter into suffering empathically with me because they are those who look intently, listen without interruption or distraction, silence their phones, and offer to me not just physical but also metaphysical presence. To be with someone in their suffering means to be with them in a way that is consuming, fully present, and holy. But that same full-souled presence does not necessitate moral equivocation or a sense of permissiveness. People may attribute such attitudes to empathy, but that is a misattribution.

I say this because I believe that Latter-day Saint cosmology and theology deepens empathy’s meaning and demonstrates why it matters so much. According to the classical Christian conception of the cosmos, we were meant to be living in paradise. If not for the arrogance and pride of Adam and Eve, the history of humanity would have unfolded without a need for suffering, and paradise would have been our eternal home. In effect, the mission of Jesus is to overcome the foundational rupture to the fabric of the theological universe ushered in by the pride of Eve and Adam. But in Latter-day Saint theology, all of this is turned on its head. In the universe as understood by Latter-day Saints, there is no time, no scenario, in which opposition did not or will not exist; indeed, opposition seems to be stitched into the deepest fabric of the universe. In a way, the entire point of the human drama is not to arrive at a place where there will be no suffering (the classical concept of paradise) but, instead, to learn to find God in the midst of suffering and, ultimately, to learn to be fully present in another’s suffering, even if we do not know how, when, or if it will end.

If we recognize that empathy is the Christ-like reaction to suffering that cannot be immediately ended, then the deep spiritual resonance of empathy becomes fully manifest. In an oppositional universe it would be folly to enter the temple of another being’s suffering declaring that we have brought with us an elixir that would end their pain. Many hurts, after all, have no mortal remedy: many cancers are not cured; many loved ones do not return; many tragedies see no happy ending; many kind people die; many crimes go unsolved; many wounds never heal; many dreams go unrealized; many problems find no resolution. But in an oppositional universe, none of these dilemmas should come as a surprise because we understand that without an opposition woven into the fabric of all things, no faith, meaning, agency, or love is possible. If we live in a universe where even God does not immediately solve every problem or cure every ill, it would be arrogance indeed to assume that we bring solutions to the same. Yet, our Christian creed and covenants dictate that we cannot look upon sorrow with callousness or ignore the cry of the bereaved. And so, when we cross the threshold to enter into the temple of another person's suffering, after doffing the shoes from our feet we are told to bring with us the balm of love—a salve which, so often lacking a solution, manifests only as empathy.

And that brings us, finally, to some of scripture’s most sublime verses—passages that, for me, demonstrate most comprehensively both the limits and the beauty of empathy. Importantly, these verses, understood in context, lead me to agree in some measure with empathy’s critics; I do believe empathy ceases to cohere if we attempt to understand it in the context of some sort of disembodied, universal “love” that we feel toward everyone, everywhere, all at once. I think this is where they have a point about “virtue run amok.” This is the “empathy” we purport to feel as driven by social media and as prescribed by ubiquitous “influencers.” This kind of “empathy” or “love” strikes me as ephemeral at best and meaningless at worst. Scripture points to a better way.

We may often forget the full context of Mosiah chapter 18. We neglect to remember that Alma is not preaching to a well-heeled congregation in an ornate temple, nor to an overwhelming crowd, but to a ragged group of tightly-knit religious refugees whose only chapel is the side of a lake. It is that little band he is addressing when he says: “As ye are desirous to come into the fold of God, and to be called his people, and are willing to bear one another's burdens, that they may be light; Yay, and are willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort,” that is how they will know they are ready to be baptized. But here's the thing: the context makes clear that Alma was teaching a specific group of people about their responsibility specifically to each other. He was not inviting them to care about “all mankind” but to look around and become bonded to the actual, fleshy, embodied people around them. He was asking them, in effect, to look each other in the eyes and to see in those faces the countenance of God.

Nothing in his invitation suggests that their empathy would be perfect or that it would be a replacement for divine love without flaw. Rather, for this little band of religious refugees doing their best to scrape out a living by the side of a lake, Alma was saying, “Once you are baptized, your job will be to take care of each other. Your love will find meaning not in universality but in particularity. Your attempts at empathy will always be woeful and incomplete, but they will still matter, anyway. What's more, most often you will not be able to solve each other's problems, but in becoming acquainted with each other's suffering, and in caring even when there is no cure, you will walk the path of discipleship and become the people God needs you to be.”

Finally, as we celebrate Easter soon, I am brought to the scripture that stands for me as perhaps the most direct and beautiful argument for the centrality of empathy in both the character of divinity and in the pantheon of Christian virtues. I am deeply touched to know that when Jesus presents himself in his resurrected glory to the people gathered at the temple surrounded by physical devastation wrought in protracted and absolute darkness, he immediately focused their attention on the centrality and beauty of his vulnerability and his history of suffering. As a doctor who has examined hundreds or thousands of patients, I cannot easily move past the visceral impact and almost macabre specificity of Jesus’s invitation and the crowd’s response:

Arise and come forth unto me, that ye may thrust your hands into my side, and also that we may feel the prints of the nails in my hands and in my feet, that ye may know that I am the God of Israel, and the God of the whole Earth, and have been slain for the sins of the world. And it came to pass that the multitude went forth, and thrust their hands into his side, and did feel the prints of the nails in his hands and in his feet; and this they did do, going forth one by one until they had all gone forth, and did see with their eyes and did feel with their hands, and did know of a surety.

What other course of action but this could have more indelibly impressed upon the hearts and minds of Jesus’s followers this message: God’s willing suffering is what makes Him God. He has come to a people whose world has just been riven by earthquakes and consumed by fire. They have endured impenetrable darkness so thick that it could be tasted, smelled, and rolled between their fingers. Thousands have died, and the cries of the wounded and dying lingered in that opacity while the living wondered if light would ever be restored. But then, the Being who finally returns light to the sky and who descends with healing in his wings does this one thing before the healing, before calling disciples, even before instituting the sacrament: he shows them that even in his resurrected glory, he has maintained the bodily reminders of the steep price of suffering he paid to gain his empathy—because that empathy is what makes him most fully God, and is the path he invites us to follow.

Tyler Johnson is a medical oncologist and associate editor at Wayfare. To receive each new Tyler Johnson column by email, first subscribe to Wayfare and then click here to manage your subscription and turn on notifications for On the Road to Jericho.

Art by Carl Bloch (1834-1890).