Christian Empathy Imagines Neighbors as Ourselves

Stories like the Good Samaritan foster an awareness of others that cures our near-sightedness.

In recent years, the term empathy has been in vogue. Psychologist Paul Bloom defines empathy as “the process of experiencing the world as others do, or at least as you think they do. To empathize with someone is to put yourself in her shoes, to feel her pain.”

Empathy is distinctly different from sympathy in that sympathy usually positions us above the other, looking down on them and feeling sorry for them. Empathy asks us to feel what they feel, thus subverting the power differential. Textbook empathy as Bloom defines it only goes so far.

Although empathetic identification is a good thing, empathy needs a context and motive for it to help us love our neighbors according to Christ’s terms and, ultimately, his sacrificial example.

The Christian understanding of empathy is connected to Christ’s teaching on the two greatest commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” and “Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Luke 10:27).

Of course, these two loves are intricately connected, as we cannot possibly love our neighbors in a Christlike way without being connected to Christ, the source of love.

Christian empathy asks us to be both self-sacrificial and intentional as we reach beyond our usual circles and experiences to identify with those who are outcast, misunderstood, abused. We fail to love God when we neglect to see and cherish the imago Dei in other human beings.

But this sort of love and its corresponding empathy are very difficult, and we find ourselves often resorting to stereotypes and dismissing the sacredness of other lives, usually out of the impulse to first serve and protect ourselves.

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from Christianity Today Magazine
Umn ministry