Forget empathy, the new war is on lament

Ever since Joe Rigney released his book about empathy being a sin, the TheoBros of conservative evangelicalism have been piling into his bus, demonizing empathy for those they run over as “the greatest rhetorical tool of manipulation in the 21st century,” and as “the progressive gaze.”

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler recently climbed aboard the anti-empathy bus. It’s the latest example of Mohler’s flip-flopping.

In 2014, he said Christians should “lead with empathy.” But now Mohler claims: “I don’t think empathy is a thing. I don’t think it’s real. It is a substitute for real Christian morality.”

For those who may be unfamiliar with Rigney, he’s an associate pastor at slavery apologist Doug Wilson’s Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. His diatribe against empathy was published by Wilson’s Canon Press. Prior to his move to Moscow, he was one of the pastors at Cities Church in Minneapolis, ruling alongside his fellow elder and local ICE director David Easterwood. He also was the president of Bethlehem Seminary, whose chancellor is John Piper.

But while the TheoBros have set their sights on empathy, Piper has been silently stewing about another deep concern — the sin of lament.

“I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time,” Piper muttered during a recent episode of the “Ask Pastor John” podcast. “Because I’m concerned about this whole frequency by which we talk about lament as though we know what we’re talking about.”

Piper was responding to a woman who lives with chronic illness and says she often questions God’s love for her. She asked: “In Jeremiah 20:14, the prophet himself cries out, ‘Cursed be the day on which I was born!’ Is such raw lament even permissible for the believer, or is this blasphemous? I’ve felt this same thought bubble up in my mind and heart, but I’m afraid to voice it. It seems greatly dishonoring to the Creator to wish to have never existed.”

So Piper began his response by claiming, “There is a way to define lament so that it is a sin.”

‘Five Statements on Lament’

While the woman is endlessly suffering in her Nevada home, Piper responds by giving her “five theses about lament”:

1. It is never right, it is always sin, to feel or think or say critical things about God and God’s ways.
2. It may be right to feel or think or express perplexity at God’s ways and to seek help from God to understand as much as possible — to cry out for it.
3. It may be right to feel or think or express how painful God’s ways are in your life and to seek God’s help to understand and endure.
4. The sin of having critical feelings or critical thoughts of God is not made worse by the sin of expressing those words to God aloud.
5. God disapproves of being criticized because it dishonors God, but God forgives those who repent and trust Christ.

While the episode of “Ask Pastor John” may appear on the surface to be answering a woman’s question about how she should think about lament during her chronic suffering, the undercurrent of Piper’s narrative is the sacralization of power and the projection of his own ego onto God.

Everything God does is right

“The reason it is always wrong and never right to criticize God is that he never does anything wrong,” Piper says. “Everything he does is right and good and wise and holy.”

To bolster his point, Piper quotes six verses about God’s ways being perfect, true and just. Then he suggests: “It is wrong to criticize God because he never does anything wrong. He never does anything worthy of criticism. To accuse him of wrong is to dishonor him, and dishonoring him is the opposite of righteousness. It is sin.”

Piper mentions the example of Job’s wife telling Job to curse God and die and then quotes Job telling her, “You’re talking like one of the foolish women.”

Then while affirming the infallibility of Scripture, Piper says Jeremiah’s cursing of the day he was born was indeed sin: “Jeremiah’s birth and the purpose of it was not his or any man’s idea. It was God’s idea, God’s design, God’s purpose. To curse God’s purpose is sin.”

Piper’s view of sovereignty

But what exactly do the works of God entail? Does God only do right, good, wise and holy things? Or can God behave like the worst abusers on earth and require us to call it good?

Many Christians would agree with Piper that God does what is right, good, wise and holy. But the devil is in the details.

“Has God predetermined every tiny detail in the universe, such as dust particles in the air and all of our besetting sins?” another listener asked.

He says the crucifixion of Jesus was “the bruising by the Father of the Son. Therefore the worst sin that was ever committed was ordained by God.”

“Yes,” Piper replied.

It’s one thing to suggest God controls the movement of dust particles throughout a room. It may seem weird. But nobody’s being harmed. And it’s totally understandable to suggest God is just in willing the liberation and healing of the oppressed. But to Piper, God also wills the empire’s violence against the least of these.

Piper roots this theology in his understanding of the Cross. He says the crucifixion of Jesus was “the bruising by the Father of the Son. Therefore the worst sin that was ever committed was ordained by God.”

Because of that, Piper says God causes and controls everything “for his glory and our good.”

Piper’s God gives kids cancer

The idea of God sitting idly by while kids get cancer is a thought that leads some people to embrace atheism. But to Piper, God doesn’t sit idly by while kids get cancer. Instead, God is the one giving them cancer for self-glory.

In his book Don’t Waste Your Cancer, Piper says while cancer for non-Christians is a “punitive pathway to hell,” cancer for Christians is a “gift” and a “purifying pathway to heaven” that is “designed for us by God.” He says, “The aim of God in our cancer (among a thousand other good things) is to knock props out from under our hearts so that we rely utterly on him.”

Piper tells cancer patients that reading too many articles about cancer is a sign of unbelief. He doesn’t clarify where the line of too many articles gets crossed.

“Cancer is designed to destroy the appetite for sin.”

He claims: “Cancer is designed to destroy the appetite for sin. Pride, greed, lust, hatred, unforgiveness, impatience, laziness, procrastination — all these are the adversaries cancer is meant to attack. … Don’t waste the power of cancer to crush these foes.”

Then Piper rejoices in the gift of cancer by calling it a “golden opportunity to show that (Christ) is worth more than life.”

Why would one lament their child getting cancer if their child’s body wasting away is a “golden opportunity” that comes with “a thousand other good things”? If God designed and implanted cancer in your child, your response, according to Piper, should be submission.

Piper’s God causes sexual assault

The conservative denominations that most closely associate with Piper’s theology — the SBC, the PCA and the ACNA — all have been mired in sexual abuse scandals for years. Given the number of women, men and children who have been suffering in silent submission, where does Piper’s theses about lament position God in relation to their assault?

According to Piper, those who have been sexually assaulted in conservative evangelical churches must confess “God’s sovereignty … at the moment of causality.” Piper says if they don’t, “You will now be left with no God to help you deal with this … . You have just shoved him off … and in your pain you shoved him so far to the edge of the universe that for the rest of your life you are crying out to a God to do miracles yet you have pushed him away… . And so you try to say there is no sense in which the sovereign God willed that, you will lose God for the rest of your life.”

In Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, which Piper edited, Mark Talbot claims God “brings about these evil aspects. … This includes God’s having even brought about the Nazis’ brutality at Birkenau and Auschwitz as well as the terrible killings of Dennis Nadar and even the sexual abuse of a young child.”

In Piper’s mind, to tell God, “This is wrong” is to tell God, “You are wrong.”

Then Piper suggests: “God disapproves of some of what he ordains to happen. That is, he forbids some of the things he brings about.”

In Piper’s mind, to tell God, “This is wrong” is to tell God, “You are wrong.” And anyone who refuses to name God as the one causing their assault is in danger of hellfire.

Piper’s God punishes with pitiless violence

In Piper’s brand of Calvinism, every cancer patient or abuse survivor who criticizes the idea of God causing their illness or assault is in sin and must be punished with being set on fire forever in hell while hearing the Christians sing songs of pitiless celebration about it.

In his book Captive to Glory, Piper quotes his idol Jonathan Edwards saying: “The saints are … called upon to rejoice … in seeing the love and tenderness of God toward them, manifested in his severity toward their enemies. … This rejoicing will be the fruit of a perfect holiness and conformity to Christ … that the just damnation of the wicked will be an occasion of rejoicing to the saints in glory … to rejoice in seeing his love to them in executing justice on his enemies … for the heavenly inhabitants will know that it is not fit that they should love them, because they will know then, that God has no love to them, nor pity for them.”

If Piper dreams of experiencing God’s love to him through the pitiless, loveless torture of those who won’t submit to his idea of God, then his muttering about lament as sin begins to make twisted sense. Like empathy, lament today would be a danger to be avoided because it might lead to criticizing the sovereign God who is causing your cancer or assault.

Confronting the sin of lament

“If you’re feeling critical of God, the sin has already been committed in your heart,” Piper claims. So he suggests that even though speaking your feelings out loud also would be a sin, it might be a sin worth committing because “you will hear how horrible it is to tell the infinitely perfect God that you know better than he does how to run the world,” and thus repent.

“Because Piper interprets reality as a hierarchy of authority and submission, he confuses lament with criticism.”

Because Piper interprets reality as a hierarchy of authority and submission, he confuses lament with criticism. One does not wrestle with Piper’s God. One simply bends the knee or gets sent to the eternal dungeon.

So according to Piper, the role of a pastor is to caution the congregation about the dangers of lament ahead of time. “You teach them before they suffer, not in that horrible moment of pain and tragedy and loss,” he advises.

But then he concludes: “And if they sin in their suffering, we will wait patiently. And when they have gotten their bearings again as the months go by, it may be that we won’t even have to say anything because they will themselves have already begun to regret the things that they said.”

Those who fawn over Piper likely will hear such a statement and adore him for waiting so patiently. But his statement assumes those who suffer from abuse or cancer must repent or face eternal punishment for dishonoring God in their lament by not following Piper’s five theses.

This means in Piper’s view of the church, those who suffer from abuse or cancer are likely in the first stage of church discipline. This is why, just as with John MacArthur’s church or with Cities Church, women have reported being excommunicated for divorcing their abusive husbands. Rather than celebrating their suffering as golden opportunities for glory, these women chose to stand up for themselves, to say those with power shouldn’t cause the least of these to suffer.

For Piper, the least of these can be perplexed at the powerful. They can ask the powerful why the powerful are hurting them. But ultimately, unless they bend the knee to the powerful, then they will bear the pitiless punishment of the powerful.

The reason Piper cautions against lament is that he worships a God who doesn’t lament but instead causes everything for self-glory. Apparently he hasn’t read the Psalms.

And the reason he worships a God who can’t take criticism is that Piper himself can’t take criticism for promoting such an abusive theology. His view of God is all the projection of his own ego.

Look at how easy it is to take his description of the dangers of criticizing God and substitute his own name for God’s: “It is never right, it is always sin, to feel or think or say critical things about (John Piper) and his ways.”

 

Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a Master of Arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.