Andy Naselli

Thoughts on Theology

Joe Rigney Is President-Elect of Bethlehem College and Seminary

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Today the trustees of Bethlehem College & Seminary announced that they have selected Joe Rigney as president-elect. Details here.

I’m grateful to God for President Tim Tomlinson’s faithful leadership as our school’s first president.

Here are seven reasons I’m grateful that our trustees selected Joe Rigney to serve as our school’s second president:

  1. My school’s presidential profile says that the president must “embody, grasp, embrace, and be able to articulate and defend the Bethlehem College & Seminary Affirmation of Faith,” especially what John Piper, our Chancellor, calls ”Christian Hedonism.” If there is a person on the planet who can articulate Christian hedonism better than John Piper, that person is Joe Rigney. (I have heard John Piper say that he thinks Joe Rigney does it better.)
  2. Rigney is committed to believe and celebrate whatever God’s word teaches no matter how unpopular that may be. As one of my friends put it, Rigney ”would rather die than drift a millimeter from the Bible. A man whose grip on Reality is so firm that you’d have to chop off his hand to undo it. And even then, he’d be holding on with his teeth and his toes.”
  3. Rigney is a rigorous, perceptive, penetrating thinker. He models what Piper calls assiduous attentiveness. He can wisely analyze multilayered intellectual and cultural issues. He is unflappable and intellectually honest.
  4. Rigney has good theological instincts, intuitions, and burdens.
  5. Rigney is humble and eminently persuadable, and he is principled and not easily manipulated. He can sympathize with others while being aware of how empathy can be sinful.
  6. Rigney is gifted at communicating in a clear, articulate, and compelling way. (I borrow the phrase ”Kill the dragon, get the girl!” from him.) He is one of the few people I enjoy listening to talk about anything—whatever the topic—because he is consistently interesting, thought-provoking, and edifying.
  7. Rigney is not just a gifted professor but a faithful family man and pastor. I recently listened to every sermon he has preached to Cities Church (a church that Bethlehem Baptist Church planted about five years ago), and he served me well by faithfully explaining and applying the Bible.

To learn more about Bethlehem College & Seminary, see here.

Update on October 1: John Piper thanks God for Joe Rigney as the president-elect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgdV9bmM4Rw

My Concise Commentary on 1 Corinthians

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My concise commentary on 1 Corinthians is now available:

Andrew David Naselli. “1 Corinthians.” Pages 209–394 in Romans–Galatians. Vol. 10 of ESV Expository Commentary. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020.

It is part of a single volume that includes three other concise commentaries:

  1. Robert W. Yarbrough on Romans (pp. 21–208)
  2. Dane Ortlund on 2 Corinthians (pp. 395–566)
  3. Frank Thielman on Galatians (pp. 567–652)

The volume is available from Amazon, Westminster Bookstore, and Logos Bible Software.

Recommended Resources on 1 Corinthians

(What follows is the concise annotated bibliography at the end of my commentary.) [Read more…] about My Concise Commentary on 1 Corinthians

Five Reflections on Pastoral Disagreements

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9Marks just published my short article “Five Reflections on Pastoral Disagreements.”

I originally prepared this article as a devotional to present to my fellow pastors at the beginning of an elder meeting in which I anticipated we would be divided on a challenging pastoral issue. I had just finished reading Rhyne Putman’s When Doctrine Divides the People of God, and I riff off his five reasons we disagree about doctrine:

  1. We read imperfectly.
  2. We read differently.
  3. We reason differently.
  4. We feel differently.
  5. We have different biases.

Related: As churches consider when and how to reopen after closing for the past several months during the COVID-19 crisis, fellow pastors (not to mention fellow church members!) may disagree with each other. Should we open on this particular date or wait until later? Should we require or encourage or welcome face masks? How should we celebrate the Lord’s Supper? In light of that, Jonathan Leeman and I talked on May 22 about the crisis of Christian conscience. (When I first wrote about the conscience, I never envisioned applying it to when a church should regather in the midst of a pandemic and whether people must wear masks!)

Related (update on 6/2/2020): On April 17, 2020, I recorded a podcast with Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman for the 9Marks podcast. It released today: Episode 130: On How Can I Love Church Members with Different Politics (with Andy Naselli). For more on politics, the conscience, and the church, see here.

Does Anyone Need to Recover from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood? A Review Article of Aimee Byrd’s Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood

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John Piper and Wayne Grudem edited Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood in 1991, and now Aimee Byrd has written Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood some thirty years later.

I just reviewed Byrd’s new book:

Andrew David Naselli. “Does Anyone Need to Recover from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood? A Review Article of Aimee Byrd’s Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.” Eikon: A Journal for Biblical Anthropology 2.1 (2020): 109–51. PDF | web version

Here’s what I argue:

  1. Summary: The gist of Byrd’s book is that biblical manhood and womanhood—especially as John Piper and Wayne Grudem teach it—uses traditional patriarchal structures to oppress women.
  2. Context: On the spectrum of views on men and women, Byrd’s position overlaps partly with the far left side of narrow complementarianism and partly with egalitarianism.
  3. Evaluation: Byrd’s book is misleading because she misrepresents complementarianism, and it is misguided because she shows faulty judgment or reasoning.

Here’s the outline:

1. Summary: What Is the Gist of Byrd’s Book?

2. Context: Where Does Byrd’s Book Fit on the Spectrum of Views on Men and Women?

3. Evaluation: Is Byrd’s Book Fair and Sound?

3.1. Misleading: Byrd Misrepresents Complementarianism

      • Byrd Asserts That Complementarianism Teaches That All Women Must Submit to All Men
      • Byrd Asserts That Complementarianism Teaches That the Key Aim of Discipleship Is Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
      • Byrd Presents a Particular View of the Trinity as Essential to Complementarianism
      • Byrd Implies that Complementarianism Inevitably Leads to Abuse
      • Byrd Argues against Broad Complementarianism without Substantively Engaging Its Strongest Exegetical and Theological Arguments
        • (1) Genesis 1–3
        • (2) 1 Corinthians 14:29–35
        • (3) Ephesians 5:21–33 and Colossians 3:18–19
        • (4) 1 Peter 3:1–7
        • (5) 1 Corinthians 11:7–9 and 1 Timothy 2:8–15

3.2. Misguided: Byrd Shows Faulty Judgment or Reasoning

      • Byrd Focuses on Stories (While Largely Ignoring Direct Teaching on Men and Women)
      • Byrd Constructs Overimaginative and Unlikely Scenarios
      • Byrd Supports Her Conjectures by Citing Evangelical Feminists
      • Byrd Does Not Specify How Men and Women Are Different
      • Byrd Uses the “Biblicist” Hermeneutic She Denounces

4. Conclusion and Four Exhortations

    • 1. Study this issue for yourself.
    • 2. Beware of the ditches on either side of complementarianism.
    • 3. Discern which ditch you are more prone to fall into.
    • 4. Love and celebrate how God has designed men and women.

My article is more than a book review. I attempt to orient Christians to the current conversation. For example, this table from §2 compares narrow and broad complementarianism: [Read more…] about Does Anyone Need to Recover from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood? A Review Article of Aimee Byrd’s Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood

How Empathy Can Be Sinful

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Most people assume that empathy is always virtuous. Some recent publications explain how empathy can be sinful.

Four articles by Joe Rigney come on the heels of his interview with Douglas Wilson titled “The Sin of Empathy” (episode 1 of Man Rampant, 1 October 2019). In that interview, Joe Rigney distinguishes between sympathy and empathy. He defines sympathy as showing compassion, and he defines empathy as joining people in their darkness and distress and refusing to make any judgments. He uses the analogy of how to help someone who is sinking in quicksand: you could show sympathy by attempting to help him get out of the pit (e.g., by holding firmly to a branch with one hand while reaching into the pit with the other), or you could show empathy by jumping into the pit with him.

In the interview Rigney gives some people the impression that he is inclined to disbelieve women who claim to have experienced abuse. That is not what Rigney intended to communicate. Rather, his point is that when someone comes to a pastor with an allegation, for example, the pastor should communicate that he is for that person but not necessarily that he is unconditionally committed to taking that person’s view on the matter.

After that interview, Rigney wrote four articles for Desiring God that clarify his intention:

  1. Rigney, Joe. “Killing Them Softly: Compassion That Warms Satan’s Heart.” Desiring God, 24 May 2019. [like one of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape letters]
  2. Rigney, Joe. “The Enticing Sin of Empathy: How Satan Corrupts through Compassion.” Desiring God, 31 May 2019. [like one of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape letters]
  3. Rigney, Joe. “Dangerous Compassion: How to Make Any Love a Demon.” Desiring God, 18 January 2020. [based on C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves and The Great Divorce]
  4. Rigney, Joe. “Do You Feel My Pain? Empathy, Sympathy, and Dangerous Virtues.” Desiring God, 2 May 2020.

The fourth and latest article is the most important one. It summarizes what Rigney has been attempting to communicate about empathy, and he even uses abusers as an example of people who attempt to manipulate feelings of empathy from others.

Rigney is criticizing what C. S. Lewis calls “blackmail.” Lewis describes how a child “sulked in the attic” instead of apologizing in order to provoke others to give in and apologize to the sulking child (The Great Divorce, pp. 131–32).

Neil Shenvi calls this “the dangerous culture of apology.”

John Piper calls it “emotional blackmail.”

Piper argues in What Jesus Demands from the World (pp. 217–20),

The next obvious implication of Jesus’s words for the meaning of love is that it is not unloving to call someone an enemy. We live in an emotionally fragile age. People are easily offended and describe their response to being criticized as being hurt. In fact, we live in a time when emotional offense, or woundedness, often becomes a criterion for deciding if love has been shown. If a person can claim to have been hurt by what you say, it is assumed by many that you did not act in love. In other words, love is not defined by the quality of the act and its motives, but by the subjective response of others. In this way of relating, the wounded one has absolute authority. If he says you hurt him, then you cannot have acted lovingly. You are guilty. Jesus will not allow this way of relating to go unchallenged.

Love is not defined by the response of the loved. A person can be genuinely loved and feel hurt or offended or angered or retaliatory or numb without in any way diminishing the beauty and value of the act of love that hurt him. We know this most clearly from the death of Jesus, the greatest act of love ever performed, because the responses to it covered the range from affection (John 19:27) to fury (Matt. 27:41–42). That people were broken, wounded, angered, enraged, and cynical in response to Jesus’s death did not alter the fact that what he did was a great act of love.

This truth is shown by the way Jesus lived his life. He loved in a way that was often not felt as love. No one I have ever known in person or in history was as blunt as Jesus in the way he dealt with people. Evidently his love was so authentic it needed a few cushions. It is owing to my living with the Jesus of the Gospels for fifty years that makes me so aware of how emotionally fragile and brittle we are today. If Jesus were to speak to us the way he typically spoke in his own day, we would be continually offended and hurt. ….

The point of this is that the genuineness of an act of love is not determined by the subjective feelings of the one being loved. …

Feeling unloved is not the same as being unloved. …

God is God and the loved one is not God. The judgment of the wounded loved one is not absolute: It may be right, or it may be wrong. But it is not absolute. God is absolute. We give an account to him. And he alone knows our hearts. The decisive thing about our love when we stand before God is not what others thought of it, but whether it was real. That some people may not like the way we love is not decisive.

Joe Rigney’s critique is also in line with this article:

Dodds, Abigail. “The Beauty and Abuse of Empathy: How Virtue Becomes a Tyrant.” Desiring God, 14 April 2020.

Dodds, who coined the term untethered empathy, explains three ways to distort or abuse empathy:

  1. Untether it from reality, from truth (isolated empathy).
  2. Pseudo-compassionately coddle sin (cowardly empathy).
  3. Let it turn inward and become a tyrant (manipulative empathy).

What Rigney and Dodds say about empathy is a thought-provoking, insightful, and wise way to apply the Bible.

Related:

  1. Roberts, Alastair. “An Ethic of Nerve and Compassion.” Alastair’s Adversaria, 27 May 2013.
  2. Dodds, Abigail. “From Empathy to Chaos: Considerations for the Church in a Postmodern Age.” Abigail Dodds, 18 June 2019.
  3. DeYoung, Kevin. “Sympathy Is Not the Point.” The Gospel Coalition, 10 March 2020.

Updates:

  1. Wilson, Douglas. “The Empathy Wars.” Blog & Mablog, 17 March 2021.
  2. Roberts, Alastair. “The ‘Sin’ of Empathy? (With Hannah Anderson and Joe Rigney).” Adversaria Videos and Podcasts: Scripture, Theology, Liturgy, and Culture, 18 March 2021. (77-minute podcast)
  3. Rigney, Joe. “Where Do We Disagree? Golden Rule Reading and the Call for Empathy.” Desiring God, 12 April 2021.
  4. Piper, John. “How Have You Processed the Sin of Ravi Zacharias?” Desiring God, 29 April 2021. (See the section titled “Loose Truth and Untethered Sympathy.”)
  5. DeYoung, Kevin. “What Does It Mean to Weep with Those Who Weep?” The Gospel Coalition, 13 September 2021.
  6. Rigney, Joe. “On Empathy, Once More: A Response to Critics (Part 1).” Medium, 14 October 2021.
  7. Rigney, Joe. “On Empathy, Once More: A Response to Critics (Part 2).” Medium, 14 October 2021.
  8. Dodds, Abigail, and Tilly Dillehay. “Untethered Empathy with Joe Rigney.” Home Fires, 15 November 2021.
  9. Doug Wilson’s interview of Joe Rigney is now free on YouTube (67 minutes):

10. Rigney, Joe (moderator), Abigail Dodds, and Jonathan Worthington. “Compassion and Empathy.” Bethlehem College & Seminary Chapel, 4 May 2022.

11. Ponder, Doug. “We’re Commanded to Love Our Neighbors, Not to Make Them Feel Loved.” Sola Ecclesia, 5 June 2023.

12. Naselli, Andrew David. “Winsomeness Can Be a Virtue or a Vice: Winning Some vs. Pleasing Some.” American Reformer, August 24, 2023.

13. Rigney, Joseph. “Brothers, Don’t Be Steered: Identifying and Resisting the Tactics of Manipulation.” American Reformer, 9 October 2023.

14. Wilson, Douglas. “Empathy as the Headwaters of Cruelty.” Blog & Mablog, 8 November 2023.

15. Wilson, Douglas. “The Bottom of the Empathy Hole.” Blog & Mablog, 20 November 2023.

16. Daws, Josh. “The Sin of Empathy with Joe Rigney.” The Great Awokening Podcast, 20 November 2023.

17. Rigney, Joe. “Empathy, Feminism, and the Church: Women’s Ordination Is Indeed a Watershed Issue.” American Reformer, 26 January 2024.

18. Rigney, Joe. “Of Empathy and Monsters: There Can Be No Covenants between Men and Lions.” American Reformer, 1 February 2024.

19. Rigney, Joe. Leadership and Emotional Sabotage: Resisting the Anxiety That Will Wreck Your Family, Destroy Your Church, and Ruin the World. Moscow, ID: Canon, 2024. Doug Wilson commends the book here (1 March 2024). My endorsement: “The wise insights Joe Rigney presents in this book are the result of his marinating in the Bible, plundering the Egyptians, and applying sound principles in challenging contexts. Joe is entirely committed to the Bible’s authority, and he does not waver when people slander him. His goal isn’t to please people but to please God. Weak leaders often fail by having a failure of discernment (especially because of untethered empathy that hinders how others grow by affirming their low pain threshold) and a failure of nerve (especially by fearing to take stands at the risk of displeasing people). In this book Joe explains what a leader should do when people are highly reactive and anxious and combustible—like a gas leak that can explode with just a spark.”

20. Piper, John. “Leaders in the Church: Speaking and Living God’s Word.” Desiring God, 3 March 2024 (preached on 30 January 2024 at the Bethlehem Conference for Pastors in Saint Paul, MN):

If you are in a staff meeting, or a meeting with the elders, or a congregational meeting, and a controversial issue arises, and someone goes to the microphone and gives an argument, and the argument is based on factual mistakes, or incomplete information, or unbiblical assumptions, or illogical reasoning, or emotional manipulation, and the congregation is being swayed by this presentation, your silence, pastor, meek as it may seem, is not servanthood. It’s either a failure of discernment or it’s cowardice. It is not leadership.

Your job at that moment is to go to the microphone and say to the person, “These two parts of what you said are true, but here’s the problem with what you said.” And you set the record straight with facts, biblical truth, and clear thinking. You will feel the people shifting back from error to truth. Dozens of godly people out there who could smell the error but couldn’t name it will be thankful for you, because you rose to the occasion as a leader, and you named the error so that people could see it. You served them well.

If you sit there and think, “If I stand up and correct this person, they will very likely accuse me of shaming and abusing them,” and you let that fear cause you to be silent in the name of humble, caring, servant leadership, you have failed your flock and acted like a hireling. Jesus told us, “Blessed are you when others revile you . . . and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account” (Matthew 5:11). So, the caution about the caution is this: Don’t let the spirit of the age define leadership. Trust God and be biblical.

21. Carlino, Michael. “The SBC Isn’t Drifting, It’s Being Steered: A Sober-Minded Response to Emotional Sabotage.” Christ Over All, 28 March 2024.

22. Basham, Megan. Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. New York: Broadside Books, 2024. My endorsement: “Megan Basham exposes and explains how some evangelical leaders are failing to affirm and defend with clarity what Scripture teaches about issues such as LGBTQ, abortion, abuse, and critical race theory. She also reveals how some wealthy secular progressives are targeting evangelicals with evil ideologies disguised as love for neighbor. But it’s not loving, she argues, to minimize or overturn offensive parts of Scripture. I pray that Megan’s book will embolden Christians to destroy arguments that keep people from knowing God and to take every rebellious thought captive to obey Christ the King. This book can help you recognize some ways you may have erred (even with good intentions) or some ways you have been misled so that you can walk in the truth.”

23. Stuckey, Allie Beth. Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. New York: Sentinel, 2024.

24. Rigney, Joe. The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits. Moscow, ID: Canon, 2025.

This book is the result of nearly a decade of speaking and writing on how empathy can be sinful. Joe dedicates this book to Tom and Abigail Dodds and to Jenni and me because we walked through some deep waters together regarding sinful empathy. The truths in this book apply widely to the Christian life. The book applies particularly to God’s good design for men and women. God designed women to have a holy and fruitful kind of empathy that nurtures children, but empathy can be sinful when we untether it from the truth. And men need to lead without being manipulated by sinful empathy. Men need to beware how others may try to put a steering wheel on their back.

25. Mohler, Albert.  “The Sin of Empathy—A Conversation with Joe Rigney.” Thinking in Public. 19 February 2025.

25. Wilson, Douglas. “Empathy Blues.” Blog & Mablog, 5 March 2025.

26. Wilson, Douglas. “Empathy in the High Places.” Blog & Mablog, 14 April 2025.

27. Wilson, Douglas. “Anxiety Storms and the Empathy Wars.” Blog & Mablog, 30 April 2025.

Politics, Conscience, and the Church

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I recently teamed up with my friend Jonathan Leeman to write both a book and an article on politics, conscience, and the church:

New Book (Crossway)

Leeman, Jonathan, and Andrew David Naselli. How Can I Love Church Members with Different Politics? 9Marks: Church Questions. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020. (63 pp.)

[Update on 9/2/2020: The book is available for free as an audiobook.]

New Article (Themelios)

Leeman, Jonathan, and Andrew David Naselli. “Politics, Conscience, and the Church: Why Christians Passionately Disagree with One Another over Politics, Why They Must Agree to Disagree over Jagged-Line Political Issues, and How.” Themelios 45 (2020): 13–31. (PDF | Web Version)

Here’s the abstract:

Today many evangelical churches feel political tension. We recommend a way forward by answering three questions:

(1) Why do Christians passionately disagree with one another over politics? We give two reasons: (a) Christians passionately care about justice and believe that their political convictions promote justice, and (b) Christians have different degrees of wisdom for making political judgments and tend to believe that they have more wisdom than those who differ.

(2) Why must Christians agree to disagree over jagged-line political issues? After explaining straight-line vs. jagged-line political issues, we give two reasons: (a) Christians must respect fellow Christians who have differently calibrated consciences on jagged-line issues, and (b) insisting that Christians agree on jagged-line issues misrepresents Christ to non-Christians.

(3) How must Christians who disagree over jagged-line political issues agree to disagree? We explain three ways: (a) acknowledge leeway on jagged-line political issues; (b) unite to accomplish the mission Christ gave the church; and (c) prioritize loving others over convincing them that your convictions about jagged-line political issues are right.

How the Book and Article Compare

The message is basically the same in the book and article, but we target different audiences. In the little book we target laypeople, and in the more academic article, we target church leaders. (The book contains no footnotes.)

3 Recent Presentations

I recently presented the gist of our work in three settings:

1. Bob Jones University Seminary (November 12, 2019)

I addressed this topic for the annual Stewart Custer Lecture Series: Part 1 | Part 2.

Sam Horn interviewed me about it (5.5 minutes):

2. Bethlehem College & Seminary Chapel (February 12, 2020)

3. Thabiti Anyabwile’s Just Gospel Conference in Alexandria, Virginia (March 6, 2020)

In the final video above, Thabiti’s introduction starts about 7 minutes in. About 49 minutes in (at the end of my talk), Thabiti joins me on stage for about 11 minutes to dialogue. He is a gracious man.

I spoke on Day 2 of 3 at the Just Gospel Conference. On Day 1 and at the beginning of Day 2, I got the sense that many of the Christians attending this conference were more left-leaning politically than I am. Rather than mask any differences or throw out red meat, I decided to try to love my brothers and sisters by uncomfortably addressing a controversial topic—political parties in America—in order to encourage some hard conversations. The controversial content I added is not in the book or article. It illustrates how I am wrestling with political issues in my American context this election season. Here’s that section from my manuscript: [Read more…] about Politics, Conscience, and the Church

The Millennial Maze: A Panel on the Millennium

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I recently moderated a panel on the millennium:

The title of the panel is “The Millennial Maze,” which misled many people at the conference to assume the panel would be about millennials!

The panel was part of the Bethlehem College & Seminary Conference for Pastors + Church Leaders and took place on February 4, 2020.

Here’s how I introduce the three panelists: [Read more…] about The Millennial Maze: A Panel on the Millennium