Compassion Needs A God

By on 5-07-2012 in Course Materials, Culture, Leadership, Life, Theology, Worldview

Compassion Needs A God

Cliches and political-slogans promoting “Social Justice” have replaced any coherent philosophy or transcended moral imperative and this does not bode well for to future of compassion. As more and more Americans embrace a Post-Christian worldview, it is interesting to observe that, for now, they still cling to some ideal of compassion… yet, what happens when economies collapse and kindness is no longer convenient?

The uniqueness of the Christian Faith, i.e. the belief in Jesus as a risen savior, is the foundation that has both propelled the Church to unmatched growth and compelled the West to unprecedented compassion around the Globe.  Yet the necessity of God as the ethical foundation for compassion has been forgotten.  There are movements of atheists, agnostics, and even christians to “do good” yet they no longer accept the direct link between their desire for compassion and need to worship God.

Be warned, as Western society rushes forward to embrace a secularized compassion… change will come.  Eventually, the political “gods” will shift their attention to more pressing matters and compassion itself will follow “God” into oblivion.

Consider then this story from the early church in Jerusalem as it exemplifies the eternal connection between the worship of God and the mandate to care for those in need.

Acts 6:1–7 (ESV

1 Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. 2 And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. 3 Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. 4 But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” 5 And what they said pleased the whole gathering, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch. 6 These they set before the apostles, and they prayed and laid their hands on them. 7 And the word of God continued to increase, and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.

This story is not an isolated incident.  It is but one example of how the compassion of the Christians changed the world forever.  The triumph of the early Christian faith over the pagan culture was due in large part to how they treated love of one-another as an expression of worship.

Rodney Stark from the University of Washington gives an excellent summary of the Christian’s unique place in history when it comes to self-sacrifice and doing good. In his article, “Epidemics, Networkds, And The Rise of Christianity.”

Here issues of doctrine must be addressed. For something distinctive did come into the world with the development of Christianity—the linking of a highly social ethical code with religion. There was nothing new in the idea that the supernatural makes behavioral demands upon humans—the gods have always wanted sacrifices and worship. Nor was there anything new in the notion that the supernatural will respond to offerings—that the gods can be induced to exchange services for sacrifices. What was new was the notion that more than self-interested exchange relations were possible between humans and the supernatural. The Christian teaching that God loves those who love Him was alien to pagan beliefs. MacMullen (1981:53) has noted that from the pagan perspective:

“What mattered was … the service that the deity could provide, since a god (as Aristotle had long taught) could feel no love in response to that offered.”

Equally alien to paganism was the notion that because God loves humanity, Christians cannot please God unless they love one another. Indeed, as God demonstrates his love through sacrifice, humans must demonstrate their love through sacrifice on behalf of one another. Moreover, such responsibilities were to be extended beyond the bonds of family and tribe, indeed to “all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 1:2). These were revolutionary ideas.

Pagan and Christian writers are unanimous that not only did Christian scripture stress love and charity as the central duties of faith, but that these were sustained in everyday behavior. Lucian wrote of the Christians: “Their original lawgiver taught them that they were all brethren, one of the other.”

ed L. Michael White, ed L. Michael White and Society of Biblical Literature, vol. 56, Semeia. Semeia 56, Semeia (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 1991), 168-69.

Compassion is not an end in itself.  Without a transcendent, triune, and loving God,  compassion will eventually run its course and a new social-ethic will prevail.  If you want to do good deeds, then remember; compassion needs a God!

Joe is currently an adjunct professor in Southern California teaching a variety of courses in Practical Theology and Leadership. In addition, he coaches church planters. Dr. Miller has a diverse educational background and authored multiple books on church history, biblical theology, and Leadership. Joe and his wife Suzanne enjoy the sun and surf with their 3 sons in San Diego, CA.

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  • http://www.thechurchofnopeople.com Matt @ The Church of No People

    Great post, Joe!  Right now, compassion means wearing a bracelet, or changing your Twitter avatar – something extremely convenient.  It’s easy to get rid of God and still call yourself compassionate when that’s your definition of compassion.  

    • http://www.EmergingLife.org J.R. Miller

      Right on brother!  Compassion means a willingness to make sacrifice.  Not to force others to sacrifice… not to do the “easy” thing, but to sacrifice yourself for the sake of another in person.

  • http://www.facebook.com/ericrboersma Eric Boersma

    J.R., you pointed me here via twitter, and I wanted to expound on the criticism that I offered you in that medium.

    The fundamental problem with this post is that the central assertion is unsupported. You begin and end with the idea that compassion without God is inevitably going to morph into something that is not-compassion. You senselessly dismiss “Social Justice” as just some sort of fad, attempting to discredit it without even appearing to attempt to understand it (there’s a good primer on the philosophical underpinnings of Social Justice available on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice). From there, you spin off into truly indefensible territory.

    Specifically, you make the claim that “Compassion needs a God”, when this claim is disproven earlier in the post, where you note that there are a number of what you call “post-Christians” who are exercising compassion in our society today. If compassion truly needed a God, then atheists would be fundamentally incapable of exercising it (unless you’re arguing from some sort of twisted Calvinistic background where the atheists operate as some sort puppet of God, but I don’t think you’d be comfortable with the problems that view creates in Christian theology). You provide no evidence that otherwise compassionate societies fell out of compassion some time after excising God from their culture. You provide no evidence of your primary assertion at all.

    Finally, your post ends with a statement that begs the question. You say “Without a…loving God, compassion will eventually run its course and a new social-ethic will prevail”. The question that is begged here is “So what?”. The replacement of compassion with a new social ethic could indeed be a negative situation, but it could very easily be a positive one (perhaps we’ve no longer a need for compassion as everyone is treated fairly and never wants for anything in our new Utopian Star Trek future), perhaps the new social ethic is something toward which we will be ambivalent; it has neither positive nor negative attributes, it just is.

    The problem with your argument at a larger scale is that it’s dangerously Protestant-centric. The Bible makes it abundantly clear that God rejoices in the removal of suffering of His children regardless of who is removing the suffering — this is the whole point of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. You come across as an old man, sitting on your porch and yelling to the pack of children running across your sidewalk to be careful, lest they fall down. They won’t heed you, because they have places to be, things to do, stuff to see. You’re right, they might skin their knee, after they fall down while trying to ford the creek — three miles from your house. Meanwhile, you’re still sitting there, on your porch, wondering why no one takes you seriously any more. The world changes. Christians can change the world. But we won’t do it by writing blog posts warning everyone about how they can’t cut God out of their compassion — instead we should be cheering those being compassionate on, and joining in right beside them. Compassion doesn’t know theology, it doesn’t need to. Christ celebrated in every hungry person fed, every poor person clothed, every sick person healed, regardless of whether the person doing the healing was a Roman or a Jew or even a Tax Collector. Compassion doesn’t need God to go with it, it needs us to go. God’s already there, waiting for us, to work miracles, to heal the sick, to provide solace to the hurting. Don’t worry about God getting left behind, he’s way too far ahead of us for that.

    • http://www.MoreThanCake.org/ J.R. Miller

      Eric, thanks for taking the time to post your disagreement and I will do my best to answer your discontent.

      1. Regarding my use of the term Social Justice, instead of Wikipedia, I might refer you to this book review I posted some time ago. It is a better context for my post http://www.morethancake.org/archives/3359

      2. Regarding my assertion that compassion needs a God; it is simply that I believe that doing good deeds are not enough. If it is true that faith without works is dead, then works without faith are meaningless. Real compassion requires sacrifice, love and an external unchanging source to guide us.

      I don’t know if you are a Christian or not, but for me I would turn to the Bible to back-up my assertion. Paul says in 1 Cor 13:1-3
      “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging symbol. And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.”

      So doing “good” things is not enough, we need genuine love (compassion) and that comes only when we are connected with the God who is Love.

      I write more on this simple point here http://www.morethancake.org/archives/3091

      3. Regarding my final point you say, “so what?” The problem you are not seeing is that when compassion is “fashionable” it changes when fashions change. So while today it is good to care for the homeless, tomorrow it may not be and then who will be left to care for those in need? Today, somebody may give $$ because they have lots of money, but when the ecconomy tightens, many will stop giving (as they already have). When giving is only done out of convenience, it will cease and then too many will be left suffering. As Mother Teresa has said, “It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving.”

      Your understanding of the Parable of the Good Samaritan is shortsighted and flawed. It is not an applause for doing good deeds. It was a reminder to the Pharisees that they were hypocrites because they did no good and even a man they considered a half-breed heathen knew better than they. But the story does NOT mean that compassion is fulfilled in meeting physical needs alone.

      My challenge, which you have clearly missed, to Christians is that we must meet BOTH physical AND spiritual needs.

      This is what Jesus taught to the woman at the well… her water was not enough! And to the disciples after feeding the 5,000.

      He said, ““Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.”” (John 6:26-27)

      Again, I don’t know your relationship with God or if you are a follower of Jesus, but if you are I hope we can agree on this most basic assertion.

      BTW, If you want to really understand some of my own journey and the context for saying this, then this recent message will give you some insight for making an informed conclusion http://www.morethancake.org/archives/4487

  • http://twitter.com/mercedeskat45 Carole Di Tosti

    Interesting reasoning on the part of Eric and your response, J.R. I would go so far as to say that compassion IS God, and that all goodness is God. Whether the individual is even a professed atheist, and he or she is prompted to do good, perhaps this is a movement of God in the person’s soul that even he or she is unaware of. Since we do not see the arc of the individual’s life and only God does, it is impossible for us to know every act of a man/woman and judge it; God is capable of assessing one’s life plan, not me. (If as the Word says, “Every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,” then individuals on the earth are constantly prompted toward God and only He knows the day and the hour for them.)

    Somewhere along the journey of individuals’ lives on this planet, they bump up against God, again, again, again, again. Even if God has given various individuals up to a reprobate mind, then an agent of God on a long chain, satan, takes over and in one way or another, that individual is brought to a point of decision. (C.S. Lewis was an atheist before he was “Surprised by Joy)There are those who eschew God, turned off by those who profess to be Christians but do not really 1)Love thy neighbor as thyself. (They have a history of discrimination, abuse, hatred toward various groups, etc., etc.) These so-called Christians have created wars and called them just, meanwhile, like the fascist government of Germany, they have hidden behind “Christianity” to promote their “righteous cause” to serve their hidden agendas which have harmed many. What of them and their “compassion” attached to God? The hypocrisy is visible and those watching have painted with a broad brush and despise “Christianity” and “God,” not discerning these are not true Christians. Also, some give to charities but their hearts are promoting their own causes.

    God judges all of us and all of us are on the journey toward Him in one way or another, either at the reprobate phase, or the atheist or doubter phase or the hypocrisy phase or whatever. I cannot judge because I do not know where folks are along the journey… if their giving has an element of goodness/God/compassion in it despite its being self-serving. I do not know if they are vessels fitted to destruction or good; God, after all spits out those who are fence sitters: be either good minded or evil minded but double minded… forget it where God is concerned. I find that any discussion of social justice has a political component; politics or power diverges from agape love; it is a blind.

    The greatest I can do as a Christian is walk after the Spirit of the Living God, pray, renew my mind washing it in the Word, daily, crucify my flesh and love with spiritual, agape love. following the first and second commandments, and know and walk in God’s will for my life. Only I can do that and I find to do that is enough. At times, I have felt that I am failing, but God forgives, and I must forgive myself of my own shortcomings. If I judge others, there may be a problem; is my judgment a righteous one? Only if it is a judgment of the church. And this is very tricky because of the spirits of hypocrisy… So one must follow the Spiritual witness within to then know what to do. It is a journey for all of us…one way or another, we are being led of the Lord to God whether kicking or screaming, blindly, or denying He exists. The absence of the evidence of this does not prove it is not happening.

    • http://www.MoreThanCake.org/ J.R. Miller

      Hi Carole Di Tosti , thanks for taking the time to respond and share your thoughts.

      I do agree that God is good because that is very clear in the Scripture through passages such as Mark 10:18.

      Is God compassion? I am mixed on that one. Certainly it is true that God works in the world through His Spirit to show grace to all people. And, God can certainly work through even the unsaved to demonstrate His love to the world. So I am with you on those points. However, to suggest that all “compassion” necessarily points toward God is a bit far for me. Why? Because in the end, it depends who defines the word “compassion”.

      To some people, anyone that is mentally handicapped has a “low quality of life” and therefore, to kill that person is considered “compassionate”. Prior to the 1970 in the US, forced institutionalization of mentally ill patients into asylums was considered compassionate. Now, we let them live as homeless people. Which one is real compassion. You see Carol, the point of my post is that one man’s compassion can be another man’s crime and therefore, as a follower of Jesus, I need to make sure that my compassion is driven first by God’s Goodness and second, that my compassion points people toward the source of good; God alone.

      Put another way, compassion is simply a means to an end, not an end unto itself. If I feed a hungry person, but do not offer them eternal life in Jesus I have not shown true compassion. Read the story of how Jesus dealt with the Woman at the Well, and you will see the point.

      Blessings sister.