This dissertation argues that pastoral theologians originally viewed empathy as an ethical resource for broadening social and political recognition because of its prospects for freedom in interpersonal relation, yet that theologians and social theorists have gradually rejected the idea that empathy is freely able to extend across human difference. As a result, religious practitioners now risk using empathy in ways that obscure the conflict between pastoral theology’s practical ethical commitments to marginalized suffering, and its commitments to intersubjective theories of difference; we have shown that empathy is limited by social recognition, but have not adjusted our expectations of what empathy can accomplish for bettering religious life. More specifically, pastoral theologians initially appropriated empathy into their theological anthropology from psychoanalytic and phenomenological sources, such as Heinz Kohut, wherein empathy includes freedom to vicariously introspect into the psychic lives of others. However, after the influence of relational and intersubjective psychoanalysis, scholars modified empathy as incapable of transgressing psychic difference, to defend relational theory from psychic colonization and intellectual imperialism. While relational psychoanalysis helped pastoral theology clarify the co-constitution of social knowledge, it also eliminated the freedom that made empathy ethically valuable for pastoral theology at the outset. This dissertation thus argues that, though empathy remains immensely valuable for certain forms of interpersonal care, pastoral caregivers’ efforts to “be more empathic” in situations where social recognition of personhood fails are often unhelpful for broadening ethical and political consciousness. It recommends that theological practitioners accept the aporia of empathy as demanding broader ethical consciousness of marginalized suffering, yet also greater respect for the limits of empathy around human difference.