Audio Transcript

We get absolutely flooded with questions here at APJ — way more than we could ever get to, as you know if you’ve read the stats I put in my little history of this podcast in the APJ book. But here’s something interesting that you might not know: Quite a few of those questions coming in are actually from authors who are working on new book projects. It’s quite something to see Ask Pastor John episodes popping up in the footnotes of books these days. And there’s a very good chance today’s episode is going to show up in a future footnote as well, because our question today comes from author Scott Christensen. Scott is a heavy hitter when it comes to tackling big questions. Just look at his books: What about Free Will? and What about Evil? Not exactly light reading (though he does do shorter versions of these books too, bless him). Scott’s new project dives into true and false shame, true and false guilt — pretty meaty stuff. He’s sent us this email.

“Pastor John, hello! I’ve got three questions for you. First up, how do you separate shame from guilt? Then, what makes false shame and false guilt different from the real thing? And finally — where does each one come from? I keep thinking the conscience must play a huge role in all this. Thank you!”

Back in the 1980s, I wrestled a good deal with the concepts of shame and guilt because they were very prominent in pop psychology. There was a popular book, for example, by John Bradshaw called Healing the Shame That Binds You, published in 1988. That book was shaping a lot of the discourse in evangelicalism and around my church. I found that book very problematical. But in the last forty years, I haven’t kept up with the way psychotherapy is talking about shame and guilt, so I don’t know if what I’m going to say right now is going to connect directly with what people who are studying these things today would think, but we’ll see.

The common definition in psychotherapy back then was this: While guilt is painful regret and responsibility for one’s actions, shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person. I didn’t then and I don’t now embrace that definition, mainly because it’s not the definition used in the Bible. Using that definition makes understanding and applying the Bible more difficult, which is what I do and want to do; I want to understand the Bible and apply the Bible to shame and guilt.

Biblical Guilt and Shame

Here’s my effort to define and distinguish guilt and shame based on the way the Bible talks about these realities. Guilt is the moral and legal condition of deserving punishment for real wrongdoing. A person may feel guilty, but his feeling is not the same as the guilt. The feeling may be justified if there’s true guilt, or the feeling may be unjustified if there’s no true guilt. You can feel guilty and not be guilty, and you can be guilty and not feel guilty. The Bible doesn’t use the word guilt or the concept of guilt for a feeling. One may or may not have that feeling and yet be truly guilty.

“Consciences need to be recalibrated so that they don’t condemn us as guilty when we have not done wrong.”

So, guilt assumes a moral law or a moral standard and a system by which a person is held accountable for infractions of that moral standard. Guilt is the condition of being called to account for those infractions of the moral law. It’s not a matter of how one feels about reality. The book of James says, “Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it” (James 2:10). The Greek word James uses, enochos, is used in the New Testament ten times and always means deserving of or liable to punishment for real wrongdoing. So, there’s a biblical concept of guilt that refers to the moral and legal condition of deserving punishment for real wrongdoing. It’s not a feeling; it’s a moral and legal status before the law of God or man.

Shame is different. The basic idea is a negative, painful emotion of disgrace or humiliation caused by evildoing or shortcoming or impropriety. (I’ll illustrate that in just a minute.) And this emotion is defined in part by the fact that other people think you should indeed be ashamed. Other people are watching; other people are assessing. So, the basic idea is the painful emotion of disgrace as others watch us.

But the meaning of the word shame is expanded beyond that in the Bible to refer to the behavior or the condition that brings down the emotion of shame. For example, Paul says some people “glory in their shame” (Philippians 3:19). Those people don’t feel shame — they don’t, but they should. And the behavior that is shameful and should make them ashamed is called their shame. Or in Hebrews 12:2, it says Jesus despised “the shame” of the cross. That means that a condition that ordinarily ought to overwhelm a person with shame — namely, hanging naked on a cross — Jesus steadfastly resisted for the joy that was set before him. So, shame in the Bible is a painful emotion of disgrace or humiliation — or the behavior or the condition that would ordinarily cause such an emotion as people look on.

Separating True from False

Now, what about true and false guilt, true and false shame? A person is truly guilty if he did wrong before the law of God or the just law of man, and a person is not guilty if he has done no such wrong. If he has done wrong, he should feel his guilt. This is what a healthy conscience is for. If he has not done wrong, he should not feel guilty, no matter how many people try to make him feel guilty, no matter whether his conscience indicts him or not. He’s not guilty if he hasn’t done the wrong.

There are areas where our consciences need to be, as Andy Naselli has helpfully written, recalibrated. Consciences need to be recalibrated so that they don’t condemn us as guilty when we have not done wrong. There is an objective reality that we can conform to, and our consciences might condemn us when we haven’t done anything wrong. We need to recalibrate our consciences according to the word of God. If a person is forgiven by God on the basis of Jesus taking our punishment on himself, he should not feel guilty even though he did the wrong, because the wrong is now covered. It’s been duly punished.

What about true and false shame, good and bad shame? A few illustrations might help. Suppose you cheat and lie on your income tax return in order to hold back proper taxes. A year goes by, and your conscience bothers you because you really are guilty, but you don’t feel shame. It’s all private; nobody knows. Then the IRS comes knocking. The word gets out to everybody you know in your church and in your community that you lied, you were caught red-handed, you have been fined and humiliated — and then you feel shame. And you ought to feel shame. That’s proper shame, true shame, good shame. And you should want not only to receive God’s forgiveness, which is available in Christ for your true guilt, your true wrongdoing, but you should also want to regain your good name and trust in the community, which may take longer and involves a good bit of faithful, humble obedience and upright living.

Or suppose you’ve trained for months to run a 1500-meter race, and you’re competing with other runners in front of a thousand people, and it turns out that they are so superior to you that all of them cross the finish line and you are still three hundred meters behind. So, while they’re celebrating, you’re still running while a thousand people watch you. Should you be ashamed? Well, yes, if you were out partying until one in the morning and wrecking your training the night before, you should. But no, not if you did your best. If you feel ashamed having done your God-given best, it probably means you love the praise of man more than the praise of God.

Or suppose you simply commit an impropriety. You go to a party thinking you’re dressed appropriately, and when you get there, you find out everybody else is dressed differently, and you look totally out of place. Now, there’s no guilt here — it’s an honest mistake — but you probably feel embarrassed. But there should be no mortifying shame. A Christian should have such a strong sense of being loved and accepted, invested in significant life and work by God, that such a mistake quickly passes into forgetfulness.

Well, so much more could be said. Chapter 10 in my book Future Grace is all about shame and how to overcome it. But I hope this is at least helpful in pointing to how I would try to answer our friend’s questions.