When we went to Japan in 1981, I presumed that the primary human problem was guilt, as measured by the law, and that Christ paid the penalty for sin’s guilt in his death. I slowly came to recognize these categories are largely absent in Japan – a strange conclusion for a universal gospel. There is no word for “sin” in Japanese, and no guilt plagued conscience due to the law. There is an abundance of shame, measured before the eyes of others (the group), which describes a holistic failure, for which the culture provides few answers (resulting in high rates of suicide). The saying, “I could have died of shame,” captures the reality of shame’s result in Japan (but also in this country). After a deep dive into both Japanese and Western psychotherapy, and a PhD dissertation on the book of Romans, I came to recognize that what was most obvious about the gospel is that sin and guilt, as conceived in the West, not only do not get at the root of Japanese self-identity – but the universal human identity the Bible is addressing.
Paul sums up his Gospel with the thesis statement in Romans: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “BUT THE RIGHTEOUS man SHALL LIVE BY FAITH” (Rom 1:16–17). In this thesis, being “not ashamed” is conjoined to righteousness, a conjunction echoed in a series of key passages from the Hebrew Bible Paul is building upon. The language of shame (aischynein and kataischynein) appears together in the lament Psalms, Isaiah, and Hosea, along with Paul’s terminology of righteousness, as it is the specific problem of shame, what is lamentable, what is distressing, what is subject to death, that righteousness addresses. The themes of shame and righteousness are paired in Paul’s favorite passage Isaiah 28: “See, I lay in Zion a stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall, and the one who believes in him will never be put to shame” (Rom. 9:33). In this passage, as in the Psalms and wisdom literature, shame and death are synonymous, and the defeat of one is the defeat of the other. As Paul explains, those who are baptized into Christ die to sin and conquer death (6:1-6) and become true children of God who are able to live in personal relationship with God, as if he is our Abba, our Father (8.2ff). He is describing the cure to his own shame experience as he describes it in Romans 7, in which he feels like he is falling apart and out of control. The cure he describes throughout, is relational, not legal. The theme of righteousness set in its Hebrew background is a relational concept, rather than its Greek form and setting in which it has the idea of a standard against which the individual is measured. There is no recovery of God, no seeing God, no presence of God, in the law, in the Temple, or in any human construct, but only a failure to enter in to his presence. This is the disease that afflicts us and which Christ cures. It became obvious to me, that the Bible was concerned with the problem of shame, the lost presence of God found in Christ. As I looked into the psychoanalytic significance of shame, I realized many secular analysts make direct appeal to Scripture, to describe shame as the root negative emotion.
Leon Wurmser, is among the earliest of psychoanalytic practitioners, to recognize shame creates a false consciousness, or what he calls a quasi-reality, aimed at blocking out the possibility of shame. “To see and to be seen have to be ‘blocked out’ as too dangerous, drained of its lifeblood, so to speak, made into a strange quasi reality” (The Mask of Shame). The process is one of depersonalization and estrangement from self and others. In the description of one patient, it has “the feeling of lacking, namely the experience of being not enough one and the same individual, of being not alive enough, of being not real enough.” As Gershen Kaufman describes it, “Shame is the most disturbing experience individuals ever have about themselves; no other emotion feels more deeply disturbing because in the moment of shame the self feels wounded from within.” Helen Lewis, who along with Wurmser has been key in recognizing the primary role of shame, calls shame “the unendurable emotion.” Prolonged exposure to shame gives rise to either murder or suicide, indicating one literally cannot endure shame over a prolonged period.
As Cain cries out in regard to his own shame experience, “(It) is more than I can bear.” Shame induces the first couple to hide the body, to hide from one another and to hide from God and in Cain it becomes murderous rage. Cain kills Abel, who shamed him before God. Then a boy slaps Lamech, and Lamech kills him, and promises he will take seventy-seven-fold vengeance should anyone else dare to insult him. If the number is literal, he would kill 490 more rather than suffer the humiliation of unrequited shame. But this is not a limited number or a finite amount, as in Hebrew idiom seventy-times-seven is infinite. We have passed from the realm of quantification into the realm of pure death drive. The violence behind shame, the violence that killed Christ, is the violence that has the world in its grip.
In short, shame is a holistic physical/spiritual failure in that both human physicality (turning red with shame, the desire to cover up) and human spirituality or personhood (the desire to not be seen, the desire to disappear) are conjoined. It is indicative that pride, the fundamental fantasy, the fig leaf construction of identity is inadequate. The inadequacy is made obvious, the lack is made apparent, the mask is fallen. We feel ourselves to not be enough, to lack being, to fail to be fully present. The identity built upon a false foundation is not correctable or salvageable, but shame is an indication that this person is built upon sand, and the whole edifice will fail. In fact, Jesus’ parable of the foolish builders is a story about shame and falling apart.
I began to realize most of the stories and situations of Jesus directly pertain to shame. His story of the wedding feast is personally familiar as I have attended several weddings where someone is mad about the seating. A wedding dinner is always a stressful time in a family. We have to gauge how we are lined up with the other guests. We all know what it feels like: “What does this placement or arrangement say about me? What does it mean for me? How do I make the most of this opportunity?”[1] Imagine being seated in a place near to the bride and groom, a place of honor, and then the host comes and tells you there has been a mistake, you will need to move to the children’s table, as someone of importance has shown up. As Jesus describes the moment the host comes and says, “‘Give your place to this man,’ and then in disgrace you proceed to occupy the last place” (Luke 14:9). Jesus tells this particular story because all the guests are embarrassed at a banquet where he is the guest of honor. He is invited to a banquet, including all the most important people, and then a man with a shameful disease, edema (or what the Bible calls dropsy) barges in. His disease is off-putting, unappetizing, his limbs are swollen and he may be peculiarly repulsive. It is on this occasion that Jesus tells the parable of the wedding feast, and the parable of a luncheon for the poor. “But when you give a reception, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind” (Lk 14:13).
Jesus stories more often than not are dealing with shame: a prodigal son having shamed himself and returning home in humility, a prominent and wealthy Jew showing up the teachers of the law, the pharisee and the tax collector in which a social outcast understands from this status how to come to God, the great wedding banquet where the host suffers public humiliation, the unforgiving servant facing total disgrace, the unfinished tower where a builder becomes a target of mockery. Jesus’ healing miracles deal with social outcasts due to their disease, their ethnic identity, their occupation, and the movement of his ministry and teaching is aimed at those who are humiliated in his own shameful death. He is dealing in a shame/honor society, and his presence, the very presence of God, is the cure. He makes things right where they are miserably wrong, as his presence is the answer to the deeply felt inadequacy and absence of shame.
This has next to nothing to do with legal notions of righteousness, as the law only accentuated the problem. The Jewish faith poses us with a strange contradiction, presenting us with the primary problem (shame, God’s absence, lack of relationship, death), but the religion does nothing to relieve this circumstance but only accentuates the problem. Think of how unapproachable God is in the Temple, divided by a series of walls, closed up in or on a box (the Ark of the Covenant) in the room which only the high priest could enter, and that only once a year, and that with great trepidation (and of course this is not dealing in realities but shadows). The religion accentuates the problem. Shame is the realization of divine absence, which results in death, and the law puts an exclamation mark on the absence. Paul’s “not ashamed” announces the antagonism we imagine, the absence we feel, the punishing effects, the fear and anger we project upon God, are dispelled.
People are incomplete in God’s absence. God told Moses, who imagined he could see God, “You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live” (Exodus 33:20). As Jesus explains, “And the Father Himself, who sent Me, has testified of Me. You have neither heard His voice at any time, nor seen His form” (John 5:37). The writer of Hebrews makes clear, that all the supposed appearances, dreams, and voices, are mere shadows (8:7), and it was not God who delivered the law, but angels who spoke to Moses (Heb. 2:2). As John declares, “No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (John 1:18). Abraham, Moses, Jacob, Ezekiel, never saw God, but only his shadows, his trailing’s (as described in Exodus 33:18-23). God is not in the theophanies, the voices, the dreams, the law. As the writer of Hebrews sums up, “God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power” (Heb 1:1-3). Here is the cure to God’s absence.
As Jesus explains to Thomas, who asked the way to the Father, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me” (Jn 14:6). As he explains to Philip, “’If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; from now on you know Him, and have seen Him. . . He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? ‘Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me?’” (Jn 14:7–10). The shame-sickness, God’s absence, is cured in the righteous presence of Christ. In the worst sort of death and shame, the cross, which is aimed at destroying “Immanuel God with us,” he is present. Christ takes an instrument of shame as the center of a message resolving shame, defeating the brokenness, he heals it on the cross, from within history, from within us. “Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb 12:2) and he has “raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him” (Eph 2:6). “For the Scripture says, ‘Whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame'” (Rom 10:11). We meet God in Christ, and this is what we were made for. The God shaped vacuum exposed in shame, is filled through participation in Paul’s “not ashamed” faith.
[1] Kenneth Tanner, Vulnerable God: How Jesus Upends Our Assumptions About God – and Shows Us How to Be Human (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2026), 70.