In this lecture by Dr. David Baggett at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln on March 30, 2022, he discusses C. S. Lewis' novel "Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold." Dr. Baggett explores the theme of shame in this story through the character of Oural and relates how shame affects our relationship with the world and those around us.
Editor’s note: Good Reasons Apologetics has graciously allowed us to republish their series, “One Good Reason” You can find the original post here.
For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths-2 Timothy 4:3
On September 12th, 2021 a 90 year old man named John Shelby Spong passed away in his sleep. Spong was an American Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey from 1979 to 2000. In the course of his tenure as Bishop and afterward, Spong wrote a number of books expressing his thoughts on God and Christianity. Spong’s works were not what you might guess would come from a person who had risen to such a position of prominence in a Christian church. Spong called for a “fundamental rethinking of Christian belief away from theism and traditional doctrines.” 1
Spong came up with what came to be called his 12 theses. Just as Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door at Wittenburg, Germany to call for a reformation of the Roman Catholic Church, Bishop Spong posted his 12 ideas for a new reformation of the Christian Church today. The 12 ideas Spong put forward included the ideas that the idea of God as we’ve always understood it is totally wrong, the story of a perfect creation and fall from grace is nonsense, there is no set of laws that can govern people for all time (think 10 Commandments), prayers to God are meaningless, the miracles of the Bible are untrue, there was no virgin birth of Jesus, the story of Christ’s death on a cross for the salvation of others is barbaric and primitive, and Jesus could not have been literally resurrected.
Of Bishop Spong’s 12 theses, the one that may be most telling is his belief that, “the hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.”
I would argue that it was the last idea that led to him trying to sell the other 11 as facts, with much pushback from scholars I might add. With the exception of a few sociopaths, being guilty is a problem for us. In the course of interviewing many people suspected or known to have committed crimes, clues of someone lying all boiled down to the person being physically uncomfortable with lying or facing the idea of their own guilt. I also found that when a true confession came, there was a tremendous sense of relief by the confessor. The burden of hiding the truth was over, and they were almost always visibly relieved to let the truth be known, despite the consequences.
Spong followed the patterns of many “critical” scholars who have attempted to dig holes under all of the things that the first 2000 years of Chirstianity claimed to be true of itself, such as the idea that God created everything perfectly, mankind is fallen, we have all sinned, and therefore we all need the sacrifice of Christ crucified to return us to fellowship with our Creator. In his attempts to remove an all knowing, all powerful God, creation, sin, guilt and Christ’s work on the cross, Spong was ultimately trying to provide another way out of guilt that he seemed to be accusing Christianity of using against its members. However, if we are honest with ourselves we all know the truth. We know we are guilty anyway. Like a defendant pleading not guilty, just because you say it doesn’t make it true.
Like me, I am confident that you have done things you wish you could take back. You have had to be forgiven, or pay the price for things you’ve done. People know the guilt is there without needing to go to church. We make excuses for our behavior, but that doesn’t get rid of guilt. However, the sooner we acknowledge the truth of our own guilt, the sooner we can work to reconcile those we have hurt. Even if it’s the Creator of the universe.
Tony Williams is currently serving in his 20th year as a police officer in a city in Southern Illinois. He has been studying apologetics in his spare time for two decades, since a crisis of faith led him to the discovery of vast and ever-increasing evidence for his faith. Tony received a bachelor's degree in University Studies from Southern Illinois University in 2019. His career in law enforcement has provided valuable insight into the concepts of truth, evidence, confession, testimony, cultural competency, morality, and most of all, the compelling need for Christ in the lives of the lost. Tony plans to pursue postgraduate studies in apologetics in the near future to sharpen his understanding of the various facets of Christian apologetics. Tony has been married for 9 years and has two sons. He and his family currently reside in Southern Illinois.
Whereas guilt reveals that we have morally transgressed, shame pertains more to who we are, not just what we have done. And so shame can be particularly damaging if we allow it to detract from recognizing the value we have in God, which it can all too easily do. If we become convinced that we are useless, that our lives are pointless, that we as people lack value, it becomes exponentially harder to see ourselves as creations of God with infinite dignity and value and worth. The topic of shame is thus vitally important for moral apologists to think about and understand.
A temptation is to think that all shame is bad—nothing but a toxic emotion. Whereas guilt might be fine, shame is thought to just saddle us with needless negative emotional baggage. Victims of abuse may feel great shame over what happened to them, even though they did nothing wrong. That is undeserved shame, and the problem is not theirs. It’s all of ours; we need to listen to such victims, not sideline them, nor silence them, but give them a voice and really hear them. There is also deserved shame, however. If I do something shameful, I should feel shame—if I were the abuser of that victims we just discussed, for example. Not that anyone should let shame decimate their sense of self or think of themselves as unredeemable, nor should engage in the practice of shaming. That is different, and little compatible with loving our neighbors as ourselves. To get a better understanding of shame, both undeserved and deserved, let’s consider an example of both.
If you have the time, watch the first half of the following clip.
It is a 1981 YouTube clip of Mister Rogers hosting a ten-year-old wheelchair-bound Jeffrey Erlanger. They had originally met five years before, and Rogers remembered him and invited him to his Neighborhood. Fred would later say that these unscripted ten minutes were his most memorable moment on television. The scene is deeply moving, and if there’s any doubt as to why, I might suggest it has to do, at least in part, with this matter of shame. Ours is sadly a society in which certain people—those who have been sexually abused, those with visible disabilities—carry a stigma and are often, for no fault of their own, riddled with a sense of shame—a loss of social standing, and a resultant tendency to shrink and hide. It threatens their sense of humanity. The solution has to be communal—usually involving someone with social capital to spare conferring honor upon them.
And that is exactly what makes those ten minutes of television so undeniably magical. It is a simply profound microcosm of the divine love that deigns and condescends to broken and marginalized people and, in the process, exalts them, replacing shame with honor, beauty for ashes. Mister Rogers gets eye level with Jeff, asks him about his experiences, gives the boy a chance to share about his condition and feelings, and talks to him like a friend. Like Mister Rogers did for Jeffrey—who was on the stage years later to confer on Rogers his Lifetime Achievement Award—this is a means by which to make goodness attractive, which is sort of part of our job description as Christians. It’s an important way to love God and our neighbor.
And now an example of deserved shame. The pages of scripture are replete with narratives of honor and shame, from Adam and Eve to the story of the prodigal son and lots in between. You know the story of the prodigal son. He insists on his inheritance ahead of time and engages in profligate spending and living, bringing shame on himself and an almost complete loss of social standing as a result. Finally, he repents and comes home, and the father, seeing him far off, comes running to him with a kiss and embrace. Here is a young man who did shame-worthy things. He felt shame, and he deserved to, and he couldn’t fix it on his own. He needed someone to confer on him the honor he had lost.
And this gives us as believers a simply wonderful opportunity. As Gregg Ten Elshof puts it in his forthcoming excellent book For Shame, “All of us, whether we have social capital to spare or not, are in a position to remind those around us that each and every person is loved and pursued by the God of the universe. The maker of heaven and earth is in a full sprint—robes and all—to embrace you, kiss you, put a ring on your finger, and throw a feast in your honor. Whatever the opinion of the company you keep, you are of immeasurable value to the One who matters most. You are so valuable that the God of the universe suffered the indignity of limited human form, betrayal, public humiliation, and naked crucifixion to rescue you not just from guilt, but also from the shame of your condition, all to enjoy an eternal life of friendship and communion with you.”
If there is any doubt that this is what the life and work of Jesus was all about, recall the OT passage that inaugurated his public ministry in Luke, from Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord GOD is on Me, because the LORD has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and freedom to the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor and the day of our God’s vengeance, to comfort all who mourn, to console the mourners in Zion—to give them a crown of beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and a garment of praise for a spirit of despair.”
David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.
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“The message of the gospel—God’s act of forgiveness and salvation in Jesus—is rooted in hesed. Hesed describes the disposition of God’s heart not only toward His people but to all humanity. The love of God extends far beyond duty or expectation. His forgiveness of sin fulfills a need that is basic to all other needs in the relationship between human beings and God—the restoration and continuation of fellowship with God in Jesus Christ. God’s hesed manifested in forgiveness makes a relationship with Him possible. That forgiveness comes to us freely as a gift from God based on the sacrificial act of Christ.”
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