EMQ » April–June 2021 » Volume 57 Issue 2
By Lewis Varley
The aim of this article is to reflect again on the now commonly used categories of honour-shame and guilt-innocence cultures, and the implications of this categorization for gospel ministry. My concern is the assumption of shame-honour-based approaches as almost a silver bullet guaranteeing a better hearing for the gospel. In turn, the danger may be that we are losing sight of the core of the gospel message.
Commonly heard approaches to this topic tend to go something like this:
The reason why the gospel has not been accepted in many cultures is because it has been communicated in concepts that are alien to the local culture and worldview. We have used language flowing from the law courts of Europe that cannot be readily understood in these cultures. We need to present the gospel in terms of honour and shame worldviews.
My goal is simply to apply a handbrake, and to encourage more careful study and reflection on the biblical material before we assume we’ve found a quick-fix for presenting the gospel in the harder places of the world. I structure this by simply asking four questions of those who champion honour-and-shame understandings as a core part of gospel communication.
Reflection 1
Are you in danger of rejecting central elements of biblical theology because of pre-conceptions about those who have highlighted them?
One of the groundings put forward by gospel for shame culture practitioners is that the gospel has been too weighted to a legal guilt-innocence worldview, and this has happened because many of the early theologians were lawyers. Roland Muller, in his book The Messenger, The Message, The Communitywrites: “There are many more examples of theologians who were also lawyers, or who studied law (such as Martin Luther), but those listed here will have to suffice to point out that legal thought and expression had much to do with the development of the theology of the early Western Church and the Reformation.”[1]
Muller mentions seven theologians in these pages, and of these, there is some doubt as to whether six of them really were lawyers:
Tertullian: evidence of his training and vocation is limited.
Augustine: in his comments on Augustine, I think Muller confuses rhetoric with being a lawyer: the former would be useful in the law court, but while Augustine was undoubtedly trained in rhetoric, I can find little evidence he was a lawyer in any conventional sense.
Ambrose: while he studied law, along with literature and rhetoric (as would have been common for young men of means in those days), there is no evidence he ever practiced as a lawyer.
Calvin: received training but did not practice extensively as a lawyer.
Arnauld Antoine: never practiced law; he initially intended to work as a lawyer but changed to study theology.
Luther: under pressure from his father he enrolled in law studies but dropped out almost immediately to study theology.
Basil the Great: the only one who would seem to fall into our category of lawyer.
Muller’s argument seems to be that none of these men, due to their “brush with the (Roman) law,” can be relied on to give us a fully rounded and comprehensive explanation of the gospel. Muller calls their understanding of the gospel, a Roman one, and “The Roman Connection” (the title of Muller’s fourteenth chapter) makes them suspect. Thus, simply because they were lawyers, we need to hold their thinking at arm’s length.
I think the danger here is of what C. S. Lewis described in a 1941 essay as Bulverism. Lewis wrote: “Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father – who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third … ‘Oh you say that because you are a man.’”[2] (emphasis in the original).
Reflection 2
Are you too hasty to denigrate the efforts of our forebears?
One of the dangers of over-reliance on new models in missiology is that they tend to lead us to look down on our predecessors as in some way unenlightened. Muller suggests that the relative fruitlessness of missions outside of the west is due to our failure to correctly understand the gospel: “We fruitlessly spend untold hours and incalculable amounts of energy explaining to someone that he is guilty of sin, and needs to be justified before God.”[3]
Some observations:
- Muller presents at best a caricature of evangelism in the harder countries of the world. Is the situation really as clear-cut as he describes, viz. if only people heard the gospel in terms of honour and shame they would readily respond? Did we really have to wait until Ruth Benedict’s 1946 The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (which popularized notions of shame cultures and guilt cultures) to fully understand the gospel and where we had been going wrong all these years? Are there other, much more complex, factors which prevent people from responding to the gospel?
- Guilt, sin, and justification wouldn’t be the only words I’d want to use in sharing my faith with a neighbour in the majority world. But Muller is telling me here that they are fruitless words.
- I recently heard an advocate of honour-and-shame approaches to evangelism reflect that, of the converts he had talked with on a recent visit to an Asian country, few mentioned a perception of personal sin as being significant in their conversion: this did not appear to be a major concern to the speaker.
In adopting a new understanding of the gospel, are at least some of those promoting honour-and-shame approaches at risk of overlooking central elements of what the biblical gospel is all about?
Reflection 3
Can honour-shame language carry the full wonder of what the gospel is and does?
One concern I have with a reliance on honour and shame language, at the expense of guilt-innocence language, is that it may lead us away from a focus on sin as an offence, first-and-foremost, against God: “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” (Psalm 51:4). Michael Horton writes: “Sin’s character is not sufficiently appreciated when it is reduced simply to broken lives and relationships between human beings or even to the individual’s subjective sense of anxiety, guilt and alienation from God.”[4]
Horton makes an important point that we easily overlook, especially in this modern age where people are identified so much with their feelings.[5] Shame, in the sense in which it is described by those writing on honour-shame cultures, is essentially a feeling or perception.[6] Is a focus on this sufficient to help people begin to understand an alienation from God, even if that is not perceived?
Feelings of shame may arise because you have been caught (more on that below). Or they may arise in the case of ‘innocent shame’ (for example, where a member of a family feels shame because of something bad done to them or their family by another). In that case, such feelings may be most closely related to feelings of suffering. Suffering may or may not be related to personal sin, but no one would want to claim that the two are the same thing. My point here is simply to highlight that shame is a more complex phenomenon than much writing on the subject would imply.
Beyond this, there is a question of how my personal feelings of shame, which may not be based in any moral breach, relate to Christ’s death. In Mark 10:45 Jesus teaches his disciples that he has come “to give his life as a ransom for many.” But how does this relate to personal feelings of shame? This is unclear in much of the discussion. It seems to be largely assumed that there is some kind of connection. I would suggest that this is because there is an absence of clear connection in the biblical texts, just as there is an absence of connection between sin and suffering in scripture.
A central theme running all the way through the Bible is that God’s people failed to realize they were guilty before God. This was true of Israel for much of her history; true of the Jews in Jesus’ day (the really bad people were tax collectors, et al.); and true of all of us for much of our own lives too. That’s surely why most of us are caught, not so much by Romans 1 (where Paul describes the really bad people), but Romans 2:1 – we love to look down on others as morally inferior. While we may experience feelingsof guilt and shame on specific occasions, we find the objective truth that we are rebels against a Holy God somewhat more difficult to believe, precisely because we don’t feel we are.
I am reminded of a story I heard of a pastor showing a visitor around the church where he worked. At the front of a church was a sculpture depicting the ten commandments on the left-hand side of the sculpture and the Apostles Creed on the right. “I can’t believe any of that,” said the visitor, referring to the Creed. The quick-thinking pastor replied: “That’s because you don’t realize you’ve broken anything on the left.”
Reflection 4
Does the gospel only change individuals, or can it change cultures?
One unintentional consequence of a strong focus on honour-shame cultures is a narrowing of the expectation of what the gospel can do. The question is raised: does God do a new thing through his word, or not? A few weeks ago I was hearing the testimony of an Indian woman. She came to faith in Jesus through one of her teachers in high school. This Indian schoolteacher was no doubt using a “Roman, legal” approach to presenting the gospel, but it made an impact. “I had no idea I was a sinner before God,” said my friend, “but the more I heard, the more I realized I was.” The gospel actually creates new channels of awareness in the lives of those it impacts.
Advocates of using honour-shame worldviews as a conduit for the gospel risk unintentionally depriving the gospel of transformative power. If we make the culture the be-all and end-all, and the gospel is not allowed to challenge the culture as being in any way wrong, will we end up finding it very hard to bring disciples to maturity? The danger is of seeking to pour the new wine of the gospel into the old wineskins of cultural forms. Or, to add to the models suggested by H. Richard Niebuhr, of moving to a model of “Christ under Culture.”[7]
Honor-shame advocates seem to display curious blind spots as to problems within these cultures.[8] In his book The Reason for God, Tim Keller cites the work of historian C. John Sommerville in showing how early preaching among Christian monks in Anglo-Saxon Britain led to cultural transformation: “Christianity changed those honour-based cultures in which pride was valued rather than humility, dominance rather than service, courage rather than peaceableness, glory rather than modesty, loyalty to one’s tribe rather than equal respect for all.”[9]
What Keller is highlighting is the impact the gospel has on culture because it is God’s power to change both individuals and whole societies.[10] The gospel message, and indeed the whole of Scripture, is radically counter-cultural – to everymanmade culture. We run a huge risk if we limit the scope of the gospel by fastening it into localized cultural wineskins. If the channel of the gospel is somehow through concepts of shame, where all that matters is not getting caught, and where personal honour and social esteem are central, I’m likely to end up with young disciples who simply translate those same values into their understanding of Christian living. It is going to be much harder to see radical transformation both in their lives, and in wider society.
Conclusion
John Piper writes: “Don’t aim to preach only in categories of thought that can be readily understood by this generation. Aim at creating biblical categories of thought that are not present. Another way to put it is to use the terminology of Andrew Walls: Don’t embrace the indigenous principle of Christianity at the expense of the pilgrim principle. The indigenous principle says, ‘I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some’ (1 Corinthians 9:22). The pilgrim principle says, ‘Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind’ (Romans 12:2).”[11]
Can the gospel no longer surprise us, disturb our cultural trends, no longer create new ways of looking at life because it must be domesticated to the demands of the culture, by which it is thereby subsumed? I believe much more careful, ongoing reflection is needed in this area.
Lewis Varley was involved in cross-cultural ministry in London before moving to a South Asian country, where he and his family lived for seventeen years. He now lives in New Zealand, where he is involved in Bible teaching and organizing TEE-based ministries.
NOTES
[1] Roland Muller, The Messenger, The Message, The Community (Turkey: CanBooks, 2006), 161.
[2] Clive Staples Lewis, “Notes on the Way,” Time and Tide XXII (March 29, 1941).
[3] Muller, The Messenger, 166.
[4] Michael Horton, For Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: Harper Collins/Zondervan, 2011), 84.
[5] On this, see atheist historian Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus (London, UK: Harvill Secker, 2016), 223. Harari writes: “For centuries humanism has been convincing us that we are the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will is therefore the highest authority of all. Instead of waiting for some external entity to tell us what’s what, we can rely on our own feelings and desires.”
[6] It is arguable that, in contrast, at least some usages of shame language in Scripture are synonyms for a more objective guilt (e.g., 1 Corinthians 15:34, where Paul has to tell the Corinthians of their shame, because they obviously don’t feel it!).
[7] H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1951).
[8] For examples of cultures impacted by honor-shame dynamics, see Thomas Barfield, ed., The Dictionary of Anthropology (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1997), 243–244.
[9] Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 61; Keller identifies further limitations of shame-honour cultures in the way they handle suffering in a recent talk in response to the COVID-19 outbreak: Tim Keller, “Peace in Times of Suffering and Uncertainty,” The Gospel Coalition, video, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/video/keller-peace-uncertainty/.
[10] For more on the breadth of the scope of biblical theology as God’s plan for the transformation of the whole world, see Christopher Wright, The Mission of God’s People (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010).
[11] John Piper, “Contending for Our All: The Life and Ministry of Athanasius,” 2005 Bethlehem Conference for Pastors, February 1, 2005, https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/contending-for-our-all.
EMQ, Volume 57, Issue 2. Copyright © 2021 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
