Putting the shameful body to death: some critiques and a way forward in the soteriology of shame

Disposal of shame

Forrester is representative of many of the proposed shame-based Gospel presentations in his contention that ‘the Gospel is about displacing shame with honor’. But it is worth asking the question: Is this actually recognisable as an effective solution to the problem of shame? In other words, do we see, in the honour-shame systems of this world, examples in which the overlaying of honour is an effective mechanism for the disposal of shame?

Bruce Malina distinguishes between two forms of honour: the ‘male aspect’ of ‘honour as social eminence’ and the ‘female aspect’ of shame or ‘honour as goodness’. ¹¹ This is confirmed in Clementine van Eck’s study of honour killings amongst Turks, ¹² which demonstrates how the Turkish words șeref and namus correspond to the male and female aspects of honour, respectively.

Considering the ‘male aspect’ of honour, Malina further points out that honour is a ‘socially recognised claim to worth’ (p. 34, emphasis ours). The problem is that Christianity is not a socially esteemed religion in much of the world; those turning to Christ frequently find that their social eminence is, in fact, diminished. To tell someone from the outcast Buraku communities in Japan that God is not ashamed of them does not help them very much if everyone around them still is; to tell them that God covers them with His own honour has no cash value in a society that does not recognise such a form of honour.

And so if honour is to be understood as a function of social status, it is not sufficient to say that on the one hand, God bestows honour upon His people, yet on the other that the honour God bestows is so different in degree and value from the world’s version of honour that it is socially unrecognisable and hence fails to transform the social status of its recipients.

If the male aspect of honour does not apply, then this leaves the female aspect (namus, ‘honour as goodness’), but Malina states that once lost, there is no mechanism by which such honour can be regained.

Perhaps an instructive example from the Bible is the parable of the prodigal son, Luke 15:11-32. It can be argued that in this pericope we see the son’s shame being covered by the father’s bestowing of symbols of honour – the shoes, the ring, the robe – upon the returning son. But this superficial reading misses a deeper point about the parable: everyone within this story is acting shamefully according to the standards of the time. In verse 12, the father allows his son to impugn his honour by giving in to his demands, while the older son abrogates his duty of chastising the wayward younger; at this point, the whole family would be considered a laughing stock. When the son returns, the father behaves in most ungentlemanly ways, both running out to meet him and initiating the reconciliation himself before the son begs forgiveness. At this point the father does not have a surplus of honour to bestow upon his son because he has squandered his own honour: ‘[E]ven at the moment of joyous celebration, the shame of the father is not removed’. ¹³ This is not a story about shame being overturned by honour, but rather about a Father who deliberately chooses to give up social honour and esteem in order to restore relationships.

So how is shame actually expiated and honour actually regained in contemporary society? Two examples from those areas of the world which have most prompted discussions of a gospel for the shamed will serve to demonstrate that, in both cases, the culturally understood way of disposing of one’s shame is not through the appropriation of the residual glory of another, but only through the death of the shameful body.

Japanese society is the most well-known example in which the expurgation of the shameful body restores honour. Suicide, whether ritual or otherwise, is the most widely accepted remedy for shame, despite its connotations of ritual impurity and pollution. ¹⁴ ‘Suicide, properly done, will, according to their tenets, clear his name and reinstate his memory’. ¹⁵

The only other permissible option for avoiding the social stigma of exposed shame is social ostracism, whether at the hands of others or self-imposed – by, for instance, disappearing and moving to a new location. ¹⁶ In either case, the shameful body is not redeemed through glorification but by removal from social interaction – ostracism is, essentially, social death. ¹⁷

In Turkish culture, Eck notes that honour killings are viewed as a key means of restoring the honour status of the killer. At risk of belabouring the point, the father of a daughter who has committed a shameful act does not restore the situation by covering his daughter with honour, loudly praising her background, upbringing, wisdom and character; what restores the situation is nothing other than the annihilation of the shameful body. The lack of honour is interpreted in the same way as the Japanese context, through the lenses of isolation and restoration:

Honour killings are committed to escape from this isolation. It is said that honour killers feel reborn after their deed. They have put an end to their social death and feel accepted once more by the community. ¹⁸

The connection between shame and death has also been noted by Western psychologists: while Westerners do not expiate shame through physical death or suicide except in extreme cases, our attempts to hide, to disappear, to distance ourselves from the shameful situation, to ‘wish the ground would swallow me up’ suggest at least a metaphorical sense of the same drive to put the shameful body to death. For Leon Wurmser, ‘shame’s aim is disappearance. This may be, most simply, in the form of hiding; most radically, in the form of dissolution’. ¹⁹ Similarly, Günter Harry Seilder sees ‘the thanatal drive-aim\dots to remain invisible (or in extreme cases to be extinguished)’ as ‘the genuine link between shame and death’. ²⁰

That there is a connection between the death of the shameful body and expiation should come as no surprise to Christians; it is a fundamental tenet of the faith that new life can only come about through death, ritually symbolised in baptism. What is surprising is that aspects of death and rebirth feature so little in shame-based gospel presentations.

From this we learn two things. First, an exploration of the gospel for the shamed must move beyond a transactional understanding of the restoration of honour ²¹ and integrate the notions of expurgation through death and rebirth through social (re-)integration. Second, we must question the traditional pairing of honour and shame. Indeed, equivocation of the term ‘shame’ has led to a category error. ²² We do not regard shame as the lack of honour; indeed we have seen that an outpouring of honour does not in fact wipe away shame. To put this another way, those Gospel paradigms which seek to redress a lack of human honour do not, as such, deal with the problem of the psychological shame affect.

The reason for this is that the desire to acquire honour and the desire to dispose of shame are, in reality, separate and orthogonal consequences of the fundamental problem of human identity. As we shall see later, the problem of human identity is that we as humans derive our identity and self-worth from, as it were, the gaze of one another rather than the gaze of God. This highlights the necessity, when seeking a soteriological model of shame, of proceeding from the basis of a theological understanding of shame rather than taking one’s cue from anthropology or sociology. ²³

This difference between the horizontal (social) and vertical (theological) dimensions of identity leads us to the next area of critique.

Horizontal and vertical dimensions

One reason why missiologists may be drawn to a presentation of the Gospel in which a surplus of honour is given to humanity to provide a covering for shame – despite the lack of anthropological attestation for such a model – is that, in a sense, very little needs to change from a classical sin-based understanding. We replace the words ‘sin’ with ‘shame’, ‘righteousness’ with ‘honour’, and we are done: Christ takes away our ‘shame’ and gives us his ‘honour’. But we do not believe that this takes sufficient account of the true nature of shame.

Shame operates between humans, on the horizontal, social dimension. ‘Shame is related in a unique way to the breakdown of interpersonal relations in the human family’. ²⁴ Shame was originally experienced by our archetypal ancestors in the eyes of each other and represents a misplaced frame of reference, caused by deriving one’s identity from the evaluation of one another rather than from the evaluation of God. The Bible gives no hint that God was ashamed of them, but rather Genesis 3:7 suggests that the man and his wife were ashamed of themselves when they became aware of the evaluative gaze of one another. Once the divine frame of reference had been lost, humans sought to gain their own honour by constructing a social identity on their own terms. At the Fall, this was done through the use of clothing to manipulate the identity seen by the other; subsequent to the Fall, social identity and worth was constructed through competition, self-aggrandisation and the denigration of the other as can be seen in the stories of Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel and others.

Certainly, a necessary part of a solution to this horizontal problem is a correct restoration of the frame of reference for human identity: we must re-learn to see ourselves as God sees us and to derive our values of status and honour from His value system. However, shame remains fundamentally a horizontal problem of interpersonal relations: I feel ashamed because of the gaze of my neighbour, their evaluation of my identity and my perception of their evaluation. However, the solutions we have examined all deal with shame as though it were purely a vertical problem, a problem which exists between God and humanity. In other words, they shift the problem from ‘I feel ashamed of myself’ or ‘others feel ashamed of me’ to ‘God is ashamed of me’.

But is the problem that God is ashamed of us? Our understanding of God’s purpose in covering Adam and Eve (Gen. 3:21) is not that God is ashamed to see the naked human flesh and must cover it up, but that God is aware of and deals with the problem of humans living in a state of vulnerability before one another. Garments of skin allow Adam and Eve to live with each other; God’s shame solution operates on a horizontal level, and so should ours. Our understanding of shame must clearly differentiate between the horizontal (my identity before others) and the vertical (my identity before God); failure to do so has even led missiologists down the track of inverting the vertical problem, claiming that God has a shame problem and needs to have His glory restored! ²⁵

It is this reframing of shame from horizontal to vertical terms which leads us to suspect that these proposed missiological treatments of shame are actually treatments for guilt in disguise. Many centuries of Western theology have prepared us very well for providing solutions to vertical problems between God and humanity, and established patterns of thinking are hard to change. Certainly Wu, from a Reformed perspective, reinterprets the problem of shame as a problem in humanity’s relationship with God and, despite using the language of shame and face, presents what is essentially a classical penal substitution solution. A similarly transactional and vertical understanding of salvation is equally prevalent in other shame-based Gospel presentations: despite acknowledging the salvific nature of being placed into a new (horizontal) social community, it is telling that Georges and Baker seek to demonstrate ‘how Jesus rescues people from spiritual shame before God’ (p. 182, emphasis ours).

Unfortunately, these approaches fail from the perspective of missiological application. The problem is that telling someone they have received honour from God does not change their horizontal relationships at all; the struggle of shame that they experience in regard to those around them is unchanged. Mischke argues that ‘our positional identification with Christ should lead to an experiential reality’, with which we wholeheartedly agree. But his own Gospel presentation leaves the mechanism for this unclear. How is it that an honour-shame transaction, on what is essentially a transcendental level, becomes appropriated by the believer into an experiential transformation in their everyday human relationships?

Jesus’ attitude to honour and shame

A third area in which many of these treatments are lacking is that the remedies for shame that they offer continue to perpetuate corrupt and fallen understandings of honour. The identity problem tells us that human honour-shame systems are fundamentally attempts to derive status and power without reference to God; honour in these terms, even honour in some sense ‘restored’ or ‘reimagined’, cannot be the final destination of a contextual model of salvation for the shamed.

At almost every point in his life and ministry, Jesus rejects or subverts the existing values of honour and shame and delivers a new set of standards for those who follow him which are in clear opposition to the world. ²⁶ Indeed, Jesus’ relationship to the honour and shame systems proceeds in two directions. On the one hand, as many commentators have pointed out, he demonstrates that he can play the honour and shame game better than anyone. ²⁷ At the same time, Jesus does not accept the social categories of his day, choosing to associate with the shameful and impure. ²⁸ He clearly does not feel the need to be accepted as honourable on the world’s terms: he is experienced at gaining this-worldly honour, but, at the same time, uninterested by it.

The temptation in the wilderness is the supreme example of confrontation between worldly and heavenly understandings of honour. As Schmutzer argues, Satan offers Jesus the opportunity to acquire honour and status for himself through demonstrations of temporal power and authority, which he categorically rejects. ²⁹

Jesus’ refusal to accept honour on the world’s terms sets the course for his inauguration of a new order of community, in which the last is first and the first is last, and those seeking positions of honour must assume the position of a slave (Matt. 20:25-27) – something he himself modelled through his incarnation (Phil 2:6-7). Jesus’ rejection of this-worldly honour-shame systems was made complete by his acceptance, ‘for the joy set before him’ (Heb 12:2), of a death by crucifixion, the most shameful death imaginable at the time. ³⁰ Not only does Jesus fully accept the cross, but he transforms its shame-inducing power. ³¹

It is therefore inappropriate for a soteriological treatment of shame to present honour as the salvific end state. Christ does not leave this fundamentally human system unchallenged and unchanged; he does not play the honour-shame game and he does not expect his followers to play it either. Indeed, Christians are expected not just to ‘call off the honour game’ but to totally ‘vacate the playing field’. ³² A model of salvation for shame must incorporate Jesus’ rejection and inversion of honour-shame dynamics and his call for his followers to participate in a rejection of the value systems of this world. If one is still seeking honour, can one indeed be saved?

Jesus’ identification with shame

Kraus makes it clear that the cross was

designed above all to be an instrument of contempt and public ridicule. Crucifixion was the most shameful treatment execution imaginable. The victim died naked, in bloody sweat, helpless to control body excretions or brush away the flies. Thus exposed to the jeering crowd, the criminal died a spectacle of disgrace. By Roman law no citizen could be so dishonorably executed. The cross was reserved for foreigners and slaves. ³³

On hearing Kraus’ description of the crucifixion, one of our Korean students remarked that her understanding of the cross was profoundly transformed when she realised that Jesus was naked. What was previously an intellectual and theological acceptance of propitiation became personal when the dynamic of shame was introduced. For Stockitt too, ‘his own nakedness is a necessary component in redeeming and healing all those whose bodies have been violated’. ³⁴ The fact that Jesus experienced situations of extreme shame and, as we shall see, demonstrated his glory through them gives hope to those who are experiencing the burden of shame themselves.

The presence of Jesus amongst the socially excluded demonstrates his commitment to identifying with their state and through that provides them with an alternate understanding of honour and shame. ³⁵ This can be seen in his interaction with the woman with the issue of blood (Luke 8:43-48). First, Jesus focuses the attention of the crowd upon a woman who is ritually impure. Then by highlighting to them the fact that she has touched him, he has the crowd recognise an act which under normal circumstances would lead to his ritual defilement and humiliation. At this point, he stands with her in her shame and impurity. But then the situation is transformed; the normal rules do not apply, and what should by rights have put him to shame has brought her to honour. Georges gives a similar explanation of Jesus’ interaction with the sinful woman at the house of Simon the Pharisee in terms of Jesus ‘taking on the shame in her place’, ³⁶ as does Bailey for the woman caught in adultery. ³⁷ Hence Forrester concludes that God, by taking human shame on himself, ‘thus restores lost people to their place and identity in the community’. ³⁸

In short,

The love of God expressed itself through his solidarity with us in Jesus and especially through his shameful death on the cross. Jesus identified with the ‘poor’. ‘He was born and raised among the lower classes, associated with outcasts, and chose artisans, fisher folk and tax collectors for his disciples. He belonged to the multitudes whom the religious leaders pronounced “accursed because they knew not the law”’ (John 7:49). He identified with the socially excluded and despised and shared the stigma of their inferiority. The cross is the epitome of this identification with us in shame. ³⁹

The cross is therefore the consummation of what we might call Jesus’ incarnation into shame, began as detailed in Phil.~2:6-8 with his kenosis and identification with the most shameful situations. And yet at the cross too, Jesus transforms the shame into honour.

Subverting and inverting shame

David deSilva interprets Jesus’ crucifixion as a means of judging the world’s value system and finding it wanting, in effect, putting the human judgement to shame. ⁴⁰ In its rejection of God’s perfect gift, humanity demonstrated the emptiness and failure of its own measures of social evaluation, and by extension, the futility of living according to humanity’s standards. It is in this sense that ‘having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross’ (Col 2:15).

In what way was the cross an inversion of shame standards? Neyrey describes the ‘ironic perspective’ of the passion narrative in the Gospel of John, approaching the topic on two levels. ⁴¹ On the first level, Neyrey points out that the attempts of the Jewish and Roman authorities to put Jesus to a shameful death backfire spectacularly: Jesus is presented at all times as being a position of honour and control, in comparison with the soldiers who fall at his feet (18:6), the Jewish leaders admitting their powerlessness (18:31) and Pilate’s dishonourable justice and weakness before the crowd (19:6-12) and culminating in the Jewish authorities’ rejection implicitly of Jesus’ lordship and explicitly of God’s lordship over them (19:15b). Meanwhile, Jesus’ honour is maintained by his control over his own life and death (10:17-18), his unblemished body (19:33-36) and his reverential burial in a rich man’s tomb (19:38-42).

Hence, what was intended to be a shameful situation should rightly have been regarded as an honourable one, and yet those taking part in Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion could not or would not recognise it as such. ‘[I]n the eyes of outsiders and enemies, his crucifixion is unqualified shame! But in the eyes of his disciples, it is ironic honor’. On this first level, we too conclude that the world’s value systems are faulty because the prejudices of the observers against Jesus led them to an unfaithful evaluation even by their own standards, while the disciples are regarded as accurate arbiters of honour. ⁴²

On the second level, however, it is to these same disciples that Jesus has entrusted a radically different standard of honour-shame dynamics: ‘last is first, least is greatest, dead is alive, shame is honor’. This finds its ultimate expression in the exaltation of persecution and martyrdom as the greatest sources of honour within the Christian community, as noted by McVann, who continues:

This reversal, however, is much stronger than a mere up-ending of the status quo. Mark’s interests range far beyond protest and social criticism. Rather, the consequences of the reversal are so powerful that the very system of honor-shame itself is thrown open to question. ⁴³

We can therefore say that Jesus’ teaching and crucifixion exposes the emptiness and conditional nature of human standards of evaluation, ⁴⁴ vindicates the community of Jesus as faithful and righteous evaluators of God’s honour perspective and inaugurates within them a new set of standards which constitute an inversion of the world’s systems of status.

Putting the shameful body to death

We have seen that the primary means that human societies – in Turkey, in Japan and in the West – have found to dispose of the burden of shame is to put the shameful body to death. This naturally leads to a problem if one wishes to dispose of one’s shame and yet continue living! To solve the problem of shame, one must have both death and new life. Hence, on the one hand, Christ both identifies with our shame in his own body and puts that shame to death, but on the other hand he also invites us to participate with him in his death and rising to new life. The means of appropriating this death and new life is through the sacrament of baptism.

From the very beginnings of the Church, baptism has denoted the public initiation of a convert. The sacrament is naturally multifaceted, and the Bible itself interprets baptism through a variety of metaphors and explanations. Traditional interpretations, even from earliest times, have naturally viewed baptism through the lens of repentance and sanctification, ⁴⁵ in line with the Jewish tradition of proselyte baptism. This understanding itself has implications for our treatment of human shame; Campbell interprets Jesus’ own baptism despite his sinlessness as a deliberate choice to undergo a shameful experience: ‘In submitting to the humiliating ritual of a public profession of penitence, Christ was identifying himself with the cause of sinners’. ⁴⁶ Here too we see Christ’s identification not just with our humanity but particularly with our experience of shame.

Paul, however, deepens the Jewish interpretation of baptism by adding another sacramental layer of meaning. For Paul, baptism is the ‘ritual reenactment of the death and resurrection of Jesus’, ⁴⁷ through which the believer is united with Christ. In particular, union with Christ through baptism is a means by which the believer themselves comes to participate in the death and resurrection of Christ (Romans 6:3-5). Baptism ‘is the moment Paul has in mind throughout when he speaks of dying with Christ’ and ‘actualizes the saving events of Christ’s death and resurrection for the baptized’. ⁴⁸ Sanders notes that for Paul, the significance of Christ’s death was not merely that sins would be expiated, but that in Christ ‘all have died’, seeing this primarily in terms of participation. ⁴⁹ Ritual participation in Christ’s death through baptism allows the believer to die, and their participation in his resurrection allows them a new life and, in particular, life in a new community.

New social identity

The need for this new community comes from the fact that, as we have argued, a gospel which restores the shamed must be effective in the social, horizontal dimension. If baptism is a sacrament which puts the shameful body to death, then the symbolically resurrected believer must be initiated into a new identity: not just as metaphysical future hope but as a present social reality. Indeed, there is a fundamental connection between the salvific work of Christ and the transformation of horizontal relationships. ‘What orthodox Protestant tradition has not seemed to recognize is that the changed pattern of relationships is an essential part of the gospel of salvation itself’. ⁵⁰

It is for this reason that baptism is seen not just as a symbol of death but also of initiation into the new society that Christ inaugurated, that is, the Church. After all, it is only within the Church that the honour of God is, in Malina’s terms, ‘socially recognised’.

The Church that Christ initiated is the locus of salvation for the shamed and forms a society which restores God to His rightful place as the fundamental reference point for human identity. In 1 Co. 12, Paul depicts the church as a body in which those parts of the body which seem to be weaker are indispensable and the parts that we think are less honourable we treat with special honour.

This is not a compensatory move on Paul’s part by means of which those of lower status are to be compensated for their low position by a benefaction of honor. Rather, his rhetoric pushes for an actual reversal of the normal, ‘this worldly’ attribution of honor and status. The lower is made higher, and the higher lower. ⁵¹

In other words, Paul has the expectation that the Church operates according to evaluations of honour and status which are fundamentally opposed to that of the world. ⁵² His vision of the Church is not just a renewed society, but a reinstatement of the original society, ‘modelling genuine human existence’, ⁵³ with each member deriving identity and status not from one another but (as per Paul’s perennial theme) from their identity ‘in Christ’.

The net effect of this is that considering the work of Jesus from the perspective of shame has given us a perspective which seamlessly integrates that which Western Christianity often struggles to hold in tension: the ethical teachings of Christ, his redemptive and representative sacrifice and the body of believers. Each of these elements makes a necessary contribution to God’s answer to the problem not just of shame, but of mis-derived human identity.

On this point, we must be cautious not to suggest a humanistic Gospel where the Church saves itself through some form of group therapy and mutual acceptance. The solution for shame remains christocentric: it is Christ who identifies with our shame, disposes of our shame and who raises us to new life in a social setting he established and which is permeated by his being.

Moreover, it is only through the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit that the Christian community can operate in such a counter-cultural manner. As Patty Toland has powerfully demonstrated, ⁵⁴ the church is often guilty of playing honour-shame games to the world’s rules rather than the rules of Jesus. It is clear that our transformation into a community of grace is not complete; but the conceptualisation of church as a space where shame can be disposed of and new social identity can be actualised underscores the need for such a transformation and such grace. Indeed,

. . . the pursuit of honor can lead to a need for repeated recognition and improved status through jockeying for higher positions, which often damages the church and quenches the work of the Holy Spirit.

The antithesis of shame is not honour, but pride and hubris. ⁵⁵ It is precisely because Christ upended, ridiculed and destroyed the power of the world’s standard that there can be no place within the community of Christ for a perpetuation or reincorporation of those standards, and this is a further reason that we believe that models of salvation which are constructed around the concept of displacing shame with honour are not satisfactory. We must live our life together with our eyes fixed on Him, and not with one eye on one another.