The Purchase of Shame

The kingdom of God is that which is good.  The kingdom of the devil is that which is evil.  The two kingdoms occupy the same space and time, though presumably in greater or lesser intensity at each place or time in which they coexist.

This coexistence of the two kingdoms, insofar as they involve us as individuals, is not gainsaid by the powerful notion of the complete depravity of our souls--all of which this depravity must consist in the on-balance judgment of our inescapable tendency to render less-than-perfect (and therefore unholy) everything we touch.  That is not the same as to say that we are entirely bereft of wholesome tendencies.

Indeed, that very Creation that was once called "very good" is still "very good" in our possible appreciations.  Jesus calls our attentions to the wonders of nature and he reminds us that we--though being evil--are still capable of reflecting the virtues of God.  Even if we are reckoned to be "fallen," that state of depravity which is lamented so often in the Scriptures is never so great that it cannot be exceeded by the appearance of still more lamentable examples.

What is important is that this capacity for lamentation be still displayed within us, and directed to our own thoughts and actions--especially because at the end, when all is stripped away, the undiluted causes of our lamentation will be poured upon us.  This is the realm of shame, because guilt is measurable and compartmentalizable, and because humiliation is referenceable to particular contexts.  We are guilty against what we have done, and as measured against what others have done, and we are humiliated in the judgment of others--even if the "other" in question is the God who made us.  But shame?  Shame permeates us, and shame infuses its cast into every perception we have.

It is for the reason of shame, shame that soaks through every element of our still God-created selves and surroundings, that we will suffer the accusations at the very end of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah.  Not that they are better people than we (or that such relative judgment would even matter), but that their necessarily (though perhaps much attenuated) kingdom-of-God essence would still gain purchase upon everything--even as would also ours.

Shame in Focus

Inquiry into the nature of God, as I described in the previous post, always includes the idea of God as a moral being.  In fact, it is inevitable that any exploration of the nature of God will settle upon the idea of God as a moral being--to the exclusion of essentially every other consideration.

God as a moral being, considered as such in the absence of the notion of him possessing describable qualities such as appearance, location, or duration of existence, is essentially the God that humanity has arrived at over the course of civilization.  The universal primitive human attachment to deities, which persons might or might not take as "evidence" of God's existence, has been considered most typically as an effectual coalescing of conceptualized tribal or local deities into the idea of a universal God.

This is, of course, not necessarily so.  A universality of religion could be represented conceivably by any number of constellations, interlocking or not, of particular "gods," and the multiplicity of such "gods" themselves might be taken as "evidence" of their existence, but the inevitable intruding notion that there must be some matrix upon which those deities could exist seems almost to dictate the presence of some larger principle emblematic of a universal deity.  Whether any of the World's Great Religions might in particular be called "polytheistic" or not, it is undeniable that an overarching concept of a singular universal deity is intimately familiar to all of them.

However, a single One God need not be understood or represented in the moral sense alone.  Christianity can paint ceilings with God as an old man in the clouds, and God can be fixated upon as the God of History, and God can be reduced to any this-or-that figure of some preacher's conceit--and meanwhile someone else can opine upon the resulting representation as being unsuitable or morally objectionable.  This sort of representation--and this sort of virtually inevitable tut-tutting--is, however, the type of occasion in which the element of morality is injected (or not) by the wills of persons, while yet the idea of God as a moral being is merely one element of his considered nature.

But there is still to be considered the rub of God's existence as understood by humans in the experiential sense--or, that is to say, in the sense of our understanding God as a reality pressing upon us.  A universal God does not exist if he exists merely in the realm of conjecture, or even in the realm of adoration.  In the Gospels, the idea is presented of God incarnate in the person of Jesus.  Jesus is presented as sharing in our humanity and as knowing our experiences.  That Jesus is a "moral" person is of course presumed in the texts, and we are to understand that he comprehends our feelings--including most acutely our sufferings.  It might be postulated, however, that Jesus' experiential existence as a human being would be hampered in the most crucial fashion--that is, Jesus presumably could not, as a function of his becoming human, "experience" the remorse, the regret, or the shame of having sinned.

It is extremely important that Jesus is represented as having been tempted.  We are tempted (though rarely in such stark fashion as The Temptations in the Desert)--and none of us can pretend that the feeling of temptation to sin is a feeling that is un-occasioned by at least the fleeting sin of momentary hesitation.  Saying that in some instances we remain sinless because we do not commit any overt act that tempts us is futile for us to say, in that Jesus is most careful to tell us that the thought is at least a minor version of the deed.  But did not Jesus then commit sin in being tempted?  Can a sinless person be tempted?  As if to grind in this latter question most distinctly, we are confronted with Jesus not merely throwing off Peter's tempting prospect of avoiding the Crucifixion, but also with Jesus casting it back onto Peter in the most virulent fashion.

Again, did not Jesus commit sin in being tempted?  In such a consideration we come face-to-face with the sort of mental exercise that has always confounded humans.  Think of the age-old jibe--can God make a stone so large that even he could not lift it?  This question can be called silly or cynical, but that sort of retort sells God short.  Of course God can make a stone so large that even he could not lift it--and then he could lift it.  God could make and lift an infinite progression of larger and larger stones in a timeless instant.  For all we know, an infinitude of physical (as well as every other type of) phenomena might be the stable-state of the changeless God--what of it?  Do we not commit moral slights (at the very least) against God in conjecturing anything else?

And so we can draw ourselves up--even if only momentarily--against the question of how a sinless Jesus might be tempted.  For all we know, the "sin" quality of Jesus' temptations might have fled to infinite nothingness even as Jesus opened himself with infinite haste to the experience of that quality.  We don't know how a sinless Jesus could be tempted, and most importantly, we don't know how a sinless Jesus could be tempted.  (I intended that repetition.)  The really crucial aspect of this consideration is the realization that nothing but the moral aspect of the Incarnate God applies here--all else is foolishness.  And this is what we need to remember, if our faith is to be something other than foolishness--God is not good because he exists, God exists because he is good.  Fools yet we are, but in this realization we are at least honest.

If we understand God and his son Jesus as moral beings, and reckon that we cannot hope to understand them otherwise, then we can address ourselves to the lessons of the Gospels in straightforward fashion.  Commentators want to describe Jesus as having some sort of ineffable magnetism (since many of his instantaneous connections with persons seem inexplicable otherwise), but there is no reason to dally with a sloppy notion of that "ineffable."  The observers of his death are represented on balance as exclaiming either that Jesus was the Son of God, or that he was a righteous man--what was "ineffable" then seems to be rather obvious.  The Good Thief asserts that Jesus was undeserving of his punishment.  Judas--the only disciple described particularly as placing himself overtly in the clutches of the authorities--laments thereupon that he has betrayed innocent blood.  Jesus' existence as a moral being is the portrayed vitality of his ministry.

When we understand the import of God as a moral being, then we can begin to understand our proper response.  By "moral being," however, we must understand that even our most focused attentions upon God as a moral being--such that this attention would seem to annihilate any other conception we might entertain--is an insufficient attention.  Our concern for God, demanded in the ministry and the teachings of Jesus, cannot hope to comprehend the moral perfection of the deity as part of some scheme of salvation.  We cannot postulate some satisfaction for guilt other than that which is beyond our understanding, and we cannot display such humility as to overcome our intrinsic attachment to the aims of that display.  All we can do is be ashamed.

In short, the only way for us to be unashamed of Jesus and unashamed of the Gospel is for us to be ashamed of ourselves.

Shame Honestly

If I am to present shame as the genuine through-line of the teachings of Jesus, I will have to present a defensible scheme of justification of "shame" as a humanly-accessible premise for our existence.  Jesus addresses an audience, and the audience is expected to know not merely of shame, but also of the God before whom we are ashamed.

Shame is a simple notion (if perhaps a frustratingly complicated notion in our workings-out of our real-life existences) and God is a stark notion--if we will entertain in our own lives a straightforward version of belief (so straightforward, as it turns out, that the various versions and theories of "belief" waver and fade.)  We might think sometimes that we possess a God-ideation so innately that we can call it unquestioned belief--this is not so.  We might think sometimes that we possess a God-theory so manifest in logic that we can call it unquestionable belief--this is not so.  What we can possess straightforwardly, however, is a disposition to account any ache of lack we feel as being genuine and as being emblematic of the nature of true belief, which throws us through undeniable lack into the fearsome gap that lack presents to us.

The idea of God is where nothing else is, and the threshold of belief in God is the feeling (yes, I said it, the "feeling") that existence is contingent upon some organizing principle.  It need scarcely be said that such a "principle" has moral implications, but in the realm of wonderings about the divine there can be no such thing as a lack of moral implications.  Otherwise we can indeed become encumbered by such nonsense as the assertion that we all have a "God-shaped hole" in all of us, for if God has the virtues of integrity assigned to him by believers, and if God is to be understood as possessing ever and always the totality of his virtues, then every believer would have by necessity, for example, a "predisposed-always-to-foster-religion-without-deceit-or-coercion hole" inside of them--which, of course, is manifestly not the case.

What we do lack is freedom from the notion that we lack.  We can decide to pursue some ostensible formula by which we can free ourselves from the notion that we lack, but we do not proceed through our lives on the basis of un-thinking our deficits, but rather (it is to be hoped) on the basis of confronting them.  The notion of belief is no different.  Presented with a feeling of dissatisfaction in the lack of an organizing principle, it is incumbent upon us to consider not ways in which we might "prove" the existence of, say, "God," but rather ways in which we can conceptualize such a principle as ultimately foundational.  Better a boundless and undefined God of our trembling conjectures than a limited God "proven" by our logic.

And all of our conjectures about God fold back into moral considerations, with the attendant "moral" implications being admittedly in the realm of the subjective, no matter how hard we might try to insist on objective logic.  As a general consideration, I will say that every attempt to assert the existence of God by logic results by necessity in the "proof" of God's existence being accompanied by a "proof" that nothing exists other than God.  There is, for example, the notion that God is the necessary "non-contingent" element of existence.  If, however, God's existence is supposedly non-contingent upon the existence of any other thing, and if God is understood as having created Creation, then God's status of being the one-and-only-perfect-God-who-created-Creation is contingent upon the existence (even if he decides to extinguish it) of that Creation that did in fact exist.  Or it might be said that the "non-contingent God" who created Creation could make it so that Creation never happened (which is utterly distinct from destroying Creation), and therefore non-existence as a potential for Creation makes our appreciation of Creation meaningless.  The Creation that exists for us as a springboard for belief in God is thereby in itself an object of belief.

Or God could be both perfect and possessed of perfect integrity (which might seem like double-talk, if not for the fact that we must often look at things from various viewpoints.)  A perfect God of perfect integrity might create as a pure function of his existence, and might ever and always create in an infinitude of modalities and possibilities.  Every jump of every quark might produce another universe (or, that is, a universe for each potential jump or moment of no-jump.)  This might simply be the universe that we know.  The element of integrity will leap out for us when we consider that the notion of a God "proven" by some extrapolation of our perceptions is also a God limited thereby in our appreciations.

Belief in God is a moral enterprise--intrinsically and necessarily so.  God is not good because God exists, God exists because God is good.  This is not logical (and it bears the onus of being perhaps objectively and eternally "untrue") but this is as good as it gets--or at least as honest as we can be about the matter.

Shame Active

Jesus tells Peter that Peter is blessed by receiving the divinely-bestowed awareness that Jesus is "the Messiah, the Son of the Living God."  Of course, according to the Gospel of John, certain disciples of Jesus had long entertained the possibility of him being the Messiah.  There is even the amazing phenomenon in the gospels of demons shouting, "I know who you are, the Holy One of God," and the like.  Given that Jesus is described as ordering the demons to be silent, there exists of course the conjecture that only Jesus hears such exclamations--though the text does not assert such possibilities.

Since Peter, after his oft-quoted proclamation of Jesus' messiahship, is rebuked by Jesus as being "Satan" for attempting to dissuade Jesus from the martyrdom of that same messiahship, it is asserted often by interpreters that Peter has failed to "understand" the fate of the Scripture-predicted Messiah--although the supposedly signal implications of the "Satan" episode would seem to be overblown in retrospect, since apparently nobody "understood" the tragic Scripture-fulfillment they witnessed at the Crucifixion and Resurrection.

Of course, it would be simpler to assert, in regards to the "Get thee behind me, Satan" episode, that contradicting the Messiah of God is just not the thing to do in any event.  I contend that the most reasonable interpretation of the close proximity of Peter's proclamation to his rebuke by Jesus is found in phenomena known to all of us--Peter was bewildered and Peter was agitated.  This is, after all, the Peter who is reduced to babbling at the Transfiguration.  One of the unfortunate aspects of conventional Christian preaching is the sloppy combination of the supposed "simple, down-to-earth" nature of the Gospels switched whenever convenient with the Gospels treated as symbolic tapestries of Great Ideas in combination or contrast.

The Gospels presume that they are written for human beings living in the world.  When we see human beings in the Gospels under stress--and Jesus himself goes about arranging purposely respites (rare, indeed) for himself and his followers--then we are warranted in treating them as human beings under stress.  The people in the Gospels are people in the world (and it is telling indeed that so much of modern preaching fixates on "the world" or "the culture" of today as though it were some sort of Behemoth-ideation against which the self-conceits of believers as "saints" might be contrasted.)  People in the world are confused, and much of what confuses them are ideas they collect from they-know-not-where.

Peter is hit with an idea from above, and he juggles it, and he fumbles it, and presumably he picks it up again.  That is how inspiration works--we are hit with ideas that surprise and burgeon and blossom and lead to so may things--all before we have come to grasp truly the initial ideas, and we might for the rest of our days second-guess and perhaps refine those initial understandings.  This is the messy reality of trying to understand our existence, but religion as a socialized and internalized phenomenon--and as a socialized-into-internalizing-it phenomenon--relies on a binary yes-or-no conceit of ostensibly packageable belief, typified in Christianity by the supposed "saving faith" as opposed to that which is merely sentimental or intellectual or whatever.

And so the great question about the teachings of Jesus is whether we are going to understand those teachings as concerned with our formulating thoughts and taking actions so as to be on the right side of conceptual divides, or as concerned with our formulating thoughts and taking actions so as to press toward and against absolutes that we might never comprehend or adjoin.  The whole idea that we could ever "understand" or "believe" the teachings of Jesus is an idea that can claim no more than indifferent warrant in the Gospels--as neither can claim the idea that "understanding" or "believing" in humanly-relatable terms is the point of the Gospels in any event.  The Gospel of John begins with Jesus amused by the first disciples' notions of belief, and it ends with Jesus regarding as merely tenuous the disciples' assertion that they believe at last--and so we are left with the all-too-understandable implication that bewilderment and frustration are the paving-stones of the true and narrow way.

Nothing illustrates better the unnecessary predicament of the conventional interpreters than the story of the Good Thief.  By any notion of the usual expectations, the Good Thief (who apparently had begun with hurling abuse as vigorously as his unrepentant compatriot) has before the end either recalled a sufficient "saving faith" idea-store about Jesus (making him no different from any other pre-Crucifixion believer and making his story therefore mere adornment), or he has been granted an un-reproduceable revelation (making his description of the logic-train of his settling on a view of Jesus as innocent into an irrelevance.)  This is what happens when we view the teachings of Jesus as being about our needing to be on the right side of this or that divide.

This blog must be about the necessity of viewing the teachings of Jesus in terms of shame.  In the Christian world today there is much talk of guilt and humiliation.  Of course Jesus bore our guilt and suffered humiliation, but Christianity does not seem to know what to do with shame--even though it is understood that Jesus is not beyond lamenting that he will suffer shame in each and every case in which people are ashamed of him and of his teaching.  Is not shame, rather than either guilt or humiliation, the final redoubt of resistance to the call of God?  The world is full of "believers" of diverse faiths who will proclaim loudly how guilty they are--and have been--of sin, and is full of such people who will assume postures of humiliation.  Guilt, however, is relative, and no matter how many sins are the cause of guilt, they are finite.  Humiliation, involving placing oneself lower and lower and perhaps lower in the eyes of the world, relies nonetheless on "achieving" such a low place in the context of one's surroundings.

"Shame," by contrast, possesses no scale or context, when it is understood that one is ashamed before the Creator--and it is in terms of shame that the proper terms of God's mercy are found.  God forgives sins by blotting out their number, and God forgives for the sake of humility--but this is all contextual.  The real cry for mercy comes from the creature in acknowledged shame before the Creator.  Nothing suits more tellingly Jesus' expectation of his followers than his expectation, not that they be perfect persons, but that they be perfect even as is God.  Only on these terms can we attempt to understand the abject quality of our shame.

The Good Thief was expiating his guilt on the cross of his torment.  The Good Thief was humiliating himself by calling out to Jesus.  Both of those things were necessary for his salvation, but they differed in no eternal implication from the Jewish leaders' approach to the Baptist at the Jordan--and the Baptist confronted them with their unaddressed shame, which made their gesture futile.  (John the Baptist also asked them where they got the idea they needed to attend to their souls--one wonders how that source of their awakening understanding differed from the source of Peter's "Messiah" revelation.)

In short, the active element of the Good Thief's episode was not guilt or humiliation, but rather shame.  For all human beings, mercy from God is ever required, and ever required in every respect--because we are not God.  Not merely because we are not as righteous as God, nor merely because God Incarnate was willing to suffer the greatest of humiliations--but simply because we are not God.  The Good Thief feared God, and was ashamed.  Jesus welcomed him into heaven--welcomed a person (like us) whose sins could never be perfectly self-prosecuted, welcomed a person whose humility was not humble enough to refrain from asking for a favor, welcomed a person who was ashamed.

Shame Discounted

There is no reason for anyone to value my opinion about this blog's subject matter over anyone else's opinion.  If my views are to be heeded at all, the most I can hope to do on that score is try to develop a "voice" that will be found tolerable.  I must try to sound the right notes.

As a start, I will try to present the "starting point" of "shame" in the scriptural accounts, found in Genesis 2:25: "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."  By "starting point," I am referring to the first explicit reference to "shame" in Genesis.  I contend that there is neither linguistic nor logical warrant to assume that this is the "first couple's" initial experience of shame--nor is it to go unnoticed that the Hebrew word in question is used most typically in terms of "shame" that is valid in a context larger than mere feeling.  That is, the shame in question is understood in terms of what is deserved, rather than what is merely felt.

If I am to employ a voice and a viewpoint that might be found justifiable, I must be careful to describe what I do not understand as emphatically as I might describe what I think I know.  In the case of Adam and Eve's nakedness, both the circumstances of their shame and the course of their experiences with shame are as tantalizingly almost-understood as any of our recollections (usually hazy at best) of our own infantile introductions to moral censure.

As to the circumstances?  Would it not be logically impossible for the "one flesh" amalgamation of male and female to be naked before each other, sharing ostensibly a union more intimate than might ever be sundered by the interposition of clothing?  And, of course, the first couple could not--logically--have imagined that they might hide anything from God (a moral realization expected to be made all the more unavoidable to them by the efficacy of the fruit.)

Plainly, Adam and Eve must have been in roiling confusion and panic--that much at least of the story is tangible to us, and relatable to our own experiences.  However, as regards the necessary consideration of the course of their experiences with shame, it is undeniable that the narrative proceeds along lines that presume that Adam and Eve know full well about transgression and fear, and indeed Adam's first post-eating response to God presumes that the framework of transgression leading to fear is one of the templates of the ongoing relationship of Adam to God.  We as individuals can scarcely pretend that we remember being first chastised as children as a novel experience, rather than as an organic element of our memories fading into an unreachable past.

In short, the notion that the "nakedness" episode is the first couple's first experience with shame is something that interpreters have supplied.  The text says that Adam and Eve were not ashamed in their nakedness.  The text does not say less than that, and the text does not say more.  Neither is there anything in the preceding chapters and verses of Genesis that would create a presumption of a First Shame included in the so-called Fall.  In my prior two blogs, "Roused, Readied, Reaped" and "Aware, Away, Awry," I deal (repetitiously, as I imagine) with my contention that sin as an aspect of Genesis finds its origin in the ineffable stirrings of Creation--a moral situation as tantalizingly indecipherable as the primordial origin of shame, an origin that undergirds the logic of the present blog.

As regards the "voice" that I will try to use in the present blog, I will try to find application and reference for my views within the context of others' views and others' presentations, and I hope to do so respectfully.  I am reminded of a well-regarded, now-deceased friend of mine--a person generally held to be an estimable example of someone who strives mightily (though with humility and humor) to "live out the Good Book."  This person admonished me, in the gentlest of tones, to the effect that he did not so much simply share my fascination with Bible-type topics, but rather that he really did believe the Bible.

It would be only with great care, then, that I would try to respond to people such as that gentleman.  It is no small thing to challenge people's deeply-held beliefs, and this challenge is most acute when what is being challenged constitutes a bedrock of those beliefs.  The above discussion is a perfect example.  I don't know that there could ever be an easy way to say to someone, "You say you believe the Genesis account, and I believe you mean this statement sincerely and upon extensive reflection, but I fear that your emphasis in this regard has been narrowed into an adversarial stance against those who would discount the text.  That is not the same as to say simply that you believe the text.

"It is apparent that you believe the story that you and others have made of the Genesis text.  You believe not merely the statements of Genesis, but also--as being of equal authority--a set of connections that interpreters have purported to find among those statements."  In the present blog I intend to assert that "shame" as a necessary theme of Jesus' teachings has been, by Christianity, reduced to a virtual punctuation mark, driving home this or that interpretive point that relies not on a relatable, organic experience-template of human existence, but rather on the maintenance of disembodied dogmas.

In the "nakedness" episode of Genesis, "shame" first appears explicitly in the text.  By comparison, in the "It is not good that the man should be alone" episode of Genesis there is the first explicit description of attentions of the man to an experience-realm separate from a mere blissful union with God.  Of course, the Creation Week itself is capped off with God's statement that Creation is "very good."  One might ask any number of Christian theologians what might be the expected fate of persons who appear before the throne of judgment equipped with an assessment--even a divine assessment--of that person as having been "very good"--such a person's fate, as the theologians in general would have it, would be far from secure.

In short, there were deficits in Creation from the beginning, and there were deficits in humans from the beginning, and the story from The First Day to the day of the Fall is a story of decline and alienation and diverted attentions.  Sinfulness was present from the start, and therefore by definition shame was present from the start.  This is what I mean by this blog's title, "Shame Appears."  Shame appears when Adam and Eve see themselves as naked, but that "appearing" is a matter of attention.  "Shame Appears" whenever human existence is looked at, and, as we will see, shame appears upon examination to have a role in humanity's fate that is a role discounted with striking vigor by conventional Christianity.

Blog Description for Shame Appears

Blog Description for Shame Appears: For any thing to exist before the divine is for that thing to be ashamed before the divine--whether to a greater extent or lesser.  Otherwise, any person--or any pebble--can claim to be lord of every realm in the universe.