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.