We must make the determination from the start, whether or not we are willing to consider the implications of shame in interpretations of the Gospels. By "determination" I do not intend to say that "shame" is warranted as an exclusive theme of analysis. Rather, I contend that keeping in mind the notion of shame (just as we must keep in mind our imperfect role in the analysis) is of pivotal importance--and the notion of shame is at least as likely as any other to emerge from our interaction with the texts.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.
John 1:1-2 confronts us with, well, the experience of being confronted. We know what the word "word" means, and we like to think that we know what is meant by the word "Word" in the text, but already a candid approach to interpretation of the text will show us what we have granted ourselves without warrant. "Word" stands for God, and "Word" stands for his Son, and simultaneously "Word" stands for the perfection of effulgent and pre-existing potent meaning from which we see emanating the Word of God.
Already, of course, that which we consider the "Word of God" is of two-fold declension from what we hold to be the original, unqualified (and un-quotation-marked) Word of God. The "Word of God" that we might also call "the Scriptures" is of imperfect provenance and is a representation of a perfect communication through the imperfections and limitations of language.
What is most important to remember, at this stage of the analysis, is the almost-infinitely-elastic potential degree to which a partial disconnect exists between the things of God and the things of his Creation. This would seem, of course, to be trite statement, but it is not the existence of the disconnect that I want to emphasize here--it is the conceptual twinning of something viewed as potentially infinitesimal and of that same thing viewed as germinating in the perceptibly vanishing void of the separation of God and his Creation. That it is counterintuitive to see something as vanishing backwards into its origins, and that it is counterintuitive to think of "twinning of something" when that something is merely being compared to itself, is part and parcel of the conundrum.
We can say we know what "God" means, but only insofar as we refrain from attaching to God (or to any other term, or personality-reference, meaning "God") any necessary qualities describable in words. The term "necessary" is pivotal here. We did not "come from" God, any more than we arose outside of God, and to say that we are a product of "God's will" is really a tautology--unless we reckon ourselves qualified to perceive God as an accumulation of his parts. God is not "necessarily" any thing, or any conglomeration of things--a truth that is represented to us in the Genesis language of the One God saying, "Let us make . . . "
Our creation, then, is a process understandable responsibly only in terms of aspects of ourselves as existing not as discrete attributes (though describable separately) but rather in terms of aspects of ourselves disappearing--in backward analysis--into the miasma of our origins. We see ourselves arising as inscrutably (to us) as the ineffable wind of John 3. That we might be born to virtue and vice (and Jesus has no patience for us clinging to either one, at the exclusion of the other) does not preclude the possibility that those attributes in their creation might be better termed "pre-virtue" and "pre-vice."
And, of course, I am going to write about "pre-shame."
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