Shame, Grace, and Martin Luther

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
George Herbert, “Love III.”[1]

What is the relationship between Christianity — especially Protestant Christianity — and shame?

Over the last 30 years a cliché has developed in theological circles. It’s now become the received wisdom that western accounts of salvation have a shame problem. Atonement theories that focus on substitution, or understandings of Christian transformation that rely heavily on confession, may be suited to dealing with guilt and its attendant problems, but they have nothing to say to those caught in dynamics of shame. Or so the argument goes. Not only that, we are told, but in fact the Augustinian tradition that has shaped so much Protestant thought actually makes things worse: All that focus on sin, on human depravity, on weakness and failure creates hopelessly shamed individuals. Those who are daily reminded that they are “miserable offenders” (in the words of the Anglican Prayerbook) cannot help but become neurotically bound into shame. And in all this, Martin Luther is often seen as particularly (ahem) “guilty”.

The best example of this argument is Stephen Pattison’s 2000 book, Shame: Theory, Therapy, Theology. With disarming honesty and vulnerability, Pattison surveys the English Christianity he grew up in, and finds “a kind of necrophilic ‘worm’ theology that dwells on human imperfection, sin, destructiveness, death, alienation and stain.” To Pattison, the “Augustinian-Lutheran” tradition that shaped his Christian imagination drove him ever deeper into the confines of his own “unrelieved and unrelievable shame,” as the church poured more and more negativity on his already damaged soul. His conclusion is stark: “Christian theology may … have to repent, turn around, and change its focus of attention quite radically — for example in relation to atonement — to make shame and defilement much more directly visible and redeemable.”

Now, as a theologian whose research focuses on Martin Luther’s theology of sin, and as someone who has their own history with shame, this line of critique feels pretty worryingly potent to me. I am deeply committed to Luther’s insights about human depravity and weakness, but I also really want to help people caught in shame’s net, and I certainly don’t want to make things worse. What am I to do?

What is shame?

Firstly though, we need to ask, what are we talking about when we discuss shame? This is surprisingly hard to answer, and the more you investigate, the less clarity there is. A lot of people are talking about shame, but they don’t always seem to be talking about the same thing. Shame is a totally destructive feeling that ruins children and those who feel it; shame is the necessary regulator of social interactions; shame is the paradigmatic modern emotion, spread by social media and the cause of all our contemporary ills; shamelessness is the real modern problem — if only all those bad people felt more ashamed, they wouldn’t do the bad things.[2] It’s easy to read all these conflicting accounts and become rather disorientated.

Pattison’s conclusion, after investigating so many different understandings, is that shame has no fixed meaning, but is used to describe a range of emotions and experiences, some of which might be positive, but many of which are negative. This means we need to be careful when we talk about shame to articulate what we are actually talking about: we cannot assume we all mean the same thing, nor should we assume that there is some sort of simple, common-sense response to shame that will always work.

In this morass of competing explanations and descriptions, I have found Affect Theory, and especially the theorizing of one of Affect Theory’s founding thinkers, Sylvan Tomkins, a particularly useful approach for analyzing shame, if not defining it.[3] Tomkins is a wonderfully original and idiosyncratic psychologist and theorist, and his views on shame are especially generative. A few insights here will be useful.

1. Shame is potent.
Tomkins recognizes the power and depth of shame, underscoring its potential to dominate other emotions and shape the entire personality:

If distress is the affect of suffering, shame is the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression, and of alienation. Though terror speaks to life and death and distress makes of the world a vale of tears, yet shame strikes deepest into the heart of man. While terror and distress hurt, they are wounds inflicted from outside which penetrate the smooth surface of the ego; but shame is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul.

To my mind at least, this gives Tomkins’ account of shame teeth, since it reads as the reflections of someone who has felt the depths of shame’s bite.[4] This is someone who has skin in the game. This is someone who is speaking my language.

2. Shame is about relationships.
In Tomkins’ view, shame interrupts core interpersonal relationships, as the self responds to rejection, whether real or imagined. The typical bodily cues that accompany shame (eyes dropped, head bowed, potentially blushing) are all reactions to being denied affection in a relationship that matters deeply to us. But, equally crucially, shame works and has power because we remain committed in some way to that relationship, desperately hoping that we won’t be rejected. If you reject me and I don’t care, I just get mad. Shame comes because I still want your love and affection, but it is being denied, and so I cannot meet your gaze.

3. Shame is reflexive.
The power of shame, in Tomkin’s thought, comes because it turns the self inwards. Shame’s reaction to rejection is to turn away from the source of that rejection, to shift the gaze downwards and, by extension, inwards to look at the self rather than the other.

Why are shame and pride such central motives? How can loss of face be more intolerable than loss of life? How can hanging the head in shame so mortify the spirit? In contrast to all other affects, shame is an experience of the self by the self. At the moment when the self feels ashamed, it is felt as a sickness within the self. Shame is the most reflexive of affects.

This is part of the great irony of shame — that shame responds to rejection by making the self more rejectable. The more I feel shame, the more I refuse to meet your eyes, and the more I prevent the possibility of the one thing that will heal my shame: your acceptance of me.

Revisiting Luther — Shame and the Law/Gospel Distinction

Seen in this light, the relationship between Martin Luther and shame becomes a bit more complex than Pattison and others suggest.

Firstly, we should acknowledge that Pattison’s experience of Protestantism as shaming is not unique and is not unreal. Doubtless there have been many Luther-influenced churches that have promulgated a message that is deeply negative and deeply hurtful. It’s easy to do, after all. When Luther says things like, “As sinners and unworthy people we deserve nothing but shame, dishonor, and even death,” it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he is trying to shame people.

It’s important to remember, however, that such an account of human nature is only half the Lutheran story. If shame has a role in Luther’s theological imagination (and his thinking on the emotion is actually fairly complex), then it is on the side of the law. The law is shaming; there doesn’t seem much doubt of that. The law proclaims that we are sinners. That we are helpless. That there is much wrong with us and much reason to reject us.

But, the shaming of the law is always a partial word, a word that is preparatory to the much greater reality of the gospel. Where the law condemns, the gospel proclaims wholeness and life and acceptance.

As Luther puts it in the Heidelberg Disputation:

To say that we are nothing and constantly sin when we do the best we can does not mean that we cause people to despair (unless they are fools); rather, we make them concerned about the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

To hear only the shame is to hear only half the story. And, perhaps, more pertinently, to preach only the shame is to preach only half the story — and the less important half at that. One must take care, then, that their theology always gets to the good news of the gospel, and that that good news is actually heard. After all, Luther insists that “God wants His preachers to be comforters, and they should always preach the forgiveness of sins to troubled consciences”.

Part of this might involve a recognition that, if the result of the law might be shame at our sins, those who are already bound by shame may have already experienced the proper work of the law. For those who struggle with shame, the law’s convicting voice might not be needed, and the word of the gospel might be all that the situation demands.

Revisiting Luther — Shame and External Righteousness

More than this, though, I think there are actually ways that Martin Luther’s specific understanding of the human condition might be particularly well calibrated to responding to shame. This is because Tomkin’s description of shame as reflexive, as turning the self into itself (another psychologist talks of the self becoming “embroiled in the self”), sounds strikingly like Luther’s famous description of the sinner as incurvatus in se. To be a sinner, for Luther, is to be endlessly pulled into oneself, unable to escape the gravitational pull of our own limitless neediness and sin.

This means that Luther’s general response to sinners might be particularly appropriate for those caught in shame. To incurved sinners, Luther proclaims the reality of a righteousness that comes extra se, that is from outside the self. In Luther’s anthropology, human beings are defined, and to a great extent created, by the word that comes from God. The word that speaks worth and meaning and blessedness from outside the human person. Sinners, Luther thinks, find themselves by looking beyond their mess and sin and weakness, and staring desperately and ceaselessly on the God who loves them and gave himself for them. They have no resources to save themselves, and so they must turn elsewhere.

On first glance, this might not seem to offer much to the shamed. In the conventional pastoral wisdom, shamed people find healing by reflecting on their intrinsic worth. Pastors are told to tell those who struggle with toxic shame to focus on the image of God within them, or their status as created children of God, or on the human dignity they share with all others.

Rather than attempting to recalibrate an individual’s self-worth by balancing the scales, Luther offers a different tack altogether. Intrinsically, we are sinners, guilty and condemned before God. Looking inside, if it is done with real honesty, will make things worse, not better.

But if shame operates as Tomkins’ claims, then actually Luther’s offer of an extrinsic salvation makes sense. Shame turns the self into itself, and that way lies an ever-deepening regression. The more I look inward, the more I pre-emptively avoid rejection, and the deeper I am forced into myself.

By looking outside myself, at the God who knows and loves me, there is the potential for this deadly cycle to be broken, and for me to find the love which I truly need to heal my shame.

This response to shame is certainly counter-intuitive, but in Luther’s insistence that we must look for our value and meaning outside of ourselves, he might just offer a key to healing. It’s certainly worth a try, given the lack of success of other methods for dealing with chronic shame.

Revisiting Luther — Hurt and Pride

Yet the incurvation caused by shame might also suggest some areas where Luther-influenced preachers might do well to reflect. In the standard Lutheran account of the incurved self, it is primarily self-regard that “embroils” us. Like light that cannot escape the gravity of a black hole, our gaze bends ever back on itself, pulled in by the weight of our selfish instincts.

The theologian Oswald Bayer offers a typical diagnosis:

The human being, who is made by nature to respond by looking outward, ends up entrapped in the endless downward spiral of a circle, talking to himself ceaselessly and to those who are like him, and spends his time doing nothing by being completely absorbed in his own existence in an arrogant and hybrid way.

Shame, though, might put a different complexion on this reality. In Tomkins’ vision, shame turns the self inwards not so much in arrogance, but in defense. It is rejection, injury, loss that causes this turn away from the world, not just self-obsession. Put simply, shamed people might be incurved because they are hurt, not because they are proud. They might turn their gaze inwards because their experience of rejection is too profound to allow for the possibility that anyone might actually want to look at them.

Now, of course, this isn’t a neat binary. Both pride and pain can be operating simultaneously, and both probably reinforce each other.[5] Just because I am ashamed doesn’t mean I’m not also a self-aggrandizing jerk. Because I’m hurt doesn’t mean I’m not self-obsessed. By the same token, we all perhaps know that wounded people can be horrendously selfish.

I find all this helpful for thinking through one of the great inexplicable problems of Luther’s theology: Why on earth would anyone, let alone most people, refuse the Gospel, the gift that seems too good to be true. Again, the “standard” Lutheran answer is that we are inveterate self-justifiers, and cannot let go of the reigns of control long enough to contemplate someone else justifying us. I cannot let God be God, I accept the gift that is too good to be true, I cannot find myself in the word spoken extra se, because when push comes to shove, I always want me to be God. I want to earn my righteousness, not receive it. I want to speak the works over myself that confer blessing and meaning and worth. In the technical Reformation language, I refuse to be justified, but instead want to justify myself.

But shame might suggest a different reality. Perhaps, for some of us, some of the time, the reason we cannot accept the gospel is that we cannot believe that anyone could love us like that. Perhaps we have been so wounded by rejection, and have retreated into ourselves so far, that the possibility of a love that sees and knows us feels too dangerous, too exposed, too frightening. Or, frankly, too impossible.

Perhaps we are caught in shame’s ironic trap: that shame prevents its own healing. The more ashamed we are, the less able we are to accept the love that would heal our shame, and the more we turn into ourselves.

Recognizing this dynamic may not change the end goal of our sermons or theology. Ultimately, we are all sinners, and shamed and proud alike both need to hear and somehow, miraculously, accept, the transforming reality of God’s love, given precisely and with specificity to the unlovely, the ashamed, and the sinful.

But it might, nevertheless, have some significant implications. It might make us more likely to encourage people to access therapy. It might make our communication just a shade more gracious and a hair more receivable. Thinking about shame might give us pause in the metaphors we use for talking about the mess Jesus saves us from. Bearing in mind that there will be people who are deeply and tragically bound in the grip of shame might make us include some images of brokenness when we talk about sin.

It might make us sensitive to the idea that people are in a mess because they are wounded, not just because they are selfish. It might make us wonder if people reject the idea of a loving God because they are hurting too much to imagine that they are lovable.

And who knows, it might help us acknowledge our own shame, the places where we have turned inwards because we cannot bear the weight of rejection, and perhaps it might help us hear the words of our gentle savior, speaking our name, lifting our faces to meet his gaze, and finding in those eyes the depth of a love that is stronger than death.