What should be clear by now from all four of these examples is that the dramatic differences in meaning is a correlative of the loss of God, or at least the loss of an external standard. Guilt becomes guilty feelings with special ease when there is no God or law before whom or which we are objectively guilty; shame becomes loss of face before peers if there is no God before whom to be ashamed. Freedom of conscience becomes sanction to do whatever I want to do, instead of the right to interpret what God has given. And tolerance becomes either an incoherent mess, or, at best, nothing more than a poorly grounded plea to be nice.

Anyone who reads thoughtfully knows that words often change their meaning with time and context. Christians are a “peculiar people,” the KJV tells us, only “peculiar” did not mean in 1611 what it means today. Sometimes an older meaning of a word continues in a restricted sector of the culture, even though most people use it in quite a different way: e.g., for most readers today, God’s gift is not “unspeakable” but “indescribable” (2 Cor 9:15), even though a conservative fringe of the populace confuse the two words. Sometimes a difference in meaning or overtone is triggered not by the passage of time, but by a different context. “Redemption” in the arcane legal terminology of a mortgage document does not conjure up exactly the same images as the use of the word in the New Testament.

All of this is common knowledge. These examples are innocuous precisely because the change in meaning is widely recognized. Far more inimical to careful conversation are those expressions whose meanings, or whose associations, are frequently unrecognized. Here are a few of them.

Guilt

For many decades now, “guilt” has sometimes referred to culpability, but very commonly referred to what might better be thought of as feelings of guilt. Our judicial systems try to establish the guilt or innocence of accused parties, regardless of whether those parties feel guilty; by contrast, our counselors often focus their attention on the guilt feelings of their clients, taking relatively little notice of the extent to which guilt feelings may be grounded in guilt. All of this, as I indicated, has been understood for a long time. When preachers talk about “penal substitutionary atonement,” they understand that the punishment is merited: before God the party is guilty and deserves the penalty which, in the case of substitutionary atonement, is discharged by another. This does not mean that wise pastors overlook the terrible burden of guilt feelings. Guilt feelings may be the psychological result of real guilt. Sometimes, however, people feel terribly guilty over things that have no valid tie to real guilt (as, for example, when a woman is sexually assaulted as she walks home from work, yet labors for years under guilt feelings [or shame? See further below.]). The careful application of passages about the cross of Christ rightly addresses both our guilt and our feelings of guilt. Efforts to expunge the latter without addressing the former may leave a sinner feeling better about themselves, but still unreconciled to God; and exclusive emphasis on addressing the real guilt before God may generate a cerebral grasp of the nature of penal substitution without providing much comfort.
All of this is common discourse in Evangelical and Reformed circles, and in some others as well. The reason for bringing it up again is that current cultural pressures are making the potential misunderstandings worse, and harder to clear up. To incur guilt, one must have committed an offense, whether against another individual, against the state (or the law, or the crown, or the like), or against God. Some offenses (e.g., theft) against individuals can be addressed by restitution (perhaps with an additional percentage, as in the OT); some cannot (e.g., rape). Traditionally, to avoid a swamp of subjectivity or, worse, a vendetta, most cultures have established a codification of personal offenses and the corresponding punishments for the guilty. Steal someone’s cow, and this is what will happen to you. Today, however, even though much of such codification still prevails, so much emphasis in Western culture is laid on the individual and his or her “rights” that new offenses against the individual are being discovered (or invented) every day. Who decides when an “offense” against an individual has been committed? When the individual feels offended? There is now not only tension between being guilty and feeling guilty, but between being guilty according to some codification of law and feeling the other party is guilty even though no code has been breached (or it has been breached only by the most egregiously creative legal extensions).

More serious is the culture’s increasing suspicion of external authority, whether that of God, of the state, or of traditional values. The broad sweep of what that looks like, for good and ill, has been discussed endlessly and need not be canvassed again here. For our purposes it is enough to observe that the traditional understanding of guilt, of culpability, over against guilt feelings, requires the authority of a God or a state or an adopted statute to transgress. If I become my own authority for right and wrong, it is difficult to see how there can be any form of “guilt” that transcends guilt feelings. In that case, there is no need for a sacrifice to deal with that guilt, either.

So in our evangelism, we simply must reserve space for talking about the God who is offended, and thus the nature of guilt, and thus God’s solution to this guilt. The gospel provides more than psychological comfort.

Read More