Shame, Sex, and Honor

Webster’s Dictionary defines shame as “the painful feeling of having done something dishonorable or improper.” The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the feeling of humiliation or distress arising from the consciousness of something dishonourable or ridiculous in one’s own or another’s behaviour or circumstances, or from a situation offensive to one’s own or another’s sense of propriety or decency.”

So, shame is a painful emotion, a sense of dishonor, impropriety, and disgrace.

If there is anything characteristic of American culture it is a fear of painful emotion. The worst offense anyone can commit these days is to make someone feel bad, especially ashamed.

Clearly, though, shame can be a good thing. It is the right response to God’s condemnation of idolatry. Look at Paul’s indictment of the human race in Romans 1:18 through 3:20. The climax of that indictment is that “every mouth must be closed.” (3:19) No one, Gentile or Jew, has any excuse before God. There is nothing we can say in our defense, nor to mitigate our crime. We have no excuses. (1:20 and 2:1) We have nothing to say. We must be silent in our guilt. We must be overcome by our sense of accountability to God, stare at our shoes, and not say a word.

But it is not just guilt that ought to overwhelm us; we ought also to be overcome by shame. We ought to lose all color in our faces. We ought to go weak-kneed. We ought to faint. We ought to feel intense humiliation. God intends to shame us. Rom 1:24, “Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.” Rom 1:26, “For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions.” Rom 1:28, “God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper.” Rom 2:23, 24, “You who boast … do you dishonor God? For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” Dishonored bodies, degrading passions, depraved minds, doing what is not proper, and dishonoring God. The healthy response -- the appropriate, true and accurate emotional response -- to this, is shame. A lack of shame is pathological.

Although we all shy away from physical pain, an absence of pain is very dangerous. I remember many years ago as a newborn Christian, I was very impressed with a pair of missionaries with the Christian & Missionary Alliance who worked at a leper colony in Vietnam. I was very taken with them and spent as much time with them as I could. They explained to me that the worst part of leprosy was the loss of the sensation of pain. Their Vietnamese leper friends could not feel the cuts, scrapes and lacerations they’d often get as they walked around in the jungles. They’d get infected and ultimately lose their limbs — it was unfortunately most common for them to lose their feet, though it was also common for them to be oblivious to burns on their hands and fingers. They had lost the sense of pain that should have been the signal that something was wrong. Pain was a good thing. They longed for a recovery of painful sensation. In the same way, we ought to long for a recovery of shame.

One of the reasons our culture seems to shy away from shame is that it is often tied to sexuality. It is thought that shame is a holdover from a sexually repressive, immature society. It is a Victorian-era emotion, to be sloughed off by sexually enlightened moderns. We know too much about sex to give in to old superstitious cultural taboos. But what is striking is how biblical, not just cultural, shame over sex is, or ought to be. The New Testament doesn’t quite put it that way; instead, the New Testament associates sex with shame’s opposite, honor. “This is the will of God, your sanctification; that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in lustful passion, like [those] who do not know God.” (1 Th 4:3-5) “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed be undefiled.” (Heb 13:4) “God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.” (Rom 1:24) A desire for illicit sex is a spiritual disease. It is idolatrous. Shame is the pain that warns us of it, designed to prevent the spread of infection.

When was the last time we thought about honor and sex? A focus on honor itself seems a little old fashioned. We don’t commonly think about honor except in times of war or with big sporting events such as the Olympics. Or we think of honor as a Southern thing; in the movies it‘s the Confederate officers who are obsessed with honor. We pay little attention to personal honor day-by-day, even less with respect to sex. It certainly doesn’t seem a strong enough motive to really move us. Yet, it ought to be; eternal life is for those who seek honor. (Rom 2:7)

We need for the sake of the health of our own souls to recover a true sense of honor and of shame.