Deserved Shame
14
An Argument from Grace
Chapters 11–13 covered central matters of moral ontology and epistemology, which arguably reside at the heart of this discussion. Still, there are other aspects of an overall moral argument that can and should be discussed. Salient among them are the two aspects of what some have called Kantian moral faith—namely, our need to be morally changed in order to live up to the moral demand (and relatedly, to be forgiven for falling short of the ideal and ultimately conformed entirely to its dictates) and the need for morality and rationality to be reconciled. This chapter will deal with the former, and chapter 15 with the latter.
Human beings are valuable, but that doesn’t mean that we are good. The fourth major piece of moral evidence to consider is moral transformation. Following John Hare’s custom in his book called God’s Command, we will call this argument the “argument from grace.” There are three deep moral needs we as human beings display, and this version of the moral argument addresses all three—namely, our need to be forgiven, our need to be changed, and our need to be perfected. Each of these existential needs we possess as human beings corresponds to an important aspect of Christian salvation. And the fact that Christian theology so impeccably addresses each of these deep needs gives us moral reasons to take theism generally and Christianity specifically most seriously.
Forgiveness
Readers might remember that in book 1 of Mere Christianity C. S. Lewis says two things are at the heart of our understanding of reality: First, there is a moral law, and second, we all fall short of it. There is a moral standard that is objective and universal. It is binding and authoritative on us, but we invariably fall short of meeting it. This results in a disconnect or a “gap” between the best we can do and what morality requires, not to mention the objective condition of guilt for falling short morally. And this gap needs addressing. Earlier we encountered an explanatory gap in the realm of epistemology that proves especially challenging for our secular interlocutors; now we encounter a behavioral gap that threatens to pose an insuperable challenge to secular ethics.
That we intuitively sense there to be a moral standard that we fall short of leaves us with a condition of guilt in need of fixing. And if we take our feelings of guilt as more than mere feelings, and something like a real objective condition of guilt, we are left wondering if there is a solution. We need forgiveness for having fallen short of the moral standard—and not just falling short in the past but continuing to fall short all the time. Forgiveness is a basic and perpetual existential human need. Robert Adams offered a few variants of the moral argument, mostly focused on recondite matters of metaphysics and epistemology, but as an aside he noted that he could have constructed a moral argument just as effective by appeal to the issue of forgiveness.1 This is what we’ll be getting at here.
An apologetic focus on forgiveness is one way that the moral argument serves as the perfect pathway to the gospel of Christ—indeed, we have fallen short and are in need of forgiveness. And God offers us that forgiveness through the death and resurrection of Christ. Readers may recognize that all of this broaches the theological topic of justification. So the first point to emphasize is that this version of the moral argument suggests that God by his grace can forgive us of our moral wrongdoing, functioning as an ideal way to introduce the good news of the gospel. We have a problem of guilt and of shame (both deserved and undeserved), but God offers the solution, by his grace. Mercifully, because of God’s provision in Christ, forgiveness is available for those who seek it, and we can also find the resources to forgive others.
Moral Transformation
But more than forgiveness is required. Another part of a reconciled relationship with God has to do with the next step or stage of salvation—what theologians call “sanctification.” Intimate and organic connections obtain between justification and sanctification, but rather than offering an exegetical analysis, we are using these categories as a way to connect the parts of Christian salvation with aspects of the moral argument. After our conversion to Christ, we are still left with a moral gap—the space between where we are morally and spiritually, on the one hand, and where we need to be, on the other. We have a long way to go; this is true for us all. That gap needs to be closed. To be forgiven without being changed leaves too much undone.
Yet another way to put it is like this: We need more than our sins to be forgiven; we need our sin problem itself to be taken away. A documentary concerning the issue of nutrition and physical health we saw a few years ago may be helpful here by way of analogy. One of its basic claims was that doctors do not really produce health. About the best they can do is remove some barriers that impede and stand in the way of health. What actually produces health is the properly functioning body—a healthy immune system: a body, properly treated and fed, doing what it was meant to do. This is most clearly seen when it comes to chronic diseases. Doctors and pharmaceutical companies cannot fix such problems. What they can do is provide medicines that help alleviate and manage certain symptoms and make life more comfortable for the patient, even while the affliction persists, managed to one degree or another.
There is a crucial difference between genuine health, on the one hand, and merely improving conditions, on the other, however much a blessing the latter can be. Another fitting analogy would be the distinction between pulling out a weed versus killing its root. The former is at best a temporary fix; the underlying problem will persist until the latter step is taken.
A similar distinction holds in the arena of morality. One option is merely to deal with symptoms, settling for marginal moral improvements, avoiding hurtful consequences by our actions, seeking forgiveness for wrongdoing, that sort of thing. True acquisition of integrity, virtue, and holiness, though, requires considerably more. In light of what seem to be some deeply entrenched patterns of selfishness and moral weakness endemic to the human condition, we need powerful resources to meet the moral demand and effect the needed change in our character.
Benjamin Franklin once tried to do this on his own, setting himself to the formidable task of achieving moral perfection. In “Arriving at Perfection,” an excerpt from his Autobiography, he wrote about his plans to conquer all imperfections that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead him into, but “I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined. While my care was employ’d in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason.”2
Immanuel Kant recognized that we fall short of what morality requires, and so he said we need to have moral faith: the belief that the moral life is possible. But in light of our moral malady, this requires radical transformation. Can we be transformed? This is a second great existential moral need, after forgiveness. Perhaps owing to his Lutheran upbringing, Kant was quite sure that human beings have a deep moral problem, a tendency to be curved inward on themselves, an intractable ethical taint, a deeply flawed moral disposition in need of a revolution. Kant saw clearly that the moral demand on us is very high, while also recognizing that we have a natural propensity not to follow it.
Malcolm Muggeridge is thought to have said that the depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact. G. K. Chesterton once said that original sin was “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.”3 Humans are infinitely valuable but are not essentially good, morally speaking. We are broken, deeply broken, and need to be healed at the root, not merely to have the symptoms removed. As Clay Jones puts it, and a book like Ordinary Men demonstrates, all of us are born Auschwitz-enabled.4 The people responsible for such unspeakable atrocities of history were not, as human beings go, preternaturally bad people. They were, sober truth be told, garden-variety human beings who, when certain circumstances presented themselves, behaved deplorably. All of us have that hideous potential. Moral ugliness lurks in each of our hearts. There is something in need of radical fixing deep within us. We all need major moral surgery.
The moral standard remains obstinately in place, but because of our moral weakness, corrupt characters, irremediable selfishness, intractable egoism, and the like, we are unable to meet that standard on our own. A basic moral principle seems to be that “ought implies can” in some sense—we cannot be obligated to do what we cannot do—and yet we do seem to be obligated to do what we simply cannot: meet the moral demand. How can this make sense?
Augustine offered the crucial insight: God bids us to do what we cannot, in order that we might learn our dependence on him. We cannot live as we ought in our own strength alone, but we can live as we ought by God’s grace, with divine assistance. So, apart from God’s grace, our moral prognosis is bad; but there is great hope. The hope we have that will not disappoint is most assuredly a function not of a false hope that comes from sticking our heads in the sand but of facing the darkness head-on. Christianity teaches that the needed resources for radical transformation are available. Although we cannot meet the moral demand on our own, God himself has made it possible, if we but submit and allow him to do it through us. It may well require a painful process, but it is possible.
Christianity teaches that there is abundant hope indeed. Our having been made in God’s image is essential to our identity; our sin nature is not. The latter is a merely contingent feature of who we are. Closer to our core identity is our having been made in God’s image. We are valuable but not good; but we can become good as we allow God to deliver us from our moral dysfunction and conform us to his image. God can do more than merely ameliorate the symptoms of our chronic moral malady. In the face of our urgent need to become not just better people but new people, and our desperate need for a revolution of the will and for radical moral transformation, the death and resurrection of Christ is indeed “good news.” This issue of transformation, again, involves the Christian theological category of sanctification. Just as God answers our need for forgiveness, God’s grace in sanctification answers our need for radical moral transformation.
By the way, biblical holiness is not just individual but social. And here Paul Copan has done us a great service by bringing a historical twist to the moral argument. He has shown how historically it has been Christ followers who were largely responsible for such significant social advances as building orphanages, arguing for the inherent dignity of the handicapped and infirm, fighting for women’s suffrage, standing against foot-binding, and so forth. This investigation gets into historical contingencies, but it remains an important empirical consideration, one that brings to mind John Wesley’s refrain that there is no holiness without social holiness.5
Moral Perfection
Then there is one more step: not just to be wholly forgiven and radically transformed, but also for the process to culminate, for the work to be finished. We need the good work that has been begun within us to be completed, which God promises to do at the day of Christ Jesus for those who trust him. And so what we are talking about now is the Christian category of glorification, when we are entirely conformed to the image of Jesus, morally beautified to the uttermost, every last vestige of sin having been excised and expunged.
Interestingly, Immanuel Kant thought that human beings would never achieve what he called a “holy will,” which he considered reserved for God alone. The process of moral perfection was thus something at best approached asymptotically—a mathematical term invoking the specter of getting closer and closer to the goal but never fully arriving at it. It is a process that is never completed, he thought, so this served as the basis of his argument for immortality, since the process must continue forever.
Although it is true that in some sense we will forever continue to grow morally, on the Christian story, the process of complete deliverance from sin will be completed. Such a tantalizing prospect answers to a deep intuitive recognition of a third basic moral drive or need, or maybe aspiration—yet one, once more, beyond the reach of our own capacities without divine grace—the hunger to be perfected, turned into the best versions of ourselves, delivered entirely from the power and consequences of sin. Christianity assures us, and we have principled reasons to believe, that this is no Pollyannaish pipe dream but rather a reality we can look forward to with a real and steady hope. Indeed, if such hope is available, might we have a duty to hold it?6
So Christian theology suggests that Kant was both right and wrong. He was wrong to think we will not be perfected. The Christian doctrine of glorification is about the process of sanctification reaching an end point. Ultimately sin will be completely defeated within us, and we will find complete deliverance from its power and consequences. That is a glorious hope. Still, Kant was also likely right that there will remain a movement, a dynamism, even after the point of glorification. For one thing, the prospect of beholding the glory and beauty and goodness of God is an unending process. For another, it is only when full deliverance from sin is achieved that the fullest life for which we were created can really begin, which even the present life already intimates.
A. E. Taylor wrote eloquently about this in his Faith of a Moralist:
The moral life does not consist merely in getting into right relations with our fellows or our Maker. That’s only preliminary to the real business: to live in them. Even in this life we have to do more than unlearn unloving. We have to practice giving love actual embodiment. This is continuous with what is morally of highest importance and value in our present life. . . . Heaven must be a land of delightful surprises. We should have learned to love every neighbor who crosses our path, to hate nothing that God has made, to be indifferent to none of the mirrors of His light. But even where there is no ill-will or indifference to interfere with love, it is still possible for love to grow as understanding grows.7
Combining all three subpoints of this argument, what we have is a three-pronged performative moral argument built on God’s grace. It is by God’s grace that we can find the forgiveness we desperately need for having fallen short of the moral standard, something we all do. It is by God’s grace that we can be set free from both our subjective feelings and our objective condition of guilt. It is by God’s grace that we can be gradually changed and made more like Christ, with less and less of a taste for sin and more and more of a hunger for righteousness. And it is by God’s grace that eventually we will be entirely conformed to the image of Christ and delivered completely from sin’s power and consequences.
From first to last, what answers our deepest moral needs—for forgiveness, for change, and for perfection—is the astounding grace of a good God perfect in holiness and perfect in love. And this is a delightful example of how a variant of the moral argument points not just to God’s existence but to his goodness and love and grace—and indeed points arguably not just to theism but to Christianity in particular.
Having started his book Mere Christianity with talk of the moral gap between what we are and what we ought to be, Lewis then explained his reason for doing so. His explanation is telling. The passage can be found in his concluding paragraph of book 1:
My reason was that Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. . . . It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor. When you have realized that our position is nearly desperate you will begin to understand what the Christians are talking about. They offer an explanation of how we got into our present state of both hating goodness and loving it. They offer an explanation of how God can be this impersonal mind at the back of the Moral Law and yet also a Person. They tell you how the demands of this law, which you and I cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how God Himself becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God.8
The Maligned Sibling of Shame
Brief mention was already made of guilt’s often maligned sibling shame, and we think it fitting to end this chapter by discussing it some more. Shame can pose a serious threat to the belief that God is good, that God loves each one of us, that we can be reconciled with God and others, and that we are valuable and worthwhile. Whereas guilt reveals that we have morally transgressed, shame has more to do with who we are, not just what we have done. And so it can be particularly damaging if we allow shame to detract from recognizing the value we have in God, which it can all too easily do. If we become convinced that we are useless, that our lives are pointless, that we as people lack value, it becomes exponentially harder to see ourselves as creations of God with infinite dignity and value and worth. It is for just such reasons that, for many, believers and unbelievers alike, the temptation is to think that all shame is bad—nothing but a toxic emotion. Guilt might be fine; we can ask forgiveness and such and get past it; but shame is thought to just saddle us with negative emotional baggage and so there is no good reason for it.
In some cases, this is obviously true. Victims of abuse may feel great shame over what happened to them, even though they did nothing wrong. That is undeserved shame, and the problem is not theirs. It is all of ours; we need to listen to such victims, not sideline them or silence them, giving them a voice and really hearing them. We will give another example of undeserved shame in just a moment.
There is also deserved shame. If we do something shameful, we should feel shame—if we had abused that victim just discussed, for example. We don’t mean to suggest that anyone should let shame decimate their sense of self or think of themselves as unredeemable, or that we should engage in the practice of shaming. That is different and is incompatible with loving our neighbors as ourselves. But if we don’t feel at least some shame for doing something genuinely shameful, then we are being shameless, and that is a vice.
From Aristotle to Aquinas to so many others in the history of philosophy and theology, the capacity to feel shame has been thought to be a virtue, and the loss of the ability a vice. It is only more recently that as a society we have started to think otherwise, casting shame as categorically toxic and attempting to be rid of it altogether. Again, if the shame is undeserved, that is a problem we all need to address; but when shame is deserved, feeling the shame is a step to healing. So let’s consider each form of shame in turn.
Undeserved Shame
Let’s start with an example of undeserved shame. In 1981 Mister Rogers hosted ten-year-old Jeffrey Erlanger, who was in a wheelchair. They had originally met five years before, and Rogers remembered him and invited him to his Neighborhood. Rogers would later say that these unscripted ten minutes were his most memorable moment on television.9 It is deeply moving, and if there is any doubt as to why, we might suggest it has to do, at least in part, with this matter of shame. Ours is sadly a society in which certain people (those who have been sexually abused, those with visible disabilities) carry a stigma and are often, for no fault of their own, riddled with a sense of shame—a loss of social standing and a resultant tendency to shrink and hide. It threatens their sense of humanity. The solution has to be communal—usually involving someone who has spare social capital conferring honor on them.10
Arguably that is exactly what makes those ten minutes of television so undeniably magical. It is a simply profound microcosm of the divine love that deigns to condescend to broken and marginalized people and, in the process, exalts them, replacing shame with honor, beauty for ashes. As Mister Rogers did for Jeffrey—who was on stage years later to confer on Rogers his Lifetime Achievement Award—this is a means by which to make goodness attractive, which is part of our job description as Christians. It is a vitally important way to love God and neighbor.
Deserved Shame
As for an example of deserved shame, the pages of Scripture are replete with narratives of honor and shame, from Adam and Eve to the story of the prodigal son and lots in between. Readers probably know the story of the prodigal son, who insists on his inheritance ahead of time and engages in profligate spending and living, bringing shame on himself and an almost complete loss of social standing as a result. Finally, he repents and comes home, and the father, seeing him far off, comes running to him with a kiss and embrace, a ring for his finger and a great celebration. Here is a young man who did shame-worthy things. He felt shame, he deserved to, and he couldn’t fix it on his own. He needed someone to confer on him the honor he had lost. His loving father did.
This gives us as believers a simply wonderful opportunity. All of us, whether we have social capital to spare or not, are in a position to remind those around us that each and every person is loved by the God of the universe. Indeed, Christianity teaches something about God that Aristotle missed; he wrote of how God attracts us, which is true. But more than that, God actively pursues us. The maker of heaven and earth is in a full sprint—robes and all—to embrace you, kiss you, put a ring on your finger, and throw a feast in your honor. Whatever the opinion of the company you keep, you are of immeasurable value to the One who matters most. You are so valuable that the God of the universe suffered the indignity of limited human form, betrayal, public humiliation, and naked crucifixion to rescue you not just from guilt but also from the shame of your condition, all to enjoy an eternal life of friendship and communion with you.11
If there is any doubt that this is what the life and work of Jesus was all about, recall the Old Testament passage that inaugurated his public ministry in Luke, from Isaiah 61:
The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn,
and provide for those who grieve in Zion—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
instead of a spirit of despair. (61:1–3)
1 Robert Adams, “Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief,” in Rationality and Religious Belief, ed. C. Delaney (University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 116-40.
2 Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1793; repr., Henry Holt, 1916), chap. 9, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20203/20203-h/20203-h.htm.
3 Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (John Lane, 1909), 24.
4 Clay Jones, Why Does God Allow Evil? Compelling Answers for Life’s Toughest Questions (Harvest House, 2017), 62; Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (HarperCollins, 1992).
5 See Paul Copan, “Reinforcing the Moral Argument: Appealing to the Historical Impact of the Christian Faith,” paper presented at the Evangelical Theological Society, November 19–21, 2014, San Diego.
6 Here’s a smattering of scriptural references to the doctrine of sanctification: Rom. 8:16–18, 29–30; 1 Cor. 15:42–44; 2 Cor. 3:18; Phil. 3:20–21; Col. 3:4; 1 Thess. 5:23–24; Heb. 2:10; 1 John 3:2.
7 A. E. Taylor, Faith of a Moralist (Macmillan, 1930), 421.
8 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), book 1, chap. 5.
9 For a clip of the episode and also Rogers’s comments about it, see “Mister Rogers’ Beloved Neighbor Jeff Erlanger Inspires New ‘Donkey Hodie’ Character,” PBS Wisconsin, April 14, 2025, https://pbswisconsin.org/article/mister-rogers-beloved-neighbor-jeff-erlanger-inspires-new-donkey-hodie-character/.
10 See Gregg A. Ten Elshof’s excellent For Shame: Rediscovering the Virtues of a Maligned Emotion (Eerdmans, 2021).
11 Ten Elshof, For Shame, 142.