True and false guilt
True and false guilt
If human beings have sinned (which they have), and if they are responsible for their sins (which they are), then they are guilty before God. Guilt is the logical deduction from the premises of sin and responsibility. We have done wrong, by our own fault, and are therefore liable to bear the just penalty of our wrongdoing.
This is the argument of the early chapters of the letter to the Romans. Paul divides the human race into three major sections, and shows how each knows something of its moral duty, but has deliberately suppressed its knowledge in order to pursue its own sinful course. As John put it, ‘This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil’ (John 3:19). Nothing is more serious than this deliberate rejection of the light of truth and goodness. Paul begins with decadent Roman society. Its people have known God’s power and glory from the creation, and his holiness from their conscience, but they have refused to live up to their knowledge. Instead, they have turned from worship to idolatry. So God has given them over to immorality and other forms of anti-social behaviour (Rom. 1:18–32).
The second section of humanity that Paul addresses is the self-righteous world, whose knowledge of God’s law may be either in the Scriptures (Jews) or in their hearts (Gentiles). In either case they do not live up to their knowledge (2:1–16). The third section is the specifically Jewish world, whose members pride themselves on the knowledge they have and on the moral instruction they give to others. Yet the very law they teach they also disobey. This being so, their privileged status as God’s covenant people will not render them immune to his judgment (2:17 – 3:8).
What, then, is the conclusion? Paul answers his own question. ‘We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin’ (3:9). Old Testament Scripture confirms this verdict. We are all without excuse, since we have all known our duty, and none of us has done it. Every protest is silenced, and the whole world is guilty and accountable to God (3:19–20).
Is this a rather morbid viewpoint? Christians have often been criticized (not least evangelical Christians) for continuously harping on sin, for becoming obsessed with it in our own lives and, particularly in our evangelism, for trying to induce in others a sense of their guilt. Nietzsche, for example, bitterly complained that ‘Christianity needs sickness....Making sick is the true hidden objective of the Church’s whole system of salvation procedures....One is not “converted” to Christianity – one must be sufficiently sick for it.’14 Nietzsche was partly correct, namely that Christianity is medicine for the sin-sick. After all, Jesus himself defended his concentration on ‘tax collectors and sinners’ by saying ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick’. ‘I have not come to call the righteous,’ he added, ‘but sinners’ (Mark 2:17). We vigorously deny, however, that it is the church’s role to ‘make’ people sick in order to convert them. Instead, we have to make them aware of their sickness, so that they will turn to the Great Physician.
Yet the criticism persists that Christians are unhealthily preoccupied with sin. An eloquent spokesman of this viewpoint is the BBC’s former Religious Affairs Correspondent, Gerald Priestland. One of his talks in the radio series Priestland’s Progress was entitled ‘Guilt-edged Religion’. He told us how at the age of ten he thought Christianity was about sin and that by the time he was fifteen he was having ‘glimpses into the abyss of depression’, accompanied by fears of divine vengeance for his ‘unnameable secret crimes’, fears which kept growing for the next thirty years. His Christianity gave him no help. ‘When I looked at the Cross, with its suffering victim, its only message to me was: “You did this – and there is no health in you!”.’ His equivalent of a Damascus Road conversion came to him at last ‘on the psychiatrist’s couch’, for that was where he learnt ‘the missing element of forgiveness’. Since then he confesses to ‘a fairly low level of personal guilt and relatively little interest in the matter of sin’ (pp.59–60).
That is not the whole of Gerald Priestland’s story, but it is enough to illustrate the grievous damage done by half-truths. How could anyone imagine that Christianity is about sin rather than about the forgiveness of sin? How could anyone look at the cross and see only the shame of what we did to Christ, rather than the glory of what he did for us? The prodigal son had to ‘come to himself’ (acknowledge his self-centredness) before he could ‘come to his father’. The humiliation of penitence was necessary before the joy of reconciliation. There would have been no ring, no robe, no kiss, no feast if he had remained in the far country or returned impenitent. A guilty conscience is a great blessing, but only if it drives us to come home.
This does not mean that our conscience is always a reliable guide. There is such a thing as a morbid, overscrupulous conscience, and it would be mischievous to seek deliberately to create one. Not all guilt feelings are pathological, however. On the contrary, those who declare themselves sinless and guiltless are suffering from an even worse sickness. For to manipulate, smother and even ‘cauterize’ (1 Tim. 4:2) the conscience, in order to escape the pain of its accusations, renders us impervious to our need for salvation.
Is it, then, healthy or unhealthy to insist on the gravity of sin and the necessity of atonement, to hold people responsible for their actions, to warn them of the peril of divine judgment, and to urge them to confess, repent and turn to Christ? It is healthy. For if there is ‘false guilt’ (feeling bad about evil we have not done), there is also ‘false innocence’ (feeling good about the evil we have done). If false contrition is unhealthy (an ungrounded weeping over guilt), so is false assurance (an ungrounded rejoicing over forgiveness). It may be, therefore, that it is not we who exaggerate, when we stress the seriousness of sin, but our critics, who underestimate it. God said of the false prophets in Old Testament days: ‘They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. “Peace, peace,” they say, when there is no peace.’15 Superficial remedies are always due to a faulty diagnosis. Those who prescribe them have fallen victim to the deceiving spirit of modernity which denies the gravity of sin. To make a true diagnosis of our condition, however, grave as it is, could never be unhealthy, provided that we go on immediately to the remedy. So the law which condemns us is nevertheless God’s good gift, because it sends us to Christ to be justified. And the Holy Spirit came to ‘convict the world of guilt’, but only in order that he might more effectively bear witness to Christ as the Saviour from guilt (John 16:8; 15:26–27). There is no joy comparable to the joy of the forgiven.
It is here that some American psychologists and psychiatrists go wrong, for they go only half-way. They start right, however, even some who make no Christian profession, for they insist that we must take sin, responsibility and guilt seriously. This is certainly great gain, but to diagnose well without being able to prescribe well is to embrace a dangerous and disillusioning half-measure.
Dr Hobart Mowrer, who was Research Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois when his critique of Freudian psychoanalysis The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion was published (1961), rejected the notion that ‘psychoneurosis implies no moral responsibility’. For ‘just so long as we deny the reality of sin, we cut ourselves off...from the possibility of radical redemption (“recovery”)’ (p.40). Dr Mowrer created quite a stir within his profession by his use of the word ‘sin’. But he persisted in teaching the fact of sin and the need for an acknowledgment of it.
Just so long as a person lives under the shadow of real, unacknowledged, and unexpiated guilt, he cannot...‘accept himself’....He will continue to hate himself and to suffer the inevitable consequences of self-hatred. But the moment he...begins to accept his guilt and his sinfulness, the possibility of radical reformation opens up, and with this...a new freedom of self-respect and peace (p.54).
A few years later, also rebelling against the Freudian insistence that guilt is pathological, Dr William Glasser began in Los Angeles to develop a different approach in treating juvenile delinquents and others which he called ‘Reality Therapy’. His thesis was that a person who is ‘unable to fulfil his essential needs’, especially love and self-worth, denies the reality of the world around him and acts irresponsibly. So the therapist seeks ‘to make him face a truth he has spent his life trying to avoid: he is responsible for his behaviour’.16 Dr Mowrer in his Foreword sums up the essence of Dr Glasser’s therapeutic method as ‘a psychiatric version of the three R’s, namely reality, responsibility and right-and-wrong’ (p.xii).
Similarly, ‘sin must be dealt with in the private courts of the human heart’, writes Karl Menninger.17 Well and good. But how? Especially, he goes on, by ‘repentance, reparation, restitution and atonement’. Karl Menninger here betrays his very partial grasp of the gospel. For those four words cannot be bracketed in this way. The first three do indeed belong together. Reparation (a general word for making amends) and restitution (the more particular restoration of what has been stolen) are both necessary to signify the genuineness of repentance. But ‘atonement’ is not something we can do; only God can atone for our sins, and indeed has done so through Christ.
It is true that Dr Menninger mentions the forgiveness of God once or twice in passing (though without any basis in Christ’s cross). Dr Hobart Mowrer, however, studiously avoids both the word and the concept. Like Karl Menninger he concentrates on the acknowledging of faults and the making of restitution. He calls his therapy groups ‘integrity groups’ because their foundation is personal integrity in the acknowledgment of wrongdoing. Initiation into a group is by means of ‘a complete unqualified self-disclosure’ which he calls exomologēsis. When, during a personal conversation with Dr Mowrer at the University of Illinois in 1970, I mentioned that exomologēsis is the Greek word for ‘confession’, and that in the Christian tradition the purpose of confession is to receive forgiveness from the injured party, he immediately responded, ‘Oh, we never talk about forgiveness.’ His concept of sin is that in each case it is the breach of a contractual obligation for which the guilty person must make restitution. Forgiveness is therefore unnecessary, either by the injured person or even by God.
Although, as has been pointed out, Dr Menninger does not share Dr Mowrer’s inhibition about mentioning forgiveness, neither of them ever refers to the cross, let alone regards it as the only and sufficient ground on which God forgives sins. To recover the concepts of human sin, responsibility, guilt and restitution, without simultaneously recovering confidence in the divine work of atonement, is tragically lopsided. It is diagnosis without prescription, the futility of self-salvation in place of the salvation of God, and the rousing of hope only to dash it to the ground again.
A full acknowledgment of human responsibility and therefore guilt, far from diminishing the dignity of human beings, actually enhances it. It presupposes that men and women, unlike the animals, are morally responsible beings, who know what they are, could be and should be, and do not make excuses for their poor performance. This is the thesis of Harvey Cox in his book On Not Leaving it to the Snake. Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden, he urges, was not so much her disobedience in eating the forbidden fruit as her feeble surrender of responsibility which preceded it, not her pride but her sloth. Although Dr Cox is surely mistaken in his refusal to accept the biblical view of sin as essentially pride, and is tainted with the ‘man come-of-age’ misconception, he nevertheless makes an important point when he says that ‘apathy is the key form of sin in today’s world....For Adam and Eve apathy meant letting a snake tell them what to do. It meant abdicating...the exercise of dominion and control of the world’ (p.xvii). But decision-making belongs to the essence of our humanness. Sin is not only the attempt to be God; it is also the refusal to be man, by shuffling off responsibility for our actions. ‘Let’s not let any snake tell us what to do’ (p.xviii). The commonest defence of the Nazi war criminals was that they were merely following orders. But the court held them responsible all the same.
The Bible takes sin seriously because it takes man (male and female) seriously. As we have seen, Christians do not deny the fact – in some circumstances – of diminished responsibility, but we affirm that diminished responsibility always entails diminished humanity. To say that somebody ‘is not responsible for his actions’ is to demean him or her as a human being. It is part of the glory of being human that we are held responsible for our actions. Then, when we also acknowledge our sin and guilt, we receive God’s forgiveness, enter into the joy of his salvation, and so become yet more completely human and healthy. What is unhealthy is every wallowing in guilt which does not lead to confession, repentance, faith in Jesus Christ and so forgiveness.
In his justly famous essay ‘The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment’, C. S. Lewis bemoans the tendency to abandon the notion of just retribution and replace it with humanitarian concerns both for the criminal (reform) and for society as a whole (deterrence). For this means, he argues, that every lawbreaker ‘is deprived of the rights of a human being. The reason is this. The Humanitarian theory removes from punishment the concept of desert. But the concept of desert is the only connecting link between punishment and justice. It is only as deserved or undeserved that a sentence can be just or unjust.’ Again, ‘when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a “case”.’ By what right may we use force to impose treatment on a criminal, either to cure him or to protect society, unless he deserves it?
To be ‘cured’ against one’s will, and cured of states which we may not regard as disease, is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better’, is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image.18