We have been hearing from David Wells on some shifts in popular thinking that have taken place in the latter half of the twentieth century. Today we’ll consider the change in our perspective of guilt and shame.

It is true that we often use the words "guilt" and "shame" interchangeably. We tend to mean the same thing by them. However, in recent years, especially in psychiatric literature, a clear difference has emerged between them. I am going to be following this distinction.

Shame

Shame is the sense of awkwardness a person feels when seen doing something, or heard saying something, he or she does not want others to know about. Shame is not necessarily “moral” in nature. A person may be ashamed about parents who come off sounding ignorant, or do not speak English, or are poor. A person may be ashamed of where he or she lives because it is in the wrong part of town. These are not moral matters, but they are still capable of making a person feel ashamed.
   This same sense, though, carries through into more clearly moral matters. A person, for example, may feel quite awkward about being caught shoplifting by a video camera, or that news somehow got out that the IRS was pursuing him or her for evading payment of taxes. The dynamic in each case, however, is the same. A person feels awkward when others know something personal he or she wished to keep hidden.

Guilt

Guilt, by contrast, happens when an external standard has been violated. In our courts each day juries pronounce defendants either innocent of the charges brought against them or guilty. In the latter case, the defendants are judged to have broken the law even though virtually all defendants deny that and plead innocent. The person who hears this verdict may not feel guilty, though many do and hide their faces. The court, however, has no interest at all in how the defendant feels. It takes no account of how ashamed the defendant may or may not be before others. The sole point in dispute is whether that person did or did not break the law as charged.
   It is the same in Christian faith. The guilt the gospel addresses is also objective in nature. It is our guilt before God's law. It is the result of our violating the standards of his character. It is all about our blameworthiness before God, not about how we feel or do not feel or whether, in the contemporary sense, we feel shame. Indeed, in America so many people think of themselves as essentially good that, from that angle, there is very little to be ashamed about.
   Shame today is what lines up our actions horizontally. Guilt is what lines them up vertically. Shame is what we feel subjectively and guilty is what we are objectively. Shame is what we feel before others. Guilty is what we are before God. Shame belongs in a psychological world and guilt belongs in a moral world.
   If shame is simply about how we see ourselves and how we feel, it is not hard to see why many psychiatrists and psychologists think of shame as a crippling, unhealthy emotion that needs to be healed. This in undoubtedly true of false shame . . . but this new approach to shame forgets that lying in the midst of many of our feelings of awkwardness are real moral perceptions. This is not false shame. This is shame for real moral reasons. To feel embarrassed because we were caught embezzling, or deceiving, or (shamelessly) self-promoting is an entirely good and healthy emotion! To argue, then, that we need to be liberated from these uncomfortable feelings, that the ultimate liberation is to become entirely shameless, is to sever our connections to the moral world entirely.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 162–163.

But that is exactly what has happened. Rather than being guilty of sins, we are now afflicted with diseases, disorders, and syndromes. And disorders, of course, cannot be disciplined or punished; they must be treated. So we coddle naughty children because it‘s not their fault, who grow to be adults who have seldom or never been held responsible for their actions, and so are unlikely to begin now.

What is worse, as sin has become syndrome, the gospel has become obsolete. We do not need forgiveness, we think; no, what we need is healing and recovery. And we are taught that healing must come from within, through positive thinking, self-forgiveness, or some such psychological mumbo-jumbo, rather than from without, as scripture plainly teaches. Oprah and Dr Phil, and yes, Dr Dobson, have replaced the Great Physician himself.