Catacomb Resident Blog

Misreading Scripture: Honor/Shame 01

21 March 2024

The authors tell us: "the entire issue of honor and shame over against right and wrong (innocence and guilt) is a bit of a mystery to us" in the west. It's simply part of our individualistic culture, while the emphasis on honor/shame is typical of collectivist cultures. Even acknowledging that, it gets worse. Our western society greatly emphasizes guilt and mythologizes innocence, while collectivist cultures emphasize honor over shame.

In part, this whole sector of social science is relatively new and the terminology is in flux. We simply do not have words in English to express some of the radical differences.

In the West, we have built up an expectation that children will eventually absorb the right versus wrong value system and individually prefer right. Hidden in there is a binary absolutism in how it's taught. Thus, the individual should buy into a sense of responsibility to an absolute value instead of to the community.

R/OB note that the Bible was revealed within the honor/shame frame of reference. But then, they take a path running through Greco-Roman culture, where guilt was a matter of being caught, found out by others. If a man could be invisible, they theorized, nothing would restrain him from doing wrong in that culture. With such a philosophy, it's only a short path to the western emphasis on internalizing right behavior. So far as I can tell, the authors seem to ignore the inherent differences between Greco-Roman mid-trust culture versus the Northern European high-trust culture (now the definition of the West), but I assure you it played a strong role.

Instead, R/OB note the western a priori assumption of binary logic about right and wrong. Thus, we encourage our children to "take the road less traveled" and pay attention to their conscience rather than the community. Asians are quite the opposite. They assume a yin-and-yang approach of balance and warn their children that the tall poppy gets cut first. They emphasize listening to the community.

Our western mythology places great faith in some internal guilt mechanism that will eventually expose wrong-doing. In Asia, if such an inner voice exists, everyone is taught to ignore it. They must take their cues from the community about what is honorable or shameful. There is no actual reference point to right or wrong. The whole culture turns on preserving "face" -- a sense of honor.

The Thai language term for "losing face" means literally tearing one's face off to expose ugliness to everyone who knows you. From all that anyone can tell, there really is no inner guilt mechanism in these cultures. They feel no remorse for something that no one has noticed. This helps to explain why Paul felt no shame until he was called to account by the risen Christ, and Peter had to be shamed in front of the other leaders about the hypocrisy of withdrawing from Gentile fellowship.

Asian governments today still act mostly as a matter of saving face, so westerners trying to impute hidden guilt falls on deaf ears. Many policies and decisions rest entirely on saving the face of the government officials. Even when everyone knows the policies will be ignored, it's more important that the government say something that saves face. Western governments take offense at such things and the interactions are frequently bad because of it. We do not understand them, and they do not understand us.

It's not a question of collective values overriding objective right and wrong, but that the community's assessment is inherently right, by definition. R/OB fail to pursue it, but this shows up in the Bible when the issue of sin is a matter of shaming God's name. He stands in the place of a collectivist community; communion with Him is the only concern. Your sole motivation is His glory, and any inner voice is presumed to uphold that. Right or wrong is defined by the Holy Spirit in a given context, not some collection of absolutist binary rules. We often carry around a load of false guilt for having violated "objective" rules, but we are unable to discern that this is not the voice of the Holy Spirit.

The Devil really loves our western value system.


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