Introduction
The wholesale rejection of objective guilt as a moral category is one reason people today are easily manipulated. The enemy tries to manipulate the church by creating a narrative of perpetual guilt. Social engineers sell the guilt they decry. It’s how they keep their hooks in people and steer them to the next cause. If people are perpetually guilty of racism, then their coping mechanism is marching at the next race rally, dutifully making penance by releasing properly timed galvanic shrieks. The expanding list of reasons people should feel guilty—colonialism, statistical inequalities, Ukraine, privilege, global warming—demands a restless conscience applied to the peer-reviewed values of the latest ideology.[1] In truth, this sort of pagan neurosis cannot cure guilt. If anything, perpetual guilt’s cannibalizing appetite, coupled with secularism’s scanty subsistence strategies of escaping guilt, drives the human conscience to lachrymose psychosis.
People today, especially young people who have attended college, carry around an immense and progressive burden of guilt that they desperately want to discharge. The manipulation of the guilty can be traced to the cultural loss of the gospel and the loss of a clear censorious dictate from Heaven. The perpetual guilt cycle promoted by fashionable teachers gets the hooks into the human yearning for moral justification. Guilt always manifests, which is why the tragic farce of fiendish ideologies will continue to manipulate the guilty.
Guilt can be both subjective and objective. It is subjective in the sense that a person can feel moral disappointment and they can feel it to differing degrees. The conscience is one of the organs of ethical knowledge, given by God, to quicken the discernment of good and evil. The conscience is the source of the feeling of guilt. But the conscience is fallible and can be seared (1 Tim. 4:2), so it must be trained by something external to human personhood.[2] This means that guilt is also objective in the sense that even if a person doesn’t feel guilty, they can be guilty, and this guilt is objectively measured by the standard of God’s Word. One way to resist the hollow murmuring of guilt is to decry the common secular strategies for dealing with guilt.
Secular Strategies for Dealing with Guilt
Strategy #1: Try to become the victim
Rahav Gabay and her colleagues at Tel Aviv University have identified a personality trait they call “interpersonal victimhood.” Since moral credit is ascribed to victims, people want to identify with the trauma of victims and claim it as their own. In the secular schema, the fastest way to affirm innocence is to escape moral responsibility. Appropriating a victim’s suffering shifts the moral weight of sin to achieve innocence.[3] Victim status is coveted because victims aren’t thought responsible for their situation. And if the victim isn’t responsible, that means the victimizer is responsible. Identifying with a victim is the surest way to put distance between yourself and guilt. This strategy is not as new as you think. Before his conversion to Christ, Saint Augustine joined with the Manichee’s to assuage his guilt. They depicted both God and man as victims of evil powers. But for Augustine, this increased his dissatisfaction because it diminished human agency, personhood, and the potential for salvation.[4]
When there aren’t any apparent victims to claim, individuals transform into victims of their situation. Seeking refuge from culpability for their missteps, they strive to persuade themselves that they are captives ensnared by their limitations. Perhaps this is why it’s now chic for adult children to blame the parents who “victimized” them.
Strategy # 2: Default to despair
Burkhard Bilger set out on a quest to understand his grandfather, who became a loyal Nazi. Bilger writes, “We live in an unforgiving time, impatient to pass judgment and rectify the past. But the guilt that drives us can reach beyond penance or restitution to a conviction that something in us, or in our culture, is broken beyond despair. That our history is irredeemable.”[5]
Bilger encounters the nihilistic tendency of guilt. If there is no meaning and if there is nothing redeemable, then guilt isn’t objectively real. In rendering guilt a solely subjective affair, we endow it with the ubiquitous presence akin to the air we breathe—a phantom that haunts the very essence of existence. Yet, no matter how much of the Nietzschean impulse reigns, human beings made in the image of God still need a moral understanding of themselves, their actions, and the evil that persists all around. The cruel confiscation of moral categories and a transcendent sense of good and evil, do not, however, remove guilt; it simply blinds people to the objective nature of their guilt. Guilt, therefore, becomes ordinary and routine, a part of life as natural and inevitable as the sun rising.
Strategy #3: Spotlight the guilt of others
This strategy is illustrated by Günter Grass, who published the 1959 novel, The Tin Drum, in which he confronts the guilt born by the German people after World War II. As it was published, Günter Grass became the moral conscience of Germany. The theme of the book is the moral inadequacy of Germany. According to Günter Grass, Germany acquiesced to a moral immaturity that could not resist the vile pull of the Nazi regime. Germany was not fulfilling its moral responsibility in facing the horrors of the atrocities of the Nazis. Even ordinary Germans were complicit because they did not properly acknowledge their guilt. Grass received the Nobel Prize. The sleight of hand was that by pointing the finger at Germany, Grass no longer shared in the collective guilt of the nation. But the attempt to evade guilt didn’t work.
As it turns out, shifting guilt to others doesn’t alleviate the guilt. In 2006, Grass admitted that after voluntarily joining the German military as a 15-year-old in 1943, he was drafted in 1944 into a Nazi Waffen-SS division. The new confession, which contradicted his former account, came as a runup to the German publication of his autobiographical book, Peeling the Onion. Günter Grass said in an interview, “What I accepted with the stupid pride of youth I wanted to conceal after the war out of a recurrent sense of shame. But the burden remained, and no one could alleviate it. I did everything I was ordered to do without a second thought.”[6]
Strategy #4: Convince yourself you are a nice person
You don’t have to pretend you are perfect to convince yourself you are a nice person. You just have to interpret all of your motivations with the very best of intentions, which means you aren’t blameworthy. The strategy of niceness becomes perilous in execution when you’ve done something undeniably rotten, in public, no less. It can’t be concealed. It’s painfully clear to all that you are guilty. Now, in a state of anthropological whiplash, what are you supposed to do with the guilt?
Some rationalize it over and over in their head until they prove themselves good: “In traffic, I’m are always waving people in. I hold the door for people. I don’t tell the boss what I really think about him.” Others suffer a crushing case of acute guilt paroxysm, which in the secular ruse, is remedied by psychologizing the guilt into a sickness. The medicalization of guilt means you need help from a professional, a therapist who, for $30/hour is available any time guilt threatens to take away self-love.
Forgiveness
All these ways of coping with guilt are reminders that if guilt is only subjective, the removal of guilt is only subjective. This Freudian view of irrevocable guilt means you have to trick yourself. You have to manage the guilt. If guilt is entirely subjective, then it is an inescapable part of human existence.
The gospel of Jesus Christ locates forgiveness as the chief antidote to the blot of guilt. This begins with the character of God, who has mercy upon whom he will (Rom. 9:15). The moral prestige of God is tied, in part, to his vast capacity for forgiveness. The Old Testament teaches that sin must be paid for by the shedding of blood (Lev. 16-17). The New Testament connects the forgiveness of sin to the vicarious death of Jesus Christ (1 Pt. 2:24). Forgiveness is freely offered to all who trust Jesus as Lord and Savior (Acts 2:38). In Christ, forgiveness doesn’t erase justice. Rather, by bearing the guilt of sin, Christ absorbs all the legitimate claims of punishment God has toward sinners. Christ affirms justice in the act of forgiveness (Rom. 3:21-26).
Consider the familiar words of 2 Corinthians 5:21, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” How do we become the righteousness of God? Christ bore the punishment of sinners by identifying with the guilt of sinners. The Old Testament meaning of the phrase “to be made sin [hamartia]” refers to a sin offering. Paul is alluding to Isaiah 53:10, where the Suffering Servant is made “an offering for guilt.” So, for Christ “to be sin” is for Christ to be made a guilt offering, even though he was not guilty of sin (Is. 53:9). Isaiah 52:15 says that the Suffering Servant will “sprinkle many nations” to redeem his people. Sprinkling for sin offerings is the act that ransoms people from guilt (Lev. 4:6, 17; 5:9). The resurrection of Christ vindicates him as the truly innocent one, the truly not guilty one. While the saints were guilty, they are vindicated by Christ’s work, which declares them not guilty.[7]
Forgiveness doesn’t end with the divine-human relationship. In the face of fragile human relationships, forgiveness multiplies the divine regard for humanity. The higher ground of transcendent forgiveness is the foundation for human relationships. The self-help guru agrees that forgiveness is necessary for human relationships. But for him, forgiveness is about the emotional well-being of the forgiver. Forgiveness, in this swindle, is about self-help and doesn’t comprise genuine moral issues or anything that is metaphysically consequential. But Christ taught that those who forgive their brother imitate the God who forgives. And those who don’t forgive their brother reveal they never tasted the forgiveness of God (Mt. 18:21-35).
Conclusion
Objective guilt means objective salvation. The ultimate deprivation of the secular guilt-reduction strategies is they rob people of receiving the guilt-removing grace of God. Since God’s grace removes guilt, grace doesn’t come after the guilt is gone. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). Christ’s death and resurrection aren’t about enhancing your guilt, but removing it. God’s gifts are irrevocable (Rom. 11:29), not man’s guilt. John Calvin says, “We are received by God into grace on the condition that whatever penalties we deserve he remits by pardoning our guilt.”[8] Or, as the Apostle Paul says, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). By faith in Jesus you are made new and that newness entails “not guilty.”
Human beings are moral creatures. All people know a guilt that they cannot resolve on their own. There is no salvation in a political candidate, a novel, a preacher, or a celebrity. There is no salvation in the secular strategies for dealing with guilt. Salvation, which includes the comprehensive removal of guilt, is found in Jesus Christ.
[1] It is common in government high schools to show students the videos at “The Story of Stuff” website (www.storyofstuff.com). This is designed to whip students into a frenzy of guilt that can only be relieved by confronting their privilege and supporting the Democratic party.
[2] John Frame, The Doctrine of the Christian Life (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 2008), 362-364.
[3] https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/were-teaching-the-holocaust-all-wrong/
[4] Joshua D. Chatraw & Mark D. Allen. The Augustine Way: Retrieving a Vision for the Church’s Apologetic Witness (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023), 21.
[5] Burkhard Bilger, Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets (Random House, 2022).
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/world/europe/gunter-grass-german-novelist-dies-at-87.html
[7] G.K. Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 972, 492, 495f.
[8] John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, III; 4; 30.
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