Not an obstacle to love. Not a complication. Not one more unfortunate feature of the human condition. The enemy.
That is a stronger claim than many Christians are prepared to make. We are often more comfortable speaking about guilt than shame, more comfortable speaking about sin than humiliation, more comfortable speaking about what we have done than about what we have come to believe we are. Guilt can be processed in a moral grammar. Shame goes deeper. Shame is not merely, I did wrong. Shame is, something about me is wrong, contemptible, disqualifying, unworthy of delight.
That distinction matters. It matters because guilt can, at least in principle, be forgiven while shame still sits in the soul like a squatter. It matters because a human being can confess and still hide. It matters because shame does not merely accuse; it sabotages the very capacities by which love becomes possible.
Dan put it in terms I found clarifying: faith and hope are the servants of love. Faith is that grounding trust by which we can stand somewhere. Hope is that movement toward what is not yet, that imaginative willingness to enter the future. Love is where both are meant to go: the giving and receiving of goodness, pleasure, honor, delight. Shame, then, does not simply make us feel bad. It works to shatter faith, poison hope, and make love feel dangerous, false, or inaccessible.
I have seen this not only in theory but in memory.
One of the defining scenes of my childhood is trying, and failing, to reach my mother while alcohol had taken her somewhere I could not go. What I remember is not merely addiction in the abstract, but atmosphere. A room. A distance. Carole King’s Tapestry playing. And me, somewhere nearby, unable to bridge the gap between the woman who loved me and the woman who had become inaccessible to me. That distinction is important. My mother did love us. Children know such things with a kind of stubborn and irrational loyalty. That love is part of what makes the injury harder to name. If there had been no love, the case would have been simpler. But simplicity is rarely granted in the human story.
What I could not understand then, but can at least partially understand now, is that shame thrives in precisely those ambiguities. It does not require overt brutality to do its work. Neglect will do. Inaccessibility will do. Confusion will do. A child trying to make emotional contact with a parent who is present but absent, near but unreachable, learns something terrible without ever being formally taught it. He begins to suspect that reality itself cannot be trusted. He begins to imagine, because children nearly always do, that somehow he is implicated in the break. He begins to devise strategies—for being good, or clever, or useful, or invisible, or precocious, or indispensable—not simply to obtain love but to survive the possibility that love is unstable.
That is one of shame’s great powers: it can enter long before language catches up. It can become architecture.
This is why I found Dan’s appeal to Eden so piercing. “They were naked and knew no shame.” We read that line too quickly. We tend to hear only innocence there. But what is being described is also unguardedness without humiliation, exposure without contempt, embodiment without self-rejection. Then comes the terrible question: Who told you that you were naked? Not, as Dan rightly noted, who informed you of an amusing fact about anatomy, but who introduced the idea that what I made is now grounds for hiding?
That is the human crisis in miniature.
And yet there is another side to this, one that matters just as much: we are never reducible to our damage.
This too Dan said beautifully. Human beings are always some terrible, glorious mixture. Brokenness and beauty are entangled. We are not one thing and then the other. We are not beautiful until brokenness is removed, nor only broken until beauty is earned back. We are both, now, always, in ways that confound moral bookkeeping and sentimental narratives alike.
I have spent much of my writing life circling that truth. Not because I solved it, but because I could not get around it. The world is full of people who want cleaner categories than reality provides. Villain and victim. innocence and guilt. nobility and corruption. But actual lives resist such sorting. The same mother whose alcoholism rendered her unreachable could also be loved, defended, remembered tenderly. The same son who suffered neglect could become proud, manipulative, self-protective, even while sincerely longing for truth and goodness. The same self can contain hunger for God and rebellion against Him, tenderness and vanity, courage and evasion.
This is not moral relativism. It is realism.
One of the decisive moments of my own life came not while I was being exemplary, but while I was very much not being a good boy. In Alaska, in the context of a high-speed chase that could easily have ended very differently, I came later to the conclusion that God had saved me. Not because I deserved it. Not because I had reached some admirable spiritual state. Not because I had finally become the sort of person a holy God would naturally wish to reward. He saved me while I was in the wrong. He saved me in motion, in danger, in defiance, in foolishness. And something about that fact rearranged me.
Had God intervened only once I had become morally presentable, I might have concluded that heaven operates on the same conditional logic that governs so much human affection. Improve yourself. Clean yourself up. Perform sincerity convincingly enough. Become worthy of rescue. But that is not what happened. What happened, as I came to understand it, was much more scandalous. Mercy arrived first.
Or to use Paul’s phrase, which Dan brought into sharp focus: it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance.
That verse is often cited, but rarely allowed to explode the emotional economy of religion. We say we believe in grace, but we often structure our spirituality as though repentance is chiefly the result of disgust, fear, or exhaustion. Feel bad enough and maybe you are on your way back to God. Become sufficiently ashamed of yourself and perhaps heaven will take notice.
But what if that is backwards?
What if repentance, in its deepest sense, is not fundamentally groveling but coming to oneself in the presence of undeserved kindness? What if the prodigal son’s real difficulty was not merely the pigsty but the party? What if the hardest thing is not admitting we have wandered, but consenting to be celebrated when we return?
I think that is right. In fact, I think it explains why so many of us resist grace more fiercely than we resist condemnation.
Condemnation, at least, feels familiar. It fits the old equations. It confirms what shame has been whispering all along. Of course you are unworthy. Of course goodness must be rationed around you. Of course delight is for others, not for you. But kindness—real kindness—poses a far more destabilizing threat. It suggests that the deepest thing about God is not His reluctance but His generosity. It suggests that His movement toward us is not merely juridical but affectionate. It suggests that the Father we have been avoiding may actually wish to welcome us with more joy than our self-contempt knows how to bear.
This, I suspect, is one of the reasons I eventually chose to claim God as my Father. I say chose deliberately. There was thought in it, and gratitude, and surrender, but there was also something like recognition. If I had been preserved in that Alaskan moment while not being good, then my relation to God could not be founded on being the good boy. It would have to be founded on something prior. Something more like election, or mercy, or love.
And if that is so, then shame’s reign is broken not by denial of sin but by a deeper belonging than sin can cancel.
This does not make repentance unnecessary. On the contrary, it makes it possible. The person most capable of repentance is not the one most terrified of punishment, but the one most disarmed by love. Not because love minimizes evil, but because love finally tells the truth about both evil and the self. It tells the truth about what has been done to us. It tells the truth about what we have done. It tells the truth about the strange entanglement of beauty and wreckage that constitutes an actual human life. And then, somehow, it does not turn away.
That is what shame cannot tolerate.
Shame wants us hidden, simplified, and contemptuous. Hidden from others, hidden from God, hidden even from ourselves. Simplified into a single accusation. Contemptuous toward our enemies, contemptuous toward our bodies, contemptuous toward our stories, contemptuous toward the needy child in us who still longs to be reached through the haze of music and alcohol and absence.
Love does something else. Love opens the door to a harsher and kinder honesty. It allows us to say that our wounds are real without enthroning them. It allows us to name sin without converting the self into refuse. It allows us to see that brokenness and beauty are not alternating chapters but concurrent realities. And it allows us, finally, to imagine that God’s movement toward us may be more celebratory than suspicious.
That is no small thing. For some of us, it may be the hardest thing of all.
To believe that God sees the whole tangled canvas—the neglect, the pride, the longing, the rebellion, the fear, the tenderness, the false starts, the near disasters, the desperate attempts to reach a mother who cannot be reached, the miles of road traveled badly and yet survived—and still says: Come in. Sit down. Eat. Be glad. You are mine.
If that is true, then repentance is not the payment we make to reenter the house. It is the turning by which we stop running from the feast.
And shame, for all its ancient power, does not get the final word.
And because none of these reflections stand alone, I would encourage you to stay with the larger conversation unfolding on Created in the Image of God.
On my recent family trip to Sweden I fell a bit behind on my Substack articles. So the sneak peek of next week’s shows, are now not that anymore. But I call them out here for how they naturally they extend what Dan Allender helped illuminate here. On Sunday, August 23 I spoke with Sarah E. Frazer—author, Bible teacher, and speaker—about trusting God’s goodness when life does not unfold the way we expected. From fear and uncertainty to hope, peace, and rest in the middle of life’s unexpected turns, hers is a conversation that belongs very much to this same terrain. If repentance begins not in self-condemnation but in the kindness of God, then learning to trust that kindness when life disappoints us is no small matter.
Then last night, on Tuesday, August 25, I was joined by Paul Dafydd Jones—theologian, professor, and author—to explore the theology of patience and why waiting can become one of the deepest expressions of Christian faith. From Christology and public theology to the wisdom, freedom, and hope found in patient faith, this too touches the nerve we have been tracing here. Shame urges us toward contempt, urgency, and despair. Love, by contrast, often asks us to endure time differently.
So if this conversation with Dan stirred something in you—if it touched a nerve around shame, brokenness, beauty, repentance, or the possibility that God may be kinder than we know—I hope you’ll check those shows out, or at least return here to read my reflections on what I learned. These are not separate subjects. They are part of the same long and winding road.
