False Shame and Loyalty to Christ
Thursday, April 16th, 2009Matt Morgan (Berit Olam) recently posted a convicting quote from Herman Bavinck on our natural tendency to be ashamed of Christ. Read the whole thing, but here is a portion:
We need more courage to confess Christ, in an ungodly environment of sinners and mockers, than in the circle of relatives and friends, who together confess the truth … But in principle the resistance is the same all over. For the flesh, the world and Satan are always the same, and the greatest and strongest enemy that resists the confession of Christ, lives in our own heart. The forms in which the enemy operates may be different, but confessing the name of Christ always demands that we deny self and bear His cross. Whoever, from which circle he may come, when he will follow Jesus, must submit to insult and contempt.
… to become a Christian is to esteem the judgment of others for nothing, accepting the judgment of God upon ourselves and hoping in His grace. To confess Christ includes, that we lose ourselves and all that is ours, our name and our honour, our good and blood, our soul and our life. It is exactly this that is resisted by a sense of false shame. The desire to apparent self preservation, urges and drives men to resist the gospel with all their strength.
Bavinck uses the phrase “false shame” to refer to sinful shame, that is, the self-protecting fear that grips us because we crave the approval of men, causing us to be disloyal to Christ.
I would add one point that Bavinck does not mention. He deftly diagnoses the sinful psychology of “false shame,” but the temptation to it really cranks up and starts messing with your head when the people who are making us feel ashamed of Christ are people whose opinion ought to be taken seriously, namely, fellow Christians. Ordinarily, we should desire the approval of the church. Ordinarily, the church should be a help to us in being faithful and loyal to Christ. But because the church is a human institution run by fallen humans who are still subject to the noetic effects of sin and who too easily succumb to spiritual pride, even the church itself can become a source of “false shame” and a stumbling block to unwavering loyalty to Christ (ask Luther; ask anyone who had to leave a cult).
To quote Bavinck again:
to become a Christian is to esteem the judgment of others for nothing, accepting the judgment of God upon ourselves and hoping in His grace. To confess Christ includes, that we lose ourselves and all that is ours, our name and our honour, our good and blood, our soul and our life.
As Jesus said:
And I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before men, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God, but the one who denies me before men will be denied before the angels of God. (Luke 12:8-9 ESV)
And
If anyone hears my words and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. The one who rejects me and does not receive my words has a judge; the word that I have spoken will judge him on the last day. (John 12:47-48 ESV)