by Warner Bailey
Pickwick Publications, Eugene, Ore. 126 pages.
reviewed by ELISA OWEN
This book attempts to provide a theological framework around which to develop the pastoral care of those who experience deep shame or a sense of abandonment, those who are “victims and perpetrators of failed risks of trust.” The author asserts that the church has neglected to develop a pastoral theology to support all those who, whether victims or agents of shame, are called to live beyond it — from betrayed spouses to battered children to cheated supervisors. He uses Psalms 73-75 to define theological shame as “the experience of God’s failure to keep trust with those who trust in God” and then moves on to Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the cross (Matthew 27: 43-46) to make the claim that there “the shame of betrayal was admitted into the Godhead as the Son is abandoned by the Father who gives up the Son.” That claim is where the noble effort in which Bailey’s book engages runs aground.
It runs aground because precisely those persons who have experienced deep shame are those who most need an atonement theology that does not posit an unbiblical God divided against himself: the Father as cosmic child abuser who betrays his beloved Son by abandoning him at the moment of his deepest crisis. What caused the death and corresponding agony that was drawn into the heart of God at the crucifixion was not the actual betrayal of the Son by the Father. Instead, it was the sin of the world taken on by the Son who willingly lays down his life for the world which causes, in Matthew’s account alone, the human Jesus’ perception of the Father’s remoteness from him as he dies. It is the sin of the world that causes our perception that the omnipresent, loving God has abandoned us in our times of crisis as well. Thus, the good news of the gospel that must be emphasized is not that God is familiar with the human experience of both being shamed and shaming. Instead it is that because of the life death and resurrection of Jesus, human experience of God abandonment – as real as it may seem (due to the rift human sin causes in our relationship with God, or in Jesus’ case, in His becoming sin for us) — is thankfully, not.
Preserving the integrity of the gospel message is the reason why, however attractive it may be to assert that the cross familiarized God not only with our human experience of betrayal, but also of betraying, we must not. Ultimately, there would be no comfort in a God who, at the crucifixion, demonstrated the capacity to abandon those God deeply loves. A Christian understanding of God that includes the Trinity divided against himself at the atoning event is a distortion of the entirety of the Biblical witness and an illogical addition to the character of God that is defined, we are told in Scripture, by God’s decision to love human beings, in the Son, from the foundation of the world.
ELISA OWEN is the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Lawrenceburg, Ky.
