An Honor-Bearing Gospel for Shame-Fueled Crises

In September 2019, I presented “An Honor-Bearing Gospel for Shame-Fueled Crises,” at the annual conference of EMS (Evangelical Missiological Society). The article is to be printed in early 2020 in Missio Dei Journal. The audio from the presentation can be found here.

A link to the full text can be found below. A short summary follows:

This is a topic dear to my heart, as my parents grew up in Germany and lived through WWII. In fact, my mother missed the fire-bombing of Dresden by only one day.

Growing up in America, I learned of WWII from history class. My mother was a wonderful Christian woman but could not provide satisfying answers for the reasons that such horrible things could be done to other people. This led me to my own research and conclusions. My extensive research into nationalism, tribalism, racism and violence has led to some understanding of how the gospel speaks to crisis.

Key Ideas discussed in “An Honor-Bearing Gospel for Shame-Fueled Crises”

• Toxic shame is both a cause and a result crisis, racism, and terrorism
• Ephesians 2:13-16 shows how the atonement of Christ makes peace by killing hostility between God and man, but also between peoples.
• Objective shame is widely referenced in scripture, in which I reference Jackson Wu’s article, “Have Theologians No Sense of Shame: How the Bible Reconciles Objective and Subjective Shame.” Wu demonstrates that shame is avoided through justification.
• I speak about Haley Goranson Jacob’s Conformed to the Image of His Son: Reconsidering Paul’s Theology of Glory in Romans. This speaks about “vocational participation” and the good work that we can do together with Christ to propel human flourishing.

The full text of this summary can be found here.

The audio from the presentation can be found here.