Viewing the Bible through honour and shame
Honour and shame can provide new insights into the Bible
One book that has given me a fresh perspective on Japanese culture is Georges and Baker’s Ministering in Honor–Shame Cultures.1 As a guide for showing how honour–shame cultures affect relationships and ministry, I cannot recommend it highly enough. But it also gave me something I hadn’t bargained for—a fresh viewpoint from which to interact with the Bible.
The authors make the point that the cultures in which the Old and New Testaments were written were honour–shame ones. Thus, in some important ways they are closer to the Japanese culture than to Western cultures, which are predominately innocence–guilt cultures. In particular, Westerners tend to read the Bible through individualistic eyes and are more attuned to the problem of guilt than that of shame.
Georges and Baker claim that the honour–shame perspective is more than just a helpful lens to view the Bible with; it affects the central message of the Bible: “Honor and shame . . . are not merely external lenses modern interpreters apply to read the Bible, but are the core foundation of the biblical testimony” (p. 103). From a Western perspective, God saves us mainly from the guilt of our sin and clothes us with his righteousness. Whereas from an honour–shame perspective, he primarily dispels our shame and crowns us with eternal honour. The two perspectives aren’t in conflict; rather they are complementary ways of looking at the same good news of the gospel. The authors liken the gospel to a multifaceted diamond, and they seek to rotate the diamond to provide a more full-orbed view of the gospel.
A biblical tour of honour and shame
Georges and Baker devote two chapters of their book to a brief biblical theology of shame and honour by going through the Old and New Testaments. This overview shows how honour and shame are key themes that run from Genesis to Revelation. “Honor and shame,” they say, “are foundational realities in God’s mission and salvation that flow through the entire Bible” (p. 81).
For me, highlights of this guided tour are when the authors take an extended passage and bring out the aspects pertaining to honour and shame. They work in this fashion through the fall, the story of Mephibosheth, the book of Ruth, the anointing of Jesus by the sinful women at Simon the Pharisee’s house, and the parable of the prodigal son. In each case, they revealed things I had never seen. For example, by staying outside and not joining the celebration of the prodigal son’s homecoming, the elder son was publicly insulting his father, but still the father condescends to go out and plead for him to join the party.
Other resources to explore
Recently, several commentaries have been springing up that take a book from the Bible and analyse it in terms of shame and honour. Many belong to the Honor and Shame Paraphrase series edited by Georges (honorshame.com/hsp/). Inspired by Georges and Baker, I recently read Jackson Wu’s Reading Romans with Eastern Eyes.2 I really liked the concept behind the book, namely that a knowledge of today’s Eastern cultures can help us interpret biblical books because they share aspects in common with the cultures of biblical times. Wu applies that principle to the whole of Romans and brings out a collectivistic viewpoint and honour–shame aspects of the text that Westerners might overlook. (While this was helpful, I shared the reservations that Worthington and Clark have expressed about Wu’s support of the New Perspectives on Paul, which is a doctrinal shift in the field of Biblical studies.3)
Exciting implications
All this has exciting implications for studying the Bible with Japanese people. The usual assumption is that Western missionaries come to Japan with a firm grasp of the Bible and just need to find culturally appropriate ways to communicate its message. But I think Georges, Baker, and Wu would argue that we can gain fresh insights into the Bible by studying it together with Japanese people since they are more attuned to the concepts of honour and shame. That makes Japan an exciting place to study the Bible.
1. Jayson Georges and Mark D. Baker, Ministering in Honor-Shame Cultures: Biblical Foundations and Practical Essentials (Downer’s Grove: IVP Academic, 2016), (page numbers on quotes in text cited from Scribd version).
2. Jackson Wu, Reading Romans with Eastern Eyes: Honor and Shame in Paul’s Message and Mission (Downer’s Grove: IVP Academic, 2019).
3. Jonathan Worthington and Elliot Clark, “Engaging Reading Romans with Eastern Eyes by Jackson Wu,” Journal of Global Christianity Vol. 6.1 (2020): 14–29. https://trainingleadersinternational.org/jgc/122/engaging-reading-romans-with-eastern-eyes-by-jackson-wu