A guilty man is immensely vulnerable, even impotent. The man who feels guilt has no stable ground to stand on when he is challenged; he is weak, crumpled up in the corner, like a tripod with one bum leg. Even when the assault comes against his blameless parts, such as they are, his awareness of that other guilt makes him incapable of true confidence, replacing it perhaps with surrender, perhaps with self-conscious bluster. Guilt provides a handle, a perception of debt, a self-destructive impulse (because self-destruction is a means of expiation, of punishing oneself for sin in order to escape God’s wrath, a futile hope), a reason to hurt others (again, as expiation, now by putting the guilt on others). Thus, guilt makes us open and vulnerable to manipulation, to those who will seize on guilt, who will induce it, in order to control us through it, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Manipulation

Guilt is a near-universal part of human life. We are all sinners, and we all know it, and for nearly all of us that knowledge manifests in us as guilt. We are aware of our rebellion against God, and we want to be rid of that stain, that stigma, that brokenness. We want to be clean, but, as a rule, we do not desire to repent and turn to God. We want to have our rebellion and be cleansed of it too. The result is an array of behaviors and desires which are ripe for manipulation.

We become willing and even desirous of harming ourselves and others, through bad decisions and malicious or reckless actions, knowing that only death, of which suffering is a subspecies, can wipe away sin, that only death can pay for sin. Part of this self-destruction is diving farther into sin: ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ The whole of both the masochist and sadist methods of expiation are sinful, being attempts to have holiness apart from God, contrary to Micah 6:8 and so many other of His commands (Matt. 22:36-40).

We become conscious of our own inadequacy and weakness. The guilt keeps us aware of our fallibility and insufficiency, our failure. We, then, answer with a potent and individual mix of pretending we’re actually sufficient with seeking out sufficiency elsewhere, in bad counsel or bad theology or drugs or hard work or entertainment. We try to avoid hard questions, knowing we can’t answer them right, and when we face them, we find ourselves insufficient to answer them rightly.

We become aware that we owe something to others. We have hurt others, we know, and so we must repay. In conjunction with our sadistic and masochistic methods of expiation (a framework I’m pulling from R.J. Rushdoony’s excellent Revolt Against Maturity, by the bye), this indebtedness leads us to submit to injustice and even aid it.

Manipulators, themselves bound by these same tendencies, exploit these effects of guilt. Manipulation hooks on to the indebtedness, the self-uncertainty, the conscious insufficiency, the self-destructive and the other-destructive impulses, the unwillingness to assert, the desire to assert. Manipulation feeds these all; when skillful or effective (the first is not always necessary for the second), it directs them towards an end.

Universality

The fact is, however, that all men, in themselves, are factually guilty and ought therefore to feel that guilt, that consciousness of sin. Unregenerate man should be guilty, and in a factual sense he always is. Some suppress parts of that awareness much more effectively than others; some direct the weight of guilt into sin more effectively than others (many manipulators fall into this category: destroying and self-destroying (to expiate their guilt) through manipulation of others guilt). Such men, having given themselves to the uncertainty of the self, of the guilt inherent to autonomy, having rejected the certainty of absolution and righteousness in Christ (Job 1:1), are described thus in James: “He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways” (1:8).

(Some, a few, are also psychologically incapable of the emotional aspect of guilt, or have a much-numbed version thereof. The manifestation of guilt in such a psychology would be different, though I believe it would share many essential characteristics. Probably a major reason for the charisma of the psychopath is the confidence which comes from a minimized guilt, with an internal similitude of the guiltless man which others perceive and find god-like.)

In politics, we can see the effects of guilt quite clearly. Rene Girard makes the case that guilt is a central part of how societies usually create cohesion, arguing that societies will engage in a collective crime- typically murder- which makes everybody guilty and thereby creates a weakness towards the internal which welds the whole together in the common wound.

On a more mundane scale, consider how guilt over various societal ills has driven the West insane over time, regardless of how manufactured the guilt may be, and how we have become more and more vulnerable to mass propagandizing (like the COVID thingamabob, most political news, etc) as our societies have become more steeped in common sins, like abortion, homosexuality, and civil injustice. Consider how our politicians, ever less commonly men truly reliant on God, are ever more manipulable by corruption and by ideology (aka bad theology).

The Church

The church ought to be different. The church ought to be immensely resistant to manipulation. The church, after all, is the institutional gathering of those who have been saved by God and therefore are no longer guilty, knowing and believing in full that Christ bore our sin (Is. 53:10-12). But the church, nowadays, seems perpetually manipulated, blown about by every wind of doctrine, open to the world. In large part, that is a function of the tares accepted among us or who have taken on the name of ‘Christian’ without doing much more than that (the PCUSA, televangelists, etc.). But even many truly belonging to the church are more easily manipulated than we ought to be.

Now, some of that is the common physical ill health of our society. Illnesses and sensitivities (like mold) can wreck thought processes, fogging logic to oblivion (seriously, check it out; more people than you might think are vulnerable to it, and the brain fog can be like having an unhealing concussion). Poor diet, poor exercise, chronic illness, environmental toxins, PTSD, they can all make the brain run like it has sugar in the gas tank. But another vice is at work here: the vice of bad doctrine.

The church errs in two ways when it comes to the question of guilt and repentance. On the one hand, the church can refuse to recognize sin at all, denying the need for repentance and thus leaving guilt unaddressed. Such antinomianism, admittedly, quickly shades off into outright heresy. On the other, more subtle hand, the church can emphasize guilt and the need for repentance to the exclusion of recognizing absolution. Rushdoony speaks of such churches in Chapter 142 of his Institutes of Biblical Law, Vol II, writing that, “I regularly hear of pastors preaching sermons at their congregations for a variety of highly refined reasons, often subtle or open efforts to create guilt feelings rather than godly action…. If you convince people that they are sinners for non-Biblical reasons, such as being bored with your preacher, or for not praying thirty minutes, an hour, or two hours daily, then you cut them off permanently from one of the most glorious facts of Scripture: absolution.”

Repentance

One grave error in our understanding of repentance is the common doctrine which reduces it to an emotional response. Repentance is feeling bad about something, feeling guilty, recognizing and responding to the sin itself. Certainly emotions are a part of repentance, a motivator in particular, but they are not the whole or the sole signifier. If they are made such, the sinner is put in a Hobson’s choice: he can ‘repent’ by feeling bad, but if he ever stops,being absolved, he is no longer repentant and thus is again mired in sin, needing absolution anew. He can never be truly clean.

The Christian doctrine of repentance, however, is not so shallow or emotionalist (any more than our doctrine of assurance is so shallow, but that’s for another time). Repentance includes recognition and hatred of one’s sin, but it is not compassed thereby. The fullness of repentance is a practical and continued rejection of sin, on a behavioral and emotional level (Deut. 30:1-2). This rejection, while always imperfect on this earth (1 John 1:10), is a positive act of good, consonant with being absolved: the Christian can be at once repentant, hating sin, and innocent, cleansed of that same sin.

The Christian, despite his struggle with sin, must believe wholeheartedly in absolution. He must sorrow for his sin (Joel 1:13), but that sorrow must in turn be overcome at each point by joy in Christ (Phil. 4:4) and certainty of His righteousness (Rom. 6:1-5). He repents not by feeling bad but by ‘turning away’ from sin (the more literal meaning of the word we translate ‘repentance’ in the New Testament); he is saved from his sin not be destructive self-expiation but by the death and resurrection of Christ (Heb. 8-9).

The Result

The result is the sheer stability of Job, of the righteous man (Job 1:1). In reading Job, it must strike us that Job, however oppressed, however despairing, however struggling, never abandons what he knows to be the truth: his own innocence in God and God’s promises to him (Job 19:25-29) (the foundation of his innocence). For this God commends him in Job 42:7. All the imprecations and manipulations levied against him by his friends and by Elihu come to naught. He is imperfect, needing to be reminded that why is not always answered, that who is enough, but he never wavers from the truth. Conscious of his innocence before God (and thus before men, as far as it matters), he cannot be moved. So ought all Christians, righteous by His blood (Is. 60:21), to be stable and secure in that Divine righteousness, steadfast against manipulation, though all the world should rage (Matt. 7:24-25).

God bless.