What is the Difference Between Guilt and Guilty Feelings?

One of courses that I've taken in my seminary education is in the field of Christian apologetics. And I think that many of you may be familiar with what that term, apologetics, mean. The term apologetics comes from the Greek word, apologia, which means to make reply. Apologetics is not simply apologizing for being a Christian, as the term might suggest, but historically, it has been a discipline or a science that is concerned with providing a rational intellectual defense of the truth claims of Christianity. It is also about answering the objections that people raise about the faith.

Apologetics can become a very abstract philosophical enterprise. And as one who is engaged in apologetics, I'll often have the opportunity to have conversations with people who are not Christian believers and some of them may be indifferent. Others may be openly hostile. But so often, what I encounter in these discussions are questions about this truth claim or that truth claim.

And I think as Francis used to say, "It is the Christian's responsibility to give honest answers to honest questions as long as we are able to do that." But anytime I'm engaged in this kind of personal discussion with people, sooner or later, and it usually happens later in the discussion, I will pose this question particularly to skeptics and people who are philosophically hostile to Christianity. I'll ask this question in a rather pointed way. I'll say to the person, "Okay, we've had our discussion about the abstractions and the existence of God. But let's lay those aside and let me ask you, what do you do with our guilt?"

Whenever I ask that question, it's almost every time that there is a noticeable dramatic shift in the whole tenor of the discussion. And I have to say this: It's rare that a person becomes angry at that question. Because, when I ask the question, "What do you do with your guilt," I'm now asking a question about something that is of visceral matter for many people, something that touches them at an existential level - that moves the whole discussion beyond the abstract realm.

And there are those who will say, "Well, I don't have any guilt. Guilt I simply a term invented by religious people." But that kind of response is extremely rare, because every human being knows what guilt is and every human being, at some level and some point in their lives, had to deal with it. And so, my question is not an abstract question.

What do you do with your guilt? That is, how do you handle it? What do you do about it? Now, when we ask a question like that, notice I don't start by starting to argue that there is such a thing as guilt. I'm just assuming that people understand the reality of guilt. But I also experience in these conversations a common and interesting phenomenon. That is, when I ask people about their guilt, they will respond to me concerning their guilt feelings. At that point, I like to take the time to say, "Wait a minute. Let's make a careful distinction here between guilt and guilt feelings."

Because though these two are closely related to each other, they are not precisely the same thing. And so, today I want to talk a little bit about these categories of guilt and guilt feelings. The basic distinction that we make between guilt and guilt feelings is the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity. Let's look at feelings for a moment.

Feelings are something that are experienced by personal beings. That is to say, rocks and stones to our knowledge do not become overwhelmed with personal feelings. They are cold lifeless objects. And so, if I get hit in the head with a stone or somebody throws a brick at me and bounces off my head, the person who throws the brick may experience guilt and may or may not guilt feelings. But I seriously doubt that there's a trauma of psychological import that experienced or suffered by the brick.

The brick is simply the tool that is used in this particular assault. But it doesn't have feelings. We don't' think of a brick as being a subject. But people are subjects. You are a personal subject. You have a mind. You have a will. You have a feeling aspect to your life. And so, when we're talking about guilt feelings, we're talking about something that is personal and subjective.

I just want to lay that aside for a second and come back to the original question. I didn't ask the person what do you do about your guilt feelings. I said, "What do you do about your guilt?" Now we have to face the question:
What is guilt? Well we say that guilt is something that is in the first instance not subjective, but objective.

It is objective in the sense that it corresponds to some kind of objective standard or reality. Now, the simplest definition that we have of guilt is guilt is that which is incurred when you break a law. We understand how this works in the criminal justice system in our own nation. If somebody breaks the law, the statute that has been enacted by government and that person is apprehended for having broken the law, that person may have to appear in court. The person may say I'm not guilty. That may be the plea. Then that person is entitled to a trial. In many cases, a trial by jury and evidence is produced and at the end of that trial, a verdict is reached by the panel that is examining the case. They must make the decision whether in their judgment the person is in fact guilty of breaking the law.

Now, we know all of the subtle nuances of different kinds of trials, different kinds of arguments that are used, and different levels of evidence. The whole country went through two trials with OJ Simpson. We know that OJ Simpson went through a criminal trial and the other a civil trial. But again, the question that remains in any case of this kind is: Is the person guilty? Did the person do it? Did the person transgress the law?

Now, all of us live in a world where there are laws. You may disagree with the laws. You maybe didn't vote for the laws. But those laws are there. They are the laws imposed by your parents. They are the rules imposed by teachers or by your employers or in the civil sense, the laws enacted by the state. So then, all of us are subject to rules and laws and regulations. And so, when we talk about guilt, we're talking about the transgression or violation of these rules or regulations or laws.

Now, from a Christian perspective, the biblical view is that the supreme law giver is God. And that God's laws hold every person who is alive accountable for conforming to his mandates. God does have rules and regulations. I've had many people say to me on many occasions, "Christianity is not about rules and regulations. It's about love." That's simply not true. Christianity is about love, but one of the reasons it's about love is because love is one of the rules. God commands us to love one another.

And even that concern for love is rooted and grounded in the divine law. Now, it's not just about rules and regulations. But it's certainly about rules and regulations and has been from the day of creation. So when we're concerned about guilt, and we define guilt as the violating or breaking of the law, the supreme guilt that we can incur is if we break the law of God.

Now, obviously, if there is no God, you don't have to worry about breaking His rules. After all, he couldn't possibly have any rules. But even if you escape god, you still have the rules of the lesser magistrates to deal with. And so, all of us, I believe all of us, have broken the law of God, but if we haven't, we've certainly broken the laws of men. So all of us have experienced the objective situation of having transgressed a law. We've broken a law before.

And so, when we're talking about guilt, we're talking about a state or a status a state of affairs by which we incur some kind of judgment for having violated a law. Now, suppose at the human level, a person commits murder with malice of forethought, willfully plans, and executes the plan by taking another human being's life. The vast majority of people in this world would agree that that is a bad thing. That murder is wrong. Even in this age of relativism where people say: There are no absolutes. They'll fudge on this commitment to relativism when somebody comes at them with a knife about to kill them.

Now all of a sudden they'll protest and say that's wrong. And if you kill me, maliciously, you will incur guilt. Now here's the tricky part. We have to understand the difference between guilt and guilt feelings. Our feelings do not always have a perfect correspondence to our state or to our status under the law. We have an expression for people who have a tension for parking in no parking places, who do it repeatedly, who get parking tickets and simply throw them and ignore the summons to pay or to appear. They seem to be able to repeat this particular violation of no parking zones without any great sense of personal remorse. Now, if we take that to a higher level, we are aware in the study of psychology, of a category of people who are called sociopaths or psychopaths.

Now, the term that's included in both the words sociopaths and psychopaths is the word path. And we get the word pathos from that or the word sympathy, or the word empathy. Because this whole concept of pathos comes from a Greek term that is used to describe the human feelings. And somebody who can commit a heinous crime without any feeling of remorse can be called a psychopath or a sociopath.

Sometimes you've heard the expression that so and so is a psychopathic liar. Not only does he lie, and he lies habitually and consistently, but he lies without suffering any particular illness of feeling by assaults from his conscious. And again, a sociopath is a person who doesn't have any care or concern for people. Now, we know that there are people who can commit horrendous crimes without particularly feeling guilty about it. That is, their feelings are not proportionate to the guilt that they have actually incurred.

So we know that it's possible to have guilt without guilt feelings, or at least, without corresponding proportionate guilt feelings. Now, suppose in our justice system somebody is a arrested for murder in the first degree and the prosecution has tape recording and video tapes of the person declaring in advance his hostility toward his victim and his firm intent to murder the person, and then we have on film the actual murder added to it DNA evidence, RNA evidence, smoking gun, and a presence of a body. We have all of it - the evidence that would lead to the easy conclusion that the person committed the crime!

Now suppose that person came in to court and was asked by the judge, how do you plead? And he said, I plead not guilty. And he elects to defend himself rather than use an attorney and he stands before the court and his only defense is this: "I am not guilty because I don't feel guilty. Never mind the objective evidence, my subjective testimony is my feelings. I can't be guilty because I don't feel guilty."

On a practical level, how far would that go in a secular courtroom? That is hardly an exculpatory plea at that point. Because the fact that the person doesn't feel guilty says nothing about whether or not the person actually broke the law regarding murder. On the other hand, we have people that we know who are plagued with all sorts of feelings of guilt for things they didn't do. That is, their status or the state the objective state of their condition may be that they didn't violate the law but for one mental aberration or another, they feel guilty for disobeying a law that they in fact didn't.

So we know that there can be a disjunction between the objective and the subjective, between real guilt and real guilt feelings. That makes the whole question of dealing with this subject exceedingly complex. Now, what we want to talk about are the solution that we have when we incur real guilt how we're supposed to deal with our guilt feelings.

Not only what do you do with your guilt, but what do you do with your guilt feelings? I would ask you to think about that as you examine a biblical perspective on guilt and guilt feelings.

"What is guilt?" Wikianswers.
"I Feel so Guilty!" Self Development.